The Clintons’ War on Drugs: When Black Lives Didn’t Matter

[No1]

The Clintons’ War on Drugs: When Black Lives Didn’t Matter
BY DONNA MURCH
February 9, 2016

In August 2015, an uncomfortable encounter between Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors and Hillary Clinton finally broke the silence of many mainstream press outlets on the Clintons’ shared responsibility for the disastrous policies of mass incarceration, and its catalyst, the War on Drugs. Although a number of prominent academics have written on the subject, little popular discussion of the racial impact of the Clintons’ crime and punishment policies emerged until the opening volleys of the 2016 presidential race.

A grainy cell phone video of the incident showed a handful of young BLM protestors confronting Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in New Hampshire. After expressing her ardent feminism and pride in meeting a female presidential candidate, BLM’s Daunasia Yancey forcefully confronted Clinton about her shared culpability in America’s destructive War on Drugs: “You and your family have been personally and politically responsible for policies that have caused health and human services disasters in impoverished communities of color through the domestic and international War on Drugs that you championed as First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State.” Yancey continued, “And so I just want to know how you feel about your role in that violence, and how you plan to reverse it?”

Yancey’s question deftly turned Hillary’s use of her husband’s presidency as political qualification on its head: If her deep involvement in policy issues during her term as First Lady qualifies her for the presidency, then she could be held responsible for policies made during those years. The Clintons had used the concept of personal responsibility to shame poor blacks for their economic predicament. Indeed, Bill Clinton titled his notorious welfare to work legislation “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.” Yancey’s question forced the Democratic front-runner to accept personal responsibility for mass incarceration policies passed under Bill Clinton’s administration.

 

[No1]

Hillary Clinton’s response to the activists was telling. She attributed the policies of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs to “the very real concerns” of communities of color and poor people, who faced a crime wave in the 1980s and 1990s. Echoing an argument that is gaining greater purchase in certain elite circles as the movement against racialized state violence and incarceration sweeps across the US, Clinton deflected the charge of anti-black animus back onto African Americans themselves. It is hard to interpret her explanation as anything more than self-serving revisionism. As I demonstrate in this essay, the rush to incarcerate was fueled by much less generous motives than the ones Clinton presents. With the Clintons at the helm of the “New Democrats,” their strident anti-crime policies, like their assault on welfare, reflected a cynical attempt to win back centrist white voters, especially those from Dixie and the South Central United States.

A true paradox lies at the heart of the Clinton legacy. Both Hillary and Bill continue to enjoy enormous popularity among African Americans despite the devastating legacy of a presidency that resulted in the impoverishment and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class black people. Most shockingly, the total numbers of state and federal inmates grew more rapidly under Bill Clinton than under any other president, including the notorious Republican drug warriors Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. This fact alone should at least make one pause before granting unquestioning fealty to Hillary, but of course there are many others, including her entry into electoral politics through the 1964 Goldwater campaign, resolute support for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, race-baiting tactics in the 2008 election, and close ties to lobbyists for the private prison industry. Nevertheless, until the encounter with BLM protestors in August 2015, few publicly called out the Clintons’ shared culpability for our contemporary prison nation that subjects a third of African American men to a form of correctional control in their lifetime.

The United States’s historically unprecedented carceral edifice of policing and prisons has been long in the making. However, in the 1990s the Clintons and their allies, as the quintessential “New Democrats,” played a crucial role in its expansion. Like their Republican predecessors, punishing America’s most vulnerable populations became an important means to repudiate the democratic upheaval of the postwar years that toppled statutory Jim Crow laws and challenged some of the most enduring social inequities of the U.S. In the three decades that followed the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the drug war and its companion legislation of welfare reform criminalized poor and working-class populations of color in huge numbers, subjecting many not only to the “carceral consequences” of voter disfranchisement but also to permanent exclusion from the legal economy.

While this is often understood as the quotidian cruelty of a brave neoliberal world, very specific political motives underlay policies of extreme cruelty and state sanctioned murder in the late twentieth century.

