Hillary Has Sinned Against Black People

A New Republic cover story on Hillary Clinton by Michael Eric Dyson concludes that Hillary, as president, would do more for blacks than President Obama has.

But Dyson does not come to this view easily. He begins his story this way:

There is good reason to be skeptical about Hillary Clinton and race. It’s never been anything explicit, necessarily, but she has sinned in the realm of signification, the place where innuendo and plausible deniability live. Let us start with her first presidential campaign in 2008, and the infamous “3 a.m. phone call” television ad that so spooked folks in the nation’s white hinterland. “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep,” a concerned narrator intoned. “Who do you want answering the phone?”

On the surface, there was nothing especially racially troubling about an advertisement that said the nation’s first female commander in chief had the chops and bravura to answer the call. But to seasoned observers of racial coding, myself included, the image of innocent sleeping children and a nervously attentive mother evoked an uglier racial epoch. “I couldn’t help but think of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation … with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society,” Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote in The New York Times. “The person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.”

And thus once again, we see the hunting down, by black second-hand dealers in ideas, real or imagined slights of blacks.This focus on such slights is the great crutch facing the black community. When a black fails. it can always be blamed on whites, when there is this micro-reading of racial disrespect, or worse. everywhere. It provides the blacks an excuse for failure. It is an evil crutch, whether true or not. Blacks really need to learn that success must be held up as a worthy goal despite the sometimes negative environment.

As Thomas Sowell has made clear in his work, success despite racial slights can be achieved. It is racial and ethnic groups who want to focus on political means of change that fail to succeed in an economic sense.


 



  -RW