Clinton told the Trotter Group of black columnists in 1997 that the crack laws and their racist impact were "unfair, unjustifiable, and should be changed." But he did nothing about it, for fear of being seen as soft on crime. The unfairness reached such a level that at one point African-Americans made up 74 percent of drug offenders put behind bars even though they make up 13 percent of the population.
Outrage comes too easy for the Democrats
By Derrick Z. Jackson | June 30, 2007
WASHINGTON
THURSDAY NIGHT'S debate was too easy for the Democratic presidential candidates. Before a hugely black audience at Howard University, they bashed the Supreme Court decision ending voluntary desegregation. They lambasted the Bush administration's bungling of Hurricane Katrina. Barack Obama said you can't have No Child Left Behind if you leave the money behind. The biggest cheer of the night came when Hillary Clinton said, "If AIDS were the leading cause of death between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country."
That is precisely the point. Playing to the outraged is child's play for the Democrats, so easy that John Edwards, he of the $400 haircut, claimed with a straight face, "The issue of poverty is the cause of my life." All the candidates said poverty, healthcare, and education were connected.
What they did not say is how they would make this connection with white, middle-class, and suburban voters. What they did not say is how they will convince them that these problems outweigh outrage and outcry over taxes.
What they did not say was how they would get the rest of the country outraged with empathy, not dismissal.
So it means that the real story was not inside the debate hall. As an African-American journalist, I was glad to see African-American and Latino journalists have a crack at the candidates. But the night was also a layup drill. No matter who the Democratic candidate is, she or he will get 90 percent of the black vote and -- the way some Republicans are harping on immigration -- a huge percentage of the Latino vote. To underscore that point to the edge of paternalism, there was no serious debate between the candidates as to who among them is best earning the black vote.
The last Democrat in the White House proved both how difficult it was to connect the haves and have-nots and his own unwillingness to expend political capital to do so. This week, for instance, it was announced that America's prison and jail population had its largest increase since 2000 and now stands at more than 2.2 million.
But before you blame President Bush for this, remember that under President Clinton, the population skyrocketed from 1.4 million to more than 2 million.
For all the legend about Clinton's connectivity to black people, the rate of incarceration during his administration went up to 3,620 prisoners for every 100,000 black men. It had been 2,800 per 100,000 black men at the end of the Reagan-Bush I era, according to the Justice Policy Institute in Washington.
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Why do blacks and Hispanics
Why do blacks and Hispanics automatically vote for the Demos? I had a conversation with a woman of color, and she mentioned that the elephants haven't done anything for blacks, and Clinton did a lot. Name one specific event that Clinton was behind that directly benefitted black people. Can't?
The point is that people should consider what the candidates are really saying before voting.
On the other hand, I have given up on both parties andhave decided to vote for alternative party folks, beit libertarian, green, or maybe commies.
I get the journalist's
I get the journalist's point. But Clinton never claimed to be about poverty. He was a DLC Founder remember? His thing was about responsibility. He was the one who put a mentally retarded black man to death and went to oversee it personally to appeal to conservative voters. His wife played a minor role in throwing Lani Guinier under the bus. I don't support Obama at this stage of the game, but I don't think his criticism applies as much to him or to Edwards--who is the first mainstream Democratic candidate in the modern era to even utter the words "poverty" and "inequality" in the same sentence.
Derrick Z. Jackson's Observations
What I have grown increasingly tired of is precisely the sort of either/or, back and forth dialectic of pieces like Jackson's. I don't mean that I disagree with the substantive points of anything he wrote save for the gratuitous insult about the cost of Edwards' haircut. (How much people pay for their haircuts and who they choose to have sex with are not issues that grab my attention.) Yes, Bill Clinton did nothing to change America's drug laws but African American journalists and hundreds of black leaders posing as "community nationalists" did even less to hold him accountable on this issue and many others affecting the black community. Derrick Z. Jackson and his black colleagues in the print and electronic media are as much a part of the problem as those they correctly, at times, affix a portion of the blame to.
Yes, the Democrats all too often receive a free ride from black voters but if the choice is between voting for people who will support some of your issues some of the time (Democrats) and voting for people who try to convince you that all of your issues are the products of a disordered collective delusion (Republicans) then black folks don't have many choices. Blll and Hillary Clinton are absolutely undeserving of any of the fawning accolades and loyalty they receive from too many black voters but name a nationally recognized Republican leader who is deserving of even ten percent of what the dynamic duo receives?
Br. Jackson needs to dig a little deper and start hitting a little harder if he wants to convince me. The fungibility and misuse of black political capital did not begin with the election of FDR or LBJ.
There are a whole lot of
There are a whole lot of things we can't afford to be nice about any more (if we ever could). There are also a whole lot of things we can't afford not to be ruthless about,
In the spirit of no longer being able to afford being nice, I'd like to see Dyson or someone else who finds him or herself on some panel with "Model Father" Bill Cosby ask him this question:
Mr. Cosby, would you say that the offspring of the majority of Black Americans in your general age group have turned out to be less solid citizens than your children, or less solid citizens than your own children?
Has anyone ever taken him to task to his face, in front of an audience about his adultery; his fathering a child out of wedlock while we was married; the accusations of sexual molestation that have been made against him? Has he been taken to task in the same way he took effectively all of us to task in that infamous tirade? If not, why not?
What are the other things can we no longer afford to be nice about?
Um, that's "less solid
Um, that's "less solid citizens than your own children, or more solid citizens than your own children?"