Although they are rarely mentioned in the same breath, the escalation of America’s drug war in the 1990s and the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its benighted son Bill Clinton are all intimately linked. Understanding why tough on crime policies and welfare reform became so foundational to the vision of the New Democrats requires a look at the sensibilities that undergirded their strategy for regaining the White House and national power. As the Democratic Party reinvented itself in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s sweeping electoral victory in 1984, Al From, an aide of Louisiana Representative Gilles Long with abiding ties to big business, Governors Bruce Babbitt (Arizona) and Charles Robb (Virginia) came together with Florida Senator Lawton Chiles and congressional representatives Richard Gephardt (Missouri), Sam Nunn (Georgia), and James R. Jones (Oklahoma) to launch the DLC in February 1985. The DLC’s coterie of conservative and centrist politicians, who hailed overwhelmingly from citadels of white discontent in the Sunbelt and Midwest, sought to wrest the party away from its alleged liberal dominance.

In terms of structural changes, they targeted the 1968 reforms implemented to the Democratic Party’s nomination process establishing interest group-based organization. By 1982 the Democratic National Committee (DNC) recognized seven different intraparty caucuses modeled on specific demographics, including “women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, liberals and business/professionals.” The DLC founders wanted to abandon this pluralistic party base, elevate the power of national elected officials, and pursue stronger ties with wealthy corporate donors.

To diagnose the precise causes behind the Democrats’ catastrophic loss of every state in the Union to Ronald Reagan in 1984, with the exception of Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, the DNC sponsored several research surveys, including one that has been estimated, at that time, to be the most expensive study commissioned in its history. Chair Paul Kirk paid survey researchers Milton Kotler and Nelson Rosenbaum a quarter of a million dollars to conduct a massive survey of 5,000 voters. In focus groups, whites from the south and northern ethnic enclaves described the Democratic Party as the “give away party, giving white tax money to blacks and poor people.” As political scientist Robert Smith has argued, the explicit racist content of Kotler and Rosenbaum’s report proved so embarrassing to Kirk that he suppressed its release and had nearly all of the existing copies destroyed. Nevertheless, the findings made their way into DLC party policy as New Democrat fellow travelers like Thomas and Mary Edsall and Harry McPherson made similar, if more carefully veiled, arguments. McPherson, a former member of the Johnson administration, published a November 1988 op-ed essay in TheNew York Timesentitled simply “How Race Destroyed the Democrat’s Coalition.”

At the core of this anger about the shift in the Democratic Party was not just “race” as an abstraction, which too often functioned as a polite euphemism, but rather black people themselves. Another DNC commissioned study by Stanley Greenberg, who subsequently became a pollster for Clinton in 1992, cited data from Macomb County, a suburb of Detroit, to make this point even more explicitly. “These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics,” explained Greenberg. “Blacks constitute the explanation for their [white defectors] vulnerability and or almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives, not being black is what constitutes being middle class, not being black is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live.”

Bolstered with polling data and the crisis of the Reagan landslide, the New Democrats searched for ways to aggressively distance themselves from “blacks” and to entice resentful white swing voters back into the fold. To do this, the New Democrats appropriated hot button issues from the Republican Party, later deemed “dog whistle politics,” that invoked the specter of blackness without directly naming it. While the turn from welfare to work and personal responsibility is often discussed in this respect, equally important is the extensive role played by Bill Clinton and his allies in vastly expanding carceral policies, including the War on Drugs, the federal death penalty, and national funding for policing and prisons in the years after the Reagan and Bush presidencies.

Associated with the DLC’s early stirrings, Bill Clinton did not become integrally involved until after Michael Dukakis’s presidential defeat in 1988. In a notorious ad campaign that drew on enduring racist imagery, George H. W. Bush won the election by blaming the Massachusetts governor for the brutal rape of a white woman by Willie Horton, a black prisoner participating in a prison furlough program. Bush advisor Lee Atwater created a vicious media blitz that featured a voice-over description of the assault paired with a menacing black and white mugshot of Horton. After contrasting Dukakis’s opposition to the death penalty with Bush’s ardent support for it, the television spot closed with the words “Weekend Prison Passes—Dukakis on Crime.” Atwater’s race-baiting appeal proved wildly successful. As legal scholar Jonathan Simon has argued, George H. W. Bush’s election “marked the emergence, for the first time, of the war on crime as the primary basis for choosing a president.”

