Here’s Why Black People Should Think Twice Before Voting For Hillary Clinton

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton has the black vote in her hands.

Eighty per­cent of black Democratic vot­ers intend­ed to cast their bal­lots for the 2016 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in August 2015 — and not much has changed since then. But with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) becom­ing a seri­ous oppo­nent for Clinton in the race to the Democratic nom­i­na­tion, many African-Americans are ask­ing if the for­mer Secretary of State real­ly deserves the black vote. Author and legal schol­ar Michelle Alexander doesn’t think so. “What have the Clintons done to earn such devo­tion? Did they take extreme polit­i­cal risks to defend the rights of African Americans?” the author of The New Jim Crow asks in a new essay for The Nation. “Did they coura­geous­ly stand up to right-wing dem­a­goguery about black com­mu­ni­ties? Did they help ush­er in a new era of hope and pros­per­i­ty for neigh­bor­hoods dev­as­tat­ed by dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, glob­al­iza­tion, and the dis­ap­pear­ance of work?”

Alexander skill­ful­ly pos­es these ques­tions before tak­ing a deep dive into Clinton’s past.

African-American vot­ers con­sis­tent­ly tend to sup­port Democrats, but they also arelike­ly to be old­er. Many black vot­ers are less famil­iar with Sanders, who attracts a lot of young vot­ers, and his val­ues. Clinton also totes cov­et­ed endorse­ments fromfor­mer Attorney General Eric Holder, Trayvon Martin’s moth­er Sybrina Fulton, activist groups, unions and black cler­gy mem­bers. It doesn’t hurt that black peo­ple dote on President Bill Clinton’s time in office either.

What a lot of black vot­ers aren’t aware of, how­ev­er, is how the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of his pres­i­den­cy helped mass incar­cer­a­tion become more effi­cient with the “three strikes” imple­men­ta­tion, a pro­vi­sion that imposed life sen­tences on any­one con­vict­ed of a vio­lent felony after two or more pri­ors. Former President Clinton also signed into law the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which gut­ted wel­fare. He repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1996 — a Depression-era bank­ing law that kept dif­fer­ent kinds of bank­ing insti­tu­tions sep­a­rate — which, arguably, led to the 2008 hous­ing cri­sis and dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affect­ed black homeowners.

Alexander, who touched on mass incar­cer­a­tion and wel­fare in her piece, says Clinton must be judged by her hus­band’s record on this because, in a way, it’s her his­to­ry too.

Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the poli­cies her hus­band cham­pi­oned years ago. But Hillary wasn’t pick­ing out chi­na while she was first lady. She brave­ly broke the mold and rede­fined that job in ways no woman ever had before. She not only cam­paigned for Bill; she also wield­ed pow­er and sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence once he was elect­ed, lob­by­ing for leg­is­la­tion and oth­er mea­sures. That record, and her state­ments from that era, should be scru­ti­nized. In her sup­port for the 1994 crime bill, for exam­ple, she used racial­ly cod­ed rhetoric to cast black chil­dren as ani­mals. “They are not just gangs of kids any­more,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-preda­tors.’ No con­science, no empa­thy. We can talk about why they end­ed up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

Clinton, who endorsed her husband’s crime poli­cies as recent­ly as 2012, hasdis­tanced her­self from the ide­ol­o­gy, but her Ready for Hillary PAC did receive$133,246 from prison lob­by­ists. See more here:  http://​www​.huff​in​g​ton​post​.com/​e​n​t​r​y​/​h​i​l​l​a​r​y​-​c​l​i​n​t​o​n​-​b​l​a​c​k​-​v​o​t​e​r​s​_​u​s​_​5​6​b​a​7​9​7​f​e​4​b​0​8​f​f​a​c​1​2​3​2​8f0