Note: I'm the author of a new book, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.
Author Toni Morrison has endorsed Barack Obama, writing: "In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which, coupled with brilliance, equals wisdom." What makes this endorsement so significant is that Morrison was the one who invented the notion that Bill Clinton was "the first black president." It’s an important symbolic step for her to turn against the Clinton machine. Now let’s hope we can put an end to the absurd notion that Bill Clinton is "black," which I analyze below.
The term came from Morrison writing in the New Yorker in 1998 during the impeachment crisis, when she called Bill Clinton "the first black president." According to Morrison, "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, despite his career accomplishments, comparing Clinton’s scrutinized sex life to the stereotyping and double standards that blacks typically endure.
According to Morrison, "African American men seemed to understand it right away" and "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?" Morrison argued, "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.’" Morrison contended that Clinton moved "from target sighted to attack, to criminalization, to lynching, and now, in some quarters, to crucifixion" and "the always and already guilty ‘perp.’" Morrison declared that Bill Clinton was "blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime." (Ironically, Obama has reported being inspired by Morrison’s novels, although probably not her cynicism about the chances of seeing a real black president.)
The idea that Bill Clinton should be called the "first black president" is absurd. Morrison herself noted how "virtually all the African American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear," but neglected in 1998 to mention how Clinton himself was responsible for failing to defend them. Clinton withdrew the nomination of Lani Guinier as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993 because her advocacy of voting rights for African Americans caused critics to label her a "quota queen." In 1992, Clinton had consciously appealed to racist whites by denouncing the controversial statements of rapper Sister Souljah (and Reverend Jesse Jackson for allowing her to speak on a panel). As Debra Dickerson observed, Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment was a calculated effort at "reassuring whites that he knew how to keep blacks in line." Sister Souljah, Lani Guinier, Jocelyn Elders: exactly how many African American women did Bill Clinton need to denounce or abandon before the myth of Clinton’s "blackness" could be abandoned as the joke it is?
(An earlier discussion of Morrison's announcement is in this diary.)
Crossposted at ObamaPolitics.