Chastened by Dukakis’s defeat, Bill Clinton emerged as the southern golden boy of the New Democrats by 1990. While serving as governor of Arkansas, he became the DLC’s first chair outside the beltway. Clinton traveled nonstop and worked tirelessly to build a national infrastructure that encompassed over two-dozen state level chapters. Two years later, his rousing speech at the DLC’s national conference in Cleveland, Ohio earned him a direct line to the nomination. New Democrat stalwart Sam Nunn’s early endorsement played a key role, as did that of lesser known members of the DLC fold, among them African American Representatives John Lewis (GA), Mike Espy (MI), William Jefferson (LA), and Floyd Flake (NY). In a depressingly familiar pattern from the Reagan administration, the support of an elite sector of the black political class helped to legitimize hard-line anti-crime policies that proved devastating for low-income populations of color.

Prior to his entrée onto the national stage, Clinton’s governorship of Arkansas demonstrated how embracing the death penalty paved the Democrats’ road back to power. After a comparatively liberal first term in which he granted over 70 separate sentencing commutations, Clinton radically reversed his earlier stance after his Republican opponent won largely by smearing him in the eyes of the electorate as considerate of criminals. Upon returning to the governor’s mansion in 1982, Clinton parsed out a meager seven additional commutations over a ten-year span, and none for the death penalty. Indeed, in 1992 amid massive press coverage, Bill flew back to Arkansas days before the New Hampshire primaryto preside over the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a black man convicted of killing a white police officer. Rector had shot himself through the temple, forcing surgeons to remove over three inches of the frontal lobe of his brain. He was so cognitively impacted as a result of the surgery that he set aside the dessert from his last meal to eat after his lethal injection. Rickey even told a reporter that he planned to vote for Bill Clinton in the fall.

As the governor of a southern state, Clinton’s execution of Rector was a powerful symbolic act that refuted incumbent President George Bush Sr.’s attempt to cast Bill Clinton and his running mate Al Gore as soft on crime. In the words of political kingmaker David Garth, Clinton “had someone put to death who had only part of a brain. You can’t find them any tougher than that.” Far from gratuitous cruelty, Rector’s execution and the virulent and racially discriminatory polices that followed it were the ultimate expression that the post-civil rights Democratic Party had repudiated its marginal commitment not only to black equality, but to black life itself. Between 1994 and 1999, nearly two-thirds of the people sentenced to the federal death penalty were black—a rate nearly seven times that of their representation in the American population.

Today, the death penalty haunts the edges of American politics, but at the height of the country’s rush to mass incarcerate, executions became central to the rightward drift of the Democratic Party. Once in office, Bill Clinton made 60 new crimes eligible for the death penalty and fellow Democrats bragged about their specific additions to the list. Joe Biden mused “someone asleep for the last 20 years might wake up to think that Republicans were represented by Abbie Hoffman” and the Democrats by J. Edgar Hoover.

As president, Bill Clinton and his allies embarked on a draconian punishment campaign to outflank the Republicans. “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say that I’m soft on crime,” he bragged. Roughly a year and a half after the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion—the largest civil disturbance in U.S. history in which demonstrators took to the streets for six straight days to protest the acquittal of the officers involved in the Rodney King beating—Clinton passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. At its core, this legislation was a federal “three strikes” bill that established a $30.2 billion Crime Trust Fund to allocate monies for state and municipal police and prison expansion. Like its predecessors, starting with Johnson’s Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, the federal government provided funding to accelerate punitive policies at all levels of governance. Specific provisions included monies for placing 100,000 new police on the streets, the expansion of death penalty eligible crimes, lifetime imprisonment for people who committed a third violent federal felony offense with two prior state or federal felony convictions, gang “enhancements” in sentencing for federal defendants, allowing children as young as 13 to be prosecuted as adults in special cases, and the Violence Against Women Act.

Hillary strongly supported this legislation and stood resolutely behind her husband’s punishment campaign. “We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Hillary declared in 1994. “The ‘three strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets,” she added. Elsewhere, she remarked, “We will finally be able to say, loudly and clearly, that for repeat, violent, criminal offenders: three strikes and you’re out.”

 

[New Username]

#fukkhilaryclinton2016

I wish more black people would wake up and see Hilary is just another agent. She is not someone that's "for the people" she always had her own agenda and that agenda invovles the eradication of minorities.

I'm tired of hearing people say "Bill Clinton was our first black president" or " Hilary is my girl ." I really dislike how easily charmed our people are by the pseudo-helping hand of non-AA. You still have to be wary of AAs too, not all AAs believe in black unity and prosperity.

