Clinton’s barefaced racism

In previous editorials this election year, we’ve predicted that in an U.S. election featuring a Black man as a viable candidate for president, the racism of both bourgeois parties would increasingly expose itself—requiring a response and defense of Sen. Barack Obama against racist attacks, despite his politics. Recent remarks—by no less than his Democratic opponent—seem to confirm that assessment.

In a May 6 interview with USA Today—one of the most widespread newspapers in the country—presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said: “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” citing a Associated Press article that, according to her, “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.” She continued to explain, “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that.”

Said a day after she faced defeat in the North Carolina primary and a narrow, two-point-margin victory in Indiana, Clinton’s words hearken back to the “good old days” of the Democratic Party’s “Southern strategy.” That strategy attempted to appeal to white voters on the most racist terms, saying in essence that whites would not vote even for a candidate favoring the Black population, let alone, today, a Black candidate. Clinton even took it a step farther when she differentiated the whites who would vote for her as the “hard-working Americans.”

Stumping for Hillary Clinton in Clarksburg, W.Va., on May 1, former President Bill Clinton expressed similar sentiments, while attempting to downplay the racism in them: “The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules. In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.” (Associated Press, May 2)

The very fact that Obama did so well in these two Southern states, mainly among workers in the cities, shows the fallacy of the Clintons’ racist arguments.

It’s not surprising that the corporate media have expressed few denunciations of these false statements compared to the amount of criticism that followed Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s valid comments on race and justice. As part and parcel of the capitalist system, the corporate media message is always the same—let the ruling class whip up racism; it’s a favored tactic to keep the working class divided. But let the masses call that racism out, and they must be silenced.

Every election year, capitalist-party candidates try to come across as “feeling the pain” of working people and as somehow authorized to speak for them. Once they’re elected into office, though, their actions rarely reflect the rhetoric. Hillary Clinton should know this best. Her spouse, Bill Clinton, signed the so-called “welfare reform” bill that cut off public assistance for some 5 million people—mostly children and their mothers. Those classified as either Black or white were affected in almost equal numbers. The result was a huge increase in child poverty. His administration also ushered in the North American Free Trade Agreement, which brought reduced wages and sweatshop conditions to workers throughout North America.

The only time the message of real working people is brought to light in the corporate media, or reflected in bourgeois politics, is when the people themselves put up a struggle that can’t be ignored. In a time of economic crisis affecting all workers, it’s all the more reason to reject racism and all attempts to divide the working class—because it takes the unity of all workers to effectively and victoriously fight the system that oppresses us.