‘Clinton does not deserve African American votes’, Michelle Alexander says

This video from the USA says about itself:

Michelle Alexander on Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

10 February 2016

Hillary Clinton was defeated by Bernie Sanders last night in the democratic primary in New Hampshire but she’s get an even bigger political problem facing her with Black voters.

Noted scholar, professor of law at Ohio State University and author of the seminal work on America’s corrupt criminal justice “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness”, Michelle Alexander has written a scathing take-down of the former secretary of state and outlines the reasons why Black America shouldn’t send another Clinton to the White House.

Alexander wrote “Why Hillary Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote”, for The Nation, outlining how former president Bill Clinton’s crime policies decimated the African-American community.

By Alexander Reed Kelly in the USA:

Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander Explains Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

Posted on Feb 10, 2016

“It seems that we—black people—are [Hillary Clinton’s] winning card,” writes Michelle Alexander, Ohio State University law professor and author of “The New Jim Crow,” at The Nation. “And it seems we’re eager to get played. Again.”

Having suffered a 21-point defeat in the New Hampshire primary by her opponent for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and a virtual tie in the Iowa caucus, Clinton “is looking to gain momentum on the campaign trail as the primaries move […] into states like South Carolina, where large pockets of black voters can be found.”

“According to some polls,” she adds, Clinton leads Sanders—a self-described democratic socialist who promises a political revolution that will bring many of the same goals championed by Martin Luther King Jr.— “by as much as 60 percent among African Americans.”

Is this favor justified? More specifically, Alexander asks: Did the Clintons “take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? 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?”

“No,” she declares. “Quite the opposite.”

After detailing Bill Clinton’s advocacy of policies that put record numbers of blacks in prison and poverty, and disproportionately so to whites, Alexander explains:

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.”

Continue reading here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the award-winning writer who has become one of the nation’s most influential voices on cultural and political issues, particularly touching on race relations, said Wednesday that he would be voting for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The decision by Mr. Coates, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and the author of “Between the World and Me,” winner of the National Book Award, came as something of a surprise: Last month, Mr. Coates, author of a widely read 2014 Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations,” wrote two articles sharply criticizing Mr. Sanders over his opposition to reparations for slavery: here.