We know Donald Trump is a racist. So in the black community he is easily written off, but Hilary? People aren't aware of her secret dealings, she use feminism and war on drugs/terror as buzzwords to stay relevant, but the general public don't know what she's trying to say when she say those words.

For Hilary, feminism is the progression of white women. She want White women to "feel" equal to white men. Black women and other women believe this equality is meant for them....

Hilary is one of the worst Presidential Candiates. She's untrustworthy and has snake tendencies, just like her husband.

 

[ShaneTheRogue]

Link to the original article? I want to share this online.

edit: Nevermind see it.

 

[MajorVitaman]

The Clinton's always been on that fukk shyt
to both of em

 

[lightskin jermaine]

good read

 

[heart]

#fukkhilaryclinton2016

I wish more black people would wake up and see Hilary is just another agent. She is not someone that's "for the people" she always had her own agenda and that agenda invovles the eradication of minorities.

I'm tired of hearing people say "Bill Clinton was our first black president" or " Hilary is my girl ." I really dislike how easily charmed our people are by the pseudo-helping hand of non-AA. You still have to be wary of AAs too, not all AAs believe in black unity and prosperity.

We know Donald Trump is a racist. So in the black community he is easily written off, but Hilary? People aren't aware of her secret dealings, she use feminism and war on drugs/terror as buzzwords to stay relevant, but the general public don't know what she's trying to say when she say those words.

For Hilary, feminism is the progression of white women. She want White women to "feel" equal to white men. Black women and other women believe this equality is meant for them....

Hilary is one of the worst Presidential Candiates. She's untrustworthy and has snake tendencies, just like her husband.

Let me first say for the most part I AGREE with everything you said.

But I will say this, you said you're tired of black people cosigning the Clintons and thinking they are really for us. My thing is none of them ain't about shyt. Politicians and trustworthiness are not intertwined. When it comes to American politics it's picking the less of the evils. Bernie is tugging on young people's heartstrings making all of these damn promises that people are gobbling up and he thinks walking around with killer mike will earn him the black vote which he is struggling with right now. I'm just tired of the manipulation and exploits that are used upon blacks in this country.

8 years ago Hilary didn't take obama seriously and thought she HAD the black vote. She actually had more votes but the super delegates went to him. She'll do and say ANYTHING to get in office but in my opinion they ALL will on both sides...

 

[New Username]

Don't forget, Hilary supported Goldwater presidential campaign. He was against Civil rights, so you know he was on his wave. Hilary supported this man, she try to spin that and say she was a "young" politician at the time.

when blacks were being hosed and church's bombed she still felt the need to support a man that was against civil rights

 

[No_bammer_weed]

Framing the article with 'when black lives didnt matter' is the kind of lazy, one-dimensional sensationalism, and fact aversive bias I would expect from conservatives.

The rate of violence and homicide in urban cities was staggering during the late 80s-90s. We agonize greatly over "Chiraq" and their few hundred homicide average per year, but in the 90s the city averaged double that. NYC averages a couple hundred homicides per year currently, but in the 90s they were averaging over two thousand!

I can tell you as a very young child living in NYC, I vividly remember strategies like sleeping on the floor every night in order to stay of the line of fire from stray bullets that often would wizz around like fireflies at night. Things became so unlivable we eventually had to break to Cali and live with family until we got on our feet.

So in this environment what do you say to the families of those being terrorized by a crack epidemic, and forced to live everyday in conditions that were deteriorating to that resembling third world? What about those lives?

Now of course longitudinally the drug war policies that may have been defendable in the immediate are now indefensible civil rights issues now. Clinton has addressed this, and spoken out against the drug laws her husband helped sign into legislation. The country is definitely moving away from 'lock em up n throw away the key' policy, and correctly understands the justice and liberty implications at stake.

But what cant be ignored is the fact that black people experienced their best economic growth under the Clinton era. By a substantial degree. Much of this was lost in the financial collapse of '08.

A more complete rendering of the Clinton admin with respect to black folks would be nice.

 

[New Username]

Let me first say for the most part I AGREE with everything you said.

