A rchive Date
[ 03-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://slate.msn.com/id/2093295/
Dean on 'Educating White Folks'
He's cluelessly pre-Clinton on race.
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Thursday, Jan. 1, 2004, at 8:50 PM PT
Howard Dean seems to have said this. That'll bring in those Southern pickup guys! They love being singled out for 'education'! ... Yes, Dean was apparently pandering to Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson. But that's hardly an excuse.
Try to imagine Bill Clinton uttering the same sentence. It's pretty difficult. For one thing, Clinton was too smart a politician. And one of Clinton's major (and heavily-advertised) virtues was his occasional willingness to speak unpleasant truths to both whites and blacks. Here's Clinton talking at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York a few days after the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles:
Can we live in a country where too many people think that violence has a black face, that is, what is consistent either with their experiences or with what they see on the news or the fact that they don't have any friends of other races. And where too many black people know that violence too often has a black face because it is their children who are shot, their schools which are savaged, their new neighborhoods which are war zones and they believe no one will make their streets safe simply because they are black. [Emphasis added.]
I would say Clinton was not merely "educating white folks" in this passage - it's from a speech in which he'd just responded to the King riots by saying "we must break the culture of poverty and dependence" and nobody thought he was talking only or even mainly about a culture of "white folks."
Does Dean really believe you can talk honestly about race--including "hiring practices" - without talking about that culture (even though it enmeshes only a minority of African-Americans, and even though, thanks in part to the welfare reform Clinton signed, it's rapidly changing for the better)? I'm sure there are better Clinton examples I don't have handy.
Update:
There are--the best-known being Clinton's November, 1993 Memphis speech to black church leaders in which he