In the words of the late Maya Angelou, “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” It is about time for African Americans to believe who former president Bill Clinton really is. In an encounter last month with Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia, Mr. Clinton refused to acknowledge the harm of his1994 crime bill. This bill created racist criminal justice processes that wreaked havoc on African American communities. Yet, until the Black Lives Matter movement started confronting this issue, Mr. Clinton escaped any major criticism from African Americans, who apparently believed him to be something other than his real self.
Mr. Clinton showed us who he was with the 1994 crime bill, which brought about harsher sentencing, expanded the death penalty to cover 60 additional offenses, and created the three-strikes penalty, which accelerated the disproportionately black mass incarceration, causing the black prison population to increase by 50 percent. All this was done among calls for controlling crime, even though the crime rate was actually going down. This was also the era of calling black kids “super predators.”
Bill Clinton had shown who he was early on—during his 1992 presidential campaign. As a part of the expressed plan of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to wrest control of the Democratic party from the likes of liberals like Andrew Cuomo and Jesse Jackson and to make the party more conservative, Clinton—a leader of the DLC—campaigned on a promise to “change welfare as we know it.” In other words, he used updated racial code language similar to Ronald Reagan’s “getting rid of welfare queens” campaign rhetoric, with the clear but wrong implication that most welfare recipients were black.
Unfortunately for many poor struggling women, Bill Clinton, as president, carried out his plan to change welfare. After repeatedly praising Charles Murray, whose racist and eugenics-based writings maligned African Americans and advocated for the abolition of welfare programs, President Bill Clinton, in 1996, implemented his welfare reform—abolishing AFDC which had been in existence since the New Deal, and implementing TANF. Please note that contrary to what was implied in much of the rhetoric–that the welfare rolls were expanding and thereby causing federal budget problems–the number of AFDC participants was actually decreasing.
TANF, the cornerstone of the Republican’s Contract with America at the time, did “change welfare as we knew it.” It essentially killed traditional welfare programs with a specific emphasis on cutting welfare for poor families with children. As a result of Mr. Clinton’s so-called “welfare reform,” single mothers in America have the least social welfare support in the developed world. Moreover, the US poverty rate in 2005 for children of single mothers was 51%, the highest in the world among similar developed economies, and our child poverty rate is double the average in these other countries.
Back to the presidential campaign in 1992, where Bill Clinton performed the “Sister Souljah” moment. The hip-hop MC, author, and political activist Sister Souljah had said some harsh things about black-on-white murders when asked about black-on-black murders. In his appearance at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push convention, Clinton, in a thinly veiled appeal to less liberal members of the electorate, denounced Sister Souljah, signaling his disagreement with and distance from “racist blacks.” The structure, time, and place of his statements suggest a repudiation of Jesse Jackson as well.
In another key signal—on how tough he could be on crime, especially by blacks–Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas at the time, left the campaign trail to go to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ray Rector, a retarded African American man. Rector’s mental capacity was so limited that as he was being led to his execution he told a prison guard to save his pie from his last meal. He thought he would return to finish his dessert.
In his presidency Mr. Clinton continued to support racial disparities in criminal justice. In 1995 the U.S. Federal Sentencing Commission reported on the racial disparity in sentencing for cocaine offenses because at the time the law stipulated that it took 100 times as much powder cocaine to equal the same sentence as for crack cocaine. Since blacks were prosecuted more often for crack cocaine offenses they received disproportionately harsh sentences. Calling the sentencing policy racially discriminatory, the Commission recommended a reduction in this 100 to 1 ratio. Bill Clinton signed legislation denying this change, thus keeping the disparate ratio. As a result, thousands more African Americans went to prison and for longer sentences than was racially fair.
The list of Clinton’s racial transgressions is even longer than I have listed here. However, from what we see here, it is way past time for African Americans to see Bill Clinton for who he is.