But I will say this, you said you're tired of black people cosigning the Clintons and thinking they are really for us. My thing is none of them ain't about shyt. Politicians and trustworthiness are not intertwined. When it comes to American politics it's picking the less of the evils. Bernie is tugging on young people's heartstrings making all of these damn promises that is people are gobbling up. I'm just tired of the manipulation and exploits that are used upon blacks in this country.

8 years ago Hilary didn't take obama seriously and thought she HAD the black vote. She actually had more votes but the super delegates went to him. She'll do and say ANYTHING to get in office but in my opinion they ALL will on both sides...

They all know the black vote means something. Obama was the young voters favorite amongst the Presidential candidates. She want that young vote which Sanders seem to have right now. On paper, Sanders seems like the right choice. We said the same thing about Obama, but did better than they expected. He could have done more for us, but we know how that goes.

You're absolutely right. Hilary been trying to whip and nae nae her way into the hearts of black people.

It says a lot about her and a lot about ourselves. She think she can tippity tap her way through these primaries and think we're going to tap dance with her.

Sadly, some of us already picked up our tap shoes.

 

[heart]

Framing the article with 'when black lives didnt matter' is the kind of lazy, one-dimensional sensationalism, and fact aversive bias I would expect from conservatives.

The rate of violence and homicide in urban cities was staggering during the late 80s-90s. We agonize greatly over "Chiraq" and their few hundred homicide average per year, but in the 90s the city averaging double that. NYC averages a couple hundred homicides per year, in the 90s they were averaging over two thousand!

I can tell you as a very young child living in NYC, I vividly remember strategies like sleeping on the floor every night in order to stay of the line of fire from stray bullets that often would wizz around like fireflies at night. Things became so unlivable we eventually had to break to Cali and live with family until we got on our feet.

So in this environment what do you say to the families of those being terrorized by a crack epidemic, and forced to live everyday in conditions that were deteriorating to that resembling third world? What about those lives?

Now of course longitudinally the drug war policies that may have been defendable in the immediate are now indefensible civil rights issues now. Clinton has addressed this, and spoken out against the drug laws her husband helped sign into legislation. The country is definitely moving away from 'lock em up n throw away the key' policy, and correctly understand the justice and liberty implications at stake.

But what cant be ignored is the fact that black people experienced their best economic growth under the Clinton era. By a substantial degree. Much of this was lost in the financial collapse of '08.

A more complete rendering of the Clinton admin with respect to black folks would be nice.

YES, I definitely agree with this as well. It seems a lot of people are making her PE#1 but to be fair I do see her apologizing for different things that has happened in the past. I'm an independent living in texas so my vote is up for grab, it's clear a lot of people hate the Clintons which can be justifiable BUT like I said you can pretty much find dirt on all of them.

 

[No1]

Framing the article with 'when black lives didnt matter' is the kind of lazy, one-dimensional sensationalism, and fact aversive bias I would expect from conservatives.

The rate of violence and homicide in urban cities was staggering during the late 80s-90s. We agonize greatly over "Chiraq" and their few hundred homicide average per year, but in the 90s the city averaged double that. NYC averages a couple hundred homicides per year currently, but in the 90s they were averaging over two thousand!

I can tell you as a very young child living in NYC, I vividly remember strategies like sleeping on the floor every night in order to stay of the line of fire from stray bullets that often would wizz around like fireflies at night. Things became so unlivable we eventually had to break to Cali and live with family until we got on our feet.

So in this environment what do you say to the families of those being terrorized by a crack epidemic, and forced to live everyday in conditions that were deteriorating to that resembling third world? What about those lives?

Now of course longitudinally the drug war policies that may have been defendable in the immediate are now indefensible civil rights issues now. Clinton has addressed this, and spoken out against the drug laws her husband helped sign into legislation. The country is definitely moving away from 'lock em up n throw away the key' policy, and correctly understands the justice and liberty implications at stake.

But what cant be ignored is the fact that black people experienced their best economic growth under the Clinton era. By a substantial degree. Much of this was lost in the financial collapse of '08.

A more complete rendering of the Clinton admin with respect to black folks would be nice.

Your post is misguided, diversionary and factually inaccurate. This is the Clinton legacy. Anyone who majored in a social science at any point from 2007 to the present should know this by now.

An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for black unemployment rates. The truth is more troubling. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn’t have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate.

