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Materials > Readings > Clinton |
Bill Clinton, Soul Brother?
By Darryl Fears
It is a running joke among some, a spicy one-liner that's guaranteed to get a guffaw at the office or chic house party. Bill Clinton? First black president? Ha! Now that's a good one.
But down in Arkansas, folks aren't laughing.
As late as the 1980s, Clinton was the first white gubernatorial candidate to truly reach out to the state's African American voters, to eat on their porches, pray in their churches, invite them into the governor's office. And for that and more, says Charles King, the former president deserves today's induction into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.
That's right. Clinton will become the first and only white person among the hall's 62 members, who include poet Maya Angelou, magazine magnate John H. Johnson and former Clinton administration surgeon general Joycelyn Elders. Remember Elders? Clinton gave her the boot.
The former president will share the dais with soul-turned-gospel singer Al Green, whose legendary marital infidelity and resulting problems connect him to Clinton in ways that transcend race and their Arkansan roots.
But it's the bigger picture that counts in Arkansas.
"We wanted to show him our appreciation," says King, the hall of fame's executive director, "not only for what he did as president but for his lifelong association with us. He came to us. We were responsible for him being governor, and president. He held on to that. And we held on to that."
Ron Walters, a University of Maryland political science professor who follows black politics, wonders if King has a hold on his senses. It's the difference between image and impact, he says. Clinton signed the most punitive crime bill and welfare reform bill in history, he says. The result, he argues, is that more than 50 percent of prisoners are black and poor women and children of all races are sinking deeper into poverty.
So just when did the idea of Clinton being a brother gain some heft? It was long before he moved into that Harlem office.
Let's go back to October 1998, when Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison wrote a New Yorker magazine essay about Clinton that said, tongue firmly in cheek, "white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime."
He is the product of a single mother, wore cool shades and blew the sax on the Arsenio Hall show while running for president, and loves to eat at McDonald's. He feels at ease among black people. In other words, Morrison was saying, Clinton is black in his soul.
Four years later, Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, is still disgusted.
"It was a ridiculous statement from a very prominent black lady," Innis says. "She used a pathology, the broken home, the single mother, the playing of a saxophone, eating at McDonald's, to compare him to black people."
Innis can tick off his own list of Clinton sins. "He stood by and watched 800,000 people get slaughtered in Rwanda when he could have done something about it," he says, among a host of other complaints.
Point well taken, says National Urban League President Hugh Price, but critics are overlooking a few things. He then lists a few points of his own:
Clinton presided over one of the most robust economies in U.S. history. "It produced dramatic gains in black employment and reduced black poverty," Price says. On top of that, he adds, were Clinton's black political appointments and his defense of affirmative action.
Then Price got quiet.
"What is the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame trying to do?" he asks.
According to King, it's trying to honor a fellow Arkansan the group now considers to be a brother.
"I can understand their feeling a special connection," Price says. "I wouldn't begrudge them that."
© October 19, 2002 The Washington Post Company
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