Blacks who don't remember Clinton's past are condemned to repeat it

[Editor's Note: I was curious as to why Hillary Clinton was so popular among Black voters, so I did a Google search — and was very surprised to see that, they actually had more reasons not to support her. Here is a collection of quotes I found in the first articles that appeared on the Clinton legacy regarding African-Americans, which made me wonder: Why would Black voters vote against their own best interests ... again? And then I remembered Hillary saying that she wasn't running for her husband's third term, she was running for her first term. But even so, does that mean that no matter what happened during the 8 years the Clintons were in the White House, that none of that should matter now? ]

(October 5, 1998) Contrary to popular belief, Bill Clinton's moniker as "the first black president" wasn't pejorative and it wasn't created by racists. Here's what Toni Morrison said in an article in The New Yorker . . . In short, it's a racial analogy to a now-famous comment made by Hillary Clinton earlier that year on The Today Show: "The great story here for anybody willing to find it — and write about it, and explain it — is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President."

(February 20, 2001) In Light of his Record how can Black America love President Clinton? (by Cedric Muhammad at the Black Electorate) It is not hard to see why many Blacks believe that the idea that President Clinton is the "first Black President", whether promoted in jest or not, is an absolute insult. We believe that the record has already shown and will continue to show that President Clinton's actions have done more harm to Black America than good, and that his policies, over the last 8 years, have been significantly more damaging to Blacks than has Republican Party rhetoric, over the last 20 years.

(August 27, 2015) It Was No Compliment to Call Bill Clinton The First Black President (by Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic) In 1998, Toni Morrison wrote a comment for The New Yorker arguing that “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” Last week the New York Times, implicitly cited Morrison’s piece, and claimed the author was giving Clinton “a compliment.” This interpretation of Morrison’s claim is as common as it is erroneous. [Odd, in that recently Ta-Nehisi Coates recently published a stinging critique of Senator Bernie Sanders over his opposition to reparations for slavery. Even though both Bernie and Hillary have the same position on reparations.]

(September 29, 2005) As Hillary Clinton goes around the country gaining support by African American elected officials based on her “Black” husband, more attention needs to be paid to Bill Clinton’s record on race and poverty in America out of the fear that Hillary might repeat it. The following article illustrates some glaring contradictions to the image Bill Clinton maintains as being sympathetic to the Black poor >>> Bill Clinton Was No Champion of the Poor (by Paul Street at Dissident Voice)

(January 24, 2008) The Clinton Fallacy: Did blacks really make big economic gains during the '90s? (By Melissa Harris-Lacewell at Slate, now known as Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC) Hillary Clinton's campaign deployed President Bill Clinton in South Carolina for the specific purpose of delivering the black vote, aiming to remind African-Americans of the good times when Clinton was president. Which raises the question: Why do so many people think the Clinton years were good times for black America? In a 2005 article I co-authored in the Journal of Black Studies, I analyzed five national surveys from 1984 through 2000. The data show that nearly a third of black Americans held false understandings of black economic conditions during the Clinton years. This belief is simply wrong.

(July 03, 2008) Hillary, African Americans & The Myth of Bill Clinton (by Cassandra R Veney at the University of Dayton) Determined to win more primaries and to get the Democratic nomination for the 2008 presidential elections, the knives were sharpened, the gloves came off, and both Hillary Clinton and former president Bill Clinton went on the attack. The net was cast widely as it went beyond Obama to include disparaging comments about Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — Many African Americans including civil rights leaders, politicians, media personalities, and ordinary citizens were outraged and shocked while others were not ... That's because there is myth around Bill Clinton concerning his love affair with Black America. There was never a love affair, and if one existed, it was one-sided. African Americans loved him while he fervently worked to make the lives of working class and poor African Americans a living hell. Let me begin to unravel and dismantle the myth that Bill Clinton was good for and to African Americans by addressing his domestic record ...

(December 7, 2015) Hillary Clinton is not entitled to black votes (by Raina Lipsitz at Al Jazeera) On the issues black voters care about, Clinton has nothing but overcautious rhetoric to offer. She is taking black voters for granted.

(January 20, 2016) Clinton rallies black voters (By Niall Stanage) Hillary Clinton, faced with the real possibility of losing Iowa and New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders, is trying to lock down the support of black voters as a way of repelling his challenge in South Carolina and beyond. But not everyone believes the idea of a “firewall” for Clinton is a sure thing in South Carolina. In the 2008 cycle, however, Clinton led Barack Obama by double-digits in South Carolina one month before the primary, only to get crushed by a ratio of more than 2-to-1 after a racially charged campaign. Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders, reminds us that Bernie was involved in the civil rights movement as a young man, and attended the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his most famous speech — and was arrested protesting segregated housing in his days as a college student. Devine said: "The civil rights struggle was a core part of who he is; our agenda has big ideas like a living wage, universal college education, that are going to affect the African-American community more than any other community."

* America needs African-Americans to "Feel the Bern!" — My post >>> Most African-Americans prefer Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton (The problem is, most of them just don't know it yet.)