Why is this not common knowledge? Because government statistics like poverty and unemployment rates do not include incarcerated people. As Harvard sociologist Bruce Western explains: “Much of the optimism about declines in racial inequality and the power of the US model of economic growth is misplaced once we account for the invisible poor, behind the walls of America’s prisons and jails.” When Clinton left office in 2001, the true jobless rate for young, non-college-educated black men (including those behind bars) was 42 percent. This figure was never reported. Instead, the media claimed that unemployment rates for African Americans had fallen to record lows, neglecting to mention that this miracle was possible only because incarceration rates were now at record highs. Young black men weren’t looking for work at high rates during the Clinton era because they were now behind bars—out of sight, out of mind, and no longer counted in poverty and unemployment statistics.

To make matters worse, the federal safety net for poor families was torn to shreds by the Clinton administration in its effort to “end welfare as we know it.” In his 1996 State of the Union address, given during his re-election campaign, Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and immediately sought to prove it by dismantling the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). The welfare-reform legislation that he signed—which Hillary Clinton ardently supported then and characterized as a success as recently as 2008—replaced the federal safety net with a block grant to the states, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, added work requirements, barred undocumented immigrants from licensed professions, and slashed overall public welfare funding by $54 billion (some was later restored).

Experts and pundits disagree about the true impact of welfare reform, but one thing seems clear: Extreme poverty doubled to 1.5 million in the decade and a half after the law was passed. What is extreme poverty? US households are considered to be in extreme poverty if they are surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person per day in any given month. We tend to think of extreme poverty existing in Third World countries, but here in the United States, shocking numbers of people are struggling to survive on less money per month than many families spend in one evening dining out. Currently, the United States, the richest nation on the planet, has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the developed world.

Despite claims that radical changes in crime and welfare policy were driven by a desire to end big government and save taxpayer dollars, the reality is that the Clinton administration didn’t reduce the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor; it changed what the funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine. By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps. During Clinton’s tenure, funding for public housing was slashed by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”

Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation. The Clinton administration eliminated Pell grants for prisoners seeking higher education to prepare for their release, supported laws denying federal financial aid to students with drug convictions, and signed legislation imposing a lifetime ban on welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense—an exceptionally harsh provision given the racially biased drug war that was raging in inner cities.

Perhaps most alarming, Clinton also made it easier for public-housing agencies to deny shelter to anyone with any sort of criminal history (even an arrest without conviction) and championed the “one strike and you’re out” initiative, which meant that families could be evicted from public housing because one member (or a guest) had committed even a minor offense. People released from prison with no money, no job, and nowhere to go could no longer return home to their loved ones living in federally assisted housing without placing the entire family at risk of eviction. Purging “the criminal element” from public housing played well on the evening news, but no provisions were made for people and families as they were forced out on the street. By the end of Clinton’s presidency, more than half of working-age African-American men in many large urban areas were saddled with criminal records and subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and basic public benefits—relegated to a permanent second-class status eerily reminiscent of Jim Crow.

It is difficult to overstate the damage that’s been done. Generations have been lost to the prison system; countless families have been torn apart or rendered homeless; and a school-to-prison pipeline has been born that shuttles young people from their decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.

 

[No_bammer_weed]

@Abogado

As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn’t have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate. When Clinton left office in 2001, the true jobless rate for young, non-college-educated black men (including those behind bars) was 42 percent.

This is awfully selective criteria, no? Was there a time in modern America where being an uneducated, young black male with a criminal record was advantageous and correlated with success?

Of course I appreciate the intersectional nature with the war on drugs, and how it operated with injustice against black males. Outside of the right wing this is almost universally recognized. But what you conveniently glossed over is the hell black families and children were forced to exist in neighborhoods that averaged thousands of homicides per year, and off the charts violence. You're selectively cutting out the fundamental component that inspired the war on drugs and crime in order to further your agenda.

Using the same economic metrics on employment, wealth creation, and income growth that was used for other admins, blacks as a collective experienced their best years under the Clintons. I can appreciate a deeper analysis of this fact, but I cant accept ignoring it or offering counterfactuals.

 

[Prominence0]

Nice try CAC poster.

So show us how Bush did 9/11!

 

[Poitier]

But what cant be ignored is the fact that black people experienced their best economic growth under the Clinton era. By a substantial degree. Much of this was lost in the financial collapse of '08.