Steven W. Thrasher, columnist for the Guardian, has an insightful post up today:
Black thinkers like Bernie Sanders. They've studied the Clintons' true cost
Spike Lee is the latest black public intellectual to endorse Bernie Sanders and to question the sanity of black voters and politicians pledging their allegiance to the Clintons, who have done as much harm to black America as any living political couple. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am mystified by robust black support for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
He examines the true cost of the Clinton era:
Bill Clinton governed through playing to white fears by harming, locking up or even executing black Americans. He left the campaign trail in 1992 to allow theexecution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man so mentally incapacitated, he reportedly did not eat the dessert from his final meal because he was “saving it for later”. When he left office, after having ended welfare for poor children and destroyed countless black families through a crime bill even he now admits made mass incarceration worse, Hillary Clinton would go out and whip up support for this slow-motion destruction of black America, even when it meant referring to children as “superpredators”.
A good part of the article focuses on black leaders who have come out to support Bernie, and those who have spoken out against Hillary:
Similarly, much of the country first got woke about the scale and racism of mass incarceration when they read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Alexander has not endorsed Sanders – “I endorse the revolution,” she wrote – but she has offered the most skewering critique on why “Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve the black vote”, in the Nation. She has also reminded black voters that“we are not checkmated” – that we can approach politics with a sense of possibility.
His closing discussion on “racial capitalism” reinforces his narrative that Hillary Clinton is not the right candidate to take on the problems that confront America today.
Read the whole article here:
www.theguardian.com/...
Hat tip to Sybil Liberty in the comments below:
Steven W Thrasher is writer-at-large for Guardian US. He was named Journalist of the Year 2012 by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, the Advocate and more. Follow him on Twitter at @thrasherxy or visit his website.
I highly recommend his other columns on black issues in America:
www.theguardian.com/...