Are Black Clintonians Killing the Dream?
Originally published in drjeremylevitt.com, January 30, 2008
Are Black Clintonians Killing the Dream?
As we remember the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr. and prepare to celebrate Black History Month I cannot help but to wonder whether those civil rights leaders that died serving as the moral conscious and compass of American society would approve of the primitive and racially polarizing way in which the Democratic presidential primary has been conducted.
The primary has unearthed and placed on global display America’s ugly and multilayered racial baggage. As the self-proclaimed party of African-Americans, other minorities and poor people, the Democratic Party has shown that it is no more enlightened or qualified to bridge America’s racial divide than the Republican Party. Who would have thought that the most racially diverse democratic presidential primary in American history would also be the most racially divisive? The heated contest between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton has placed race and gender at the center stage of the presidential primary, but not in anyway that will advance Americans. It has fed a nearly all white and too often racially incompetent and insensitive American media establishment racially toxic information, and further entrenched misconceptions that black voters are politically homogenous, monolithic and conflicted-a paradigm that serves the Clinton campaign and Republican Party well.
Unfortunately, African-Americans have allowed themselves to become the objects of a divisive political game where history, plantation patronage, race politics, and political spin have taken their “eyes off the prize”. Who is to blame? Prominent African-American Clinton loyalists from the civil rights era bear the greatest responsibility for this tragic phenomenon. This group, including Obama critics such as BET founder Bob Johnson, Congressman John Lewis and former Atlanta Mayor and US Ambassador to the UN Andrew Young, need to free themselves from the Clinton political plantation. I have always respected these living legends but now question their motives. For example, why did Young recently and publicly claim that Bill Clinton was blacker than Obama heralding the former president for likely sleeping with more black women than Obama, and Johnson recklessly demean Obama at a Clinton political rally. How did these freedom fighters and barrier breakers become Clintonian share croppers?
What exactly did Bill Clinton, the self-professed first black president, actually do to “earn” the undying support of African-American notables that would cause them to openly attack the first viable African-American candidate for president? Was it to sit idly by while genocide unfolded in Rwanda and the Congo? How can they justify contesting Obama, not on principled issues, but because he has not risen through their patronage network? Is their support of Hillary Clinton simply a manifestation of the politically diverse nature of African-Americans? In my view, the answer is very simple, no. Bill and Hillary Clinton lauded the African-American elite class, composed of civil rights era legacies, old school black political elites and African-American entertainers with unfettered political access, appointments, contracts, awards and other rewards such as “slumber parties” at the White House. In doing so, the Clintons unwittingly empowered an authoritarian civil rights class of blacks to the disadvantage of younger non-civil rights era black leaders like Obama.
Bill Clinton wisely ingratiated himself to African-Americans, especially black elites, by apologizing to African-Americans for slavery and the infamous Tuskegee experiment. To my knowledge, he did not attach reparations the the slavery apology! He is widely praised by black elites for creating jobs, providing support to historically black colleges and, oh yes, traveling to Africa, equivalent to a political home run with the Congressional Black Caucus. Should African-Americans have expected any less from the president they put into the White House? In essence, Clinton made African-Americans believe that he was comfortable with them. What an achievement! What African-Americans need to ask is: Who are Bill and Hilary Clinton to be equal to anyway? Only blacks with a plantation mentality would reward the wife of a former president, who owes his two presidencies to African-American voters, with unswerving loyalty. Did their loyalty to the Clinton’s cause the Johnson’s, Young’s and Lewis’ of the world to forget about the fire hoses, dogs, jail cells, lynching’s, killings and assassinations of their friends, mentors and leaders?
King’s dream has become a reality and I wonder whether or not his civil rights era black cohorts are too blind to see the mountain top and to deaf to hear the bells of freedom ringing.
