When Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton walked onto the stage during BET’s annual Black Girls Rock award show earlier this month, I winced – hard. The Black Girls Rock organization presents one evening every year to exclusively honor black girls and women, not to facilitate white female presidential candidates seeking to campaign for votes under the guise of ally-ship.
Because frankly, if her ally-ship were credible to begin with, someone in her black girl magic squad surely would have let her know that she should sit this one out. It also made me wonder, though, beyond pondering the seemingly infinite right of entry into any space at any time provided by whiteness: what is it with Hillary Clinton and black women?
I get it. As Kirsten West Savali, my friend and fellow journalist, pointed out in conversation: “Proximity to power and privilege feels like liberation, or at least advancement [for some black women].” In this context, it means access to that beautifully uncomplicated world of unshucked, pearl-filled oysters that awaits every white man or woman who is willing to fight for it, or to at least game the system.
In my all-white regional high school in rural New Hampshire, there were the rich, preppy kids in the front hall and the smokers, druggies and poor kids in the back hall. I was unequivocal about my central aim and allegiance: the most popular kids of all. My white adoptive parents were artists; we were poor and I was black. In the popular thoroughbreds, I saw a way out.
And although I endured their micro-aggression racism on a fairly regular basis – the unsolicited hair touching, the axiomatic standard of white beauty, the litany of “colorblind” comments: “We don’t really think of you as black”; “You’re so pretty even though you are black” – I saw an open seat on their privilege bus and I took it, even if it was all the way in the back. To be fair, they were not bad kids. They just wielded the most power.
I was not concerned with the arty theater kids (even though I worked with a regional company during summers), or the readers and intellectuals (despite my love of books and conversation), not even the one black kid from inner-city New York who, as I recall, attended our school for a couple of brief stretches after spending summers with a local family through a not-for-profit organization. All of whom are now probably voting for Bernie Sanders.
I was ambitious. And though I do regret the betrayal of the boy from New York City, I also knew even at 15 years old that any form of solidarity with him would compromise the social capital I had earned through my investment with the wealthy white kids.
That investment got me to college, and out of my rural town. I likely would not have taken the idea of college seriously if it hadn’t been the focused goal of my friends, who were all applying to Ivy League schools. I’m grateful for that.
That’s why, despite my many reservations about whether the Clintons are actually good for black Americans, I do understand why so many support Hillary’s candidacy, no shortage of whom are high-profile figures – from Kerry Washington to Shonda Rhimes and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who has called Clinton “a sister”.
And from Clinton’s perspective, as black women had the highest voter turnout rate in the past two presidential election cycles, and older black women overwhelmingly support her, it stands to reason that she would be judicious in her efforts to attract young black women as potential supporters.
But I have never gone in for the whole Clintons-and-black-folk solidarity yarn. Dating back to Bill Clinton’s nomination and subsequent rejection of black law professor Lani Guinier for assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division in 1993, to his public excoriation of Sister Souljah, to his corny-ass sax playing on the Arsenio Hall Show and his more recent exchange with activists from Black Lives Matter, Bill Clinton took the misinterpreted sobriquet of “first black president” and ran like hell with it in whichever direction he bloody well wanted.
And that’s before we even broach the topic of his crime bill.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has in some ways reflected a model candidate in terms of her appeal to black women. She appeared on the popular BuzzFeed podcast Another Round with Heben Nigatu and Tracey Clayton, and she visited the predominantly black Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, where she was celebrated by young black women and joined by New York City’s first lady, Chirlane McCray.
But she has also been frighteningly tone deaf regarding race, with the Black Girls Rock appearance among the examples – and this month’s “CP time” joke with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio among the more egregious.
So while I understand the black women who might choose to support Hillary Clinton, and I hope their alliance ultimately frees them, I don’t have much faith in the strength of her coattails.
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