Bill Clinton isn’t black!

Mon, 26 Feb 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Every time I think it's going to die, it rears its ugly head once again. I'm referring to the dishearteningly durable idea that former President Bill Clinton somehow shares a special kinship with black men. I'm not sure exactly whom to blame for giving birth to this nauseating notion. I do know that it first gained mainstream currency in the fall of 1998, when Toni Morrison launched a spirited defense of the scandal-ridden chief executive in a New Yorker essay. The normally reliable Nobel laureate attempted to bolster her specious argument by unfurling a sequence of stereotypes that would make any self-respecting white supremacist salivate with glee. She contended that African-American men possessed a firsthand understanding of Clinton's difficulties:

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 body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?
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Bill Clinton isn’t black!