African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: 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. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."
/snip/
So now I have this to chew on: Morrison's Obama endorsement - which poetically and pointedly rejects the Clintons. (For extra measure, let's let Christopher Hitchens chime in on the myth of Bill's affinity for Black folk).
What this means for me is something closer to home. I have a picture of me and Bill Clinton - the coup de grace: he's wearing a Stanford t-shirt - that I've kept for years. Until we had painting done recently, it hung upstairs in the hall. What to do? I dig the photo. But I'm increasingly down (have been since he was in office) about the actual policies and politics he pursued. And the prospect of him back in the White House makes my skin crawl.
