As GOP nominee Donald Trump attempts to draw black voters away from decades-long allegiance to Democrats by accurately pointing out that African-Americans have little to show for their kneejerk support for the party, liberals will resort to creative interpretations of history to keep blacks in the fold.
An example of this was seen on Fox News Sunday when host Chris Wallace was interviewing Democrat House member Gregory Meeks of New York about Trump's pitch to black voters.
Meeks made a dubious claim you'll likely hear again before election day, regardless of its veracity --
FOX NEWS SUNDAY HOST CHRIS WALLACE: During the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders went after Clinton in several cases from the left. For instance, he noted that the welfare reform plan that she supported and her husband signed into law in 1996 resulted in more than the doubling of the number of Americans living in extreme poverty. He noted that the crime bill that she supported and President Clinton signed in 1994 dramatically increased the number of blacks going into prison and the amount of time that they spend there. Isn't that part of the Clinton record?
MEEKS: Well, you know, I think that if you put into perspective what was taking place at that time and when you look at the crack epidemic that was going on, many of that, much of that that took place at that time is taken out of context when we talk today. If you recall at that time, the income disparity between African-Americans and others was shrinking. You talk about unemployment, was the lowest that it had been. In fact, so many good things were happening in the African-American community that some was calling Bill Clinton at the time the first African-American president.
I'll give Congressman Meeks the benefit of a doubt that he's merely mistaken and believes this to be true. But this description of Clinton comes from a specific person, in response to a specific event -- novelist Toni Morrison's take on the Lewinsky scandal.
In Morrison's view, as claimed in a widely read New Yorker essay in October 1998, not only was Clinton the victim of a lynching from the GOP, what took place that year was nothing less than -- brace yourself -- a "crucifixion." Yes, she actually used that word to describe a man who'd had an affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, then lied about it -- under oath, repeatedly -- while president.
Morrison wrote of her plan earlier that summer to limit herself to "very selective reading," with no newspapers, magazines or television, to avoid what she called The Only Story Worth Telling that dominated media coverage since January. In short order, after she vilified "feral Republicans" lusting for the "totalitarian power they believe is rightfully theirs," Morrison made her larger point --
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 body-searched, 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 from 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."
For a large segment of the population who are not African-Americans or members of other minorities, the elusive story left visible tracks: from target sighted to attack, to criminalization, to lynching, and now, in some quarters, to crucifixion. The always and already guilty "perp" is being hunted down not by a prosecutor's obsessive application of law but by a different kind of pursuer, one who makes new laws out of the shards of those he breaks. ...
This is Slaughtergate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d'etat. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.
"One heard the first murmurs" of Clinton as the first president of color several years earlier, Morrison wrote, during the Whitwater scandal, though she neglects to point out that Whitewater was first reported by the thoroughly racist, Constitution-loathing New York Times. But it was not until Morrison's vituperative essay that the "trope" of Clinton as first black president -- hence, the inevitable victim of a lynching -- gained widespread traction. It clearly never occurred to Morrison that the only reason Bill Clinton's "sexuality" did not remain "unpoliced" was because of his pathological inability to keep it restrained, regardless of legal consequences, even after he became president.
Two decades later, Morrison's overheated observation has been transformed for the purpose of helping another Clinton as she runs for president. And Congressman Meeks' citing of the metaphor as an example of Bill Clinton's affinity for black folk --- and hence, Hillary's too -- is not the first time it has been so deployed.
In August 2015, New York Times reporter Peter Baker wrote about new DNA evidence establishing that Warren Harding "had no recent ancestors with African blood," despite decades-old rumors to the contrary. In his lede, Baker wrote that Bill Clinton "was called the first black president because he crossed racial lines so easily, a distinction he lost when Barack Obama became the first actual black president." Later in the post, Baker wrote that for Clinton, "the sobriquet of first black president was meant as a compliment."
In response, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates ran a post under the headline "It Was No Compliment to Call Bill Clinton 'The First Black President' ". Citing Baker's story, Coates wrote that "this interpretation of Morrison's claim is as common as it is erroneous" --
Clinton isn't black, in Morrison's rendition, because he knows every verse of Lift Every Voice And Sing, but because the powers arrayed against him find their most illustrative analogue in white supremacy. "People misunderstood that phrase," Morrison would later say. "I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp."
Now, one can make all sorts of arguments over whether the pursuit of Clinton was, in fact, analogous to how black people have been regarded across American history. But Morrison was not giving Clinton an award. She was welcoming him into a club which should not exist.
National Review's Jonah Goldberg quickly pointed out the glaring problem embedded within Morrison's "fairly tortured prose" -- "Of course I could write that Bill Clinton is dysfunctional and therefore black -- just like Ms. Morrison -- but that would be racist coming from a white male."
