Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
It's time to bury the ridiculous and insulting notion that the former president is anything but white.
Feb 26, 2001 | 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?
In barbershops, churches, diners and taverns, along the sidelines at sporting events, at PTA meetings and during water-cooler rap sessions, I was repeatedly relieved to discover that I wasn't the only person who read Morrison's essay and wondered, what black men? I walk around all day in a black man's skin and rarely in the course of my travels do I trip over any of the "tropes" Morrison attributes to men like me. Furthermore, the black men with whom I associate have not, under any circumstances, engaged in the nonsensical "murmurings" that Morrison describes. Linking Clinton's "metaphorical" frisking to our own experiences -- and those of our fathers and grandfathers -- would be like spitting in the faces of our ancestors, an act of blasphemy most of us would take care to avoid.
In the midst of my dismay I considered the damaging likelihood of white Americans responding as they often have in such situations -- that is, mistaking Morrison's comments as the viewpoint of all black Americans. The danger seemed real given the alacrity with which pundits pounced upon her article. Morrison wasn't the only prominent liberal intellectual to offer a dubious tribute to Clinton in that particular magazine, but her comments were the ones most often dragged through the mud and subjected to the ridicule that, I must say, they deserved. Even so, the ensuing hubbub was mercifully short-lived. Thus, while Morrison's arguments in favor of Clinton's "blackness" were ill-considered indeed, they can hardly be blamed for the idea's persistence.
Eleven months after Morrison's essay appeared, Clinton himself resurrected the concept. He told attendees at the Congressional Black Caucus's annual awards dinner that he recently had met with comedian Chris Tucker, who was developing a film project about the nation's first black president. "I didn't have the heart to tell him that I've already taken the position," Clinton said. News reports noted that audience members, including various black congressmen, "cracked up."
I hope they were laughing to keep from crying. As public officials with agendas to pursue and constituents to placate, maybe they had good reason to soothe the presidential ego. Perhaps Paul Laurence Dunbar was thinking of black officeholders when he fashioned these lines in "We Wear the Mask": "This debt we pay to human guile;/With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,/And mouth with myriad subtleties."
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