On Bill Clinton and Why Black America Must Do Away with the “Honorary Black” Myth
Politics Features Bill Clinton
“The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.”—Michelle Alexander
“We got Clinton, that’s close. He got negro tendencies.”—Cedric the Entertainer
Consider this one more plea from one more black person who is desperate to rid Black America of the myth of “honorary” black people. It’s true that there are white people who can sing the blues. And it’s true that there are are white people who know all of the lyrics to Outkast’s “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik.” There are whites who have been victims of police brutality, white people who live in the projects—and those who don’t, but are still welcome in predominantly black arenas. But we don’t have to dub them “honorary blacks.” Bill Clinton, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, etc. Just let them be white people, even if they’re a white person you really, really like.
I never understood these attempts to baptize certain whites (usually men, whatever that may signify) who had managed to appeal to the black community, offering them up some sort of born-again black card that they never earned and didn’t need. The myth that you can be cool enough, or even enough of an ally, to shed whiteness and don blackness is silly, but also dangerous. Bill Clinton saying things today that Bill Clinton said (with a 1994 crimes bill) many years ago—about problems in predominantly black communities—should not be cause for alarm. And it wouldn’t be, were it not for this dangerous myth that the Clintons are, somehow, specifically good for blacks in America.
Bill Clinton should have never been given the honorary badge, and Michelle Alexander can better explain the myriad reasons why. In a piece for The Atlantic that went up just as the video of Bill Clinton versus a Black Lives Matter protestor began to go viral, Vann R. Newkirk II offers up a slightly more diplomatic reading of Clinton’s bill:
“It seems the best way to describe the 1994 crime bill is that it was a tragedy of groupthink produced under the pressure of real, imminent dangers. The need to fix a crisis gave way to an awful policy that—as awful policies tend to do—further marginalized poor people and people of color.”
Although I’d never claimed him as “honorary,” I admit I was thrown by the vigor with which Clinton defended the bill against the protestor. But that’s only because I could have sworn he just apologized for the same bill, a few months back.
“I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it… our nation has too many people in prison and for too long—we have overshot the mark. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, we now have 25 percent of its prison population… Some are in prison who shouldn’t be, others are in for too long, and without a plan to educate, train, and reintegrate them into our communities, we all suffer.”
I was thrown, but not disappointed, because I never functioned under the myth that Bill Clinton was on our side, let alone one of us. And, as nice as it would be to have such a political figure (especially a white one, since he’d be less likely to get written off as pandering to his race, or you know, a Muslim), it’s time to stop pretending that Clinton (and others like him) are just kidding, or just being tough on crime when they support the labeling of black, underprivileged kids as “super-predators.”
For all of those who have yet to read work by Michelle Alexander, or haven’t gotten around to Ta-Nehisi Coates, I hope those video clips making their way around Twitter will be enough to get blacks to, at least, drop the “honorary black” that has for so long appeared alongside Clinton’s name. By making a statement that boils down to, “But what about black on black crime?!” Bill Clinton has, hopefully, lost such status (mythical or otherwise). For me, right now, he’s no better than those online commentators who appear on every thread about police brutality. He’s the reason that #WhereWasBLM was trending not too long ago, because he seems to believe that protestors aren’t aware of the vast difference (and the relationship) between violence committed by one underprivileged person against another, and violence committed by the state.
And it should be acknowledged that this likely isn’t the end of the honorary black myth. After all, there are plenty of occasions when it’s used, comedically, and I’m not above such humor. Of course I still laugh when I see Cedric the Entertainer’s black President routine from The Original Kings of Comedy. But the myth has no place in politics, no place in conversations about Bill or Hillary Clinton. I’d even go so far as to say that some of the “honorary black” myth even trickles down to Bernie Sanders talk as well. Yes, he has Killer Mike in his corner, and damn. That’s impressive. But no matter how many pictures I see of Sanders marching alongside King, or getting arrested—chained to a black woman—or standing aside at a rally so a Black Lives Matter protestor can speak, I will never dub him honorary black.
Black people, I get it. We so badly want to believe that there is someone in power, and on our side. It’s like the feeling that I got when I saw that we got a black woman president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I want to believe that there is a symbol of black empowerment somewhere, anywhere, but a Cheryl Boone Isaacs still got us an #OscarsSoWhite. And a black President of the United States still got us a #BlackLivesMatter movement, because it was so clear that black lives didn’t. So if our own, actual black people do not automatically signify immediate change and political evolution, why do some of us still keep thinking that such change will come from the Clintons of the world? Or even from Sanders?
This is not Hollywood, and there is no white savior. The good news is that we don’t need one—at least that’s what I want to believe. We don’t need Hillary Clinton to take back her super-predator comment and the vigor with which she supported the crime bill, and we don’t need Sanders to support reparations, anymore than we needed Paula Deen to apologize for being the kind of racist who asked her black worker to dress like they were on a plantation.
I think what we do need is for black Americans to come together and resoundingly answer the question Bill Clinton so boldly posed to the protester. The question was, essentially, “How would you characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children?
Here’s my answer:
Did those people—selling crack and joining gangs—have access to decent schools and jobs? If they were given the same opportunities as, say, Chelsea Clinton, or even my kids—who at least live in a neighborhood with very good public schools, and have been afforded other privileges—then I’d likely have to agree with Hillary Clinton, and categorize them as super-predators. People presented with opportunities outside of gang and drug life, people who are consistently encouraged to strive for greatness, people who are taught that there’s a great big world out there, waiting for their ideas, who would then, still, choose to get 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack—yes, I’d likely call them animals who naturally and instinctively prey on others.
But if we’re talking about people who were not given the same opportunities as Chelsea Clinton, or my sons, then I’d categorize them differently. And I’d direct people, once again, to Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates or even the Vice documentary, Fixing the System, to craft a response to Clinton and those many others (black and white) who cosign his statements.
What we need is for people to consider the question Clinton posed, and really answer it—on a personal note. For example:
I’d categorize those aforementioned super-predators as people a lot like the people I would have grown up with, had crack (and folks “hopped up” on it—like my parents) not destroyed my biological family and ultimately, led to my being adopted. I’d categorize those people as flesh and blood, and—like me, like Chelsea Clinton, like my sons, like all of us—products of their environment.
In answering these questions, and thinking about our responses, I believe we will be reminded that the political is personal. It’s the reason Coates wrote a book in the form of a letter to his son, and it’s the reason Time photographer Devin Allen captures beautiful, intimate picture of individual people as much as he creates iconic images of rebellions. We need to not only take these politicians seriously, but we need to take them personally.
We, black Americans—if I may speak for us, momentarily—don’t need a presidential candidate who admits that the environments that create so called “super-predators” were not created by the people who grow up there. We don’t need a candidate—or his or her family members—to apologize for their role in the creation and re-creation of such environments. We need more, many more, black Americans who are willing to do away with the notion of a single, political figure who will create an America where black lives matter. As Andrew Crump recently argued in a piece on the new series Underground, there can be no one, lone figure in a fight for freedom. In the case of American politics, where a President, ultimately, only has so much power anyway—and more to the point of this issue, where state and local prisons must be at the center of the conversation surrounding mass incarceration—it’s dangerous (at least for black Americans) to put so much stock in one figure.
It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than one man or woman—no matter how pro-black they appear to be—to shift an entire society, where it is still not evident that all men and women are born equal.
Shannon M. Houston is a Staff Writer and the TV Editor for Paste. This New York-based freelancer probably has more babies than you, but that’s okay; you can still be friends. She welcomes almost all follows on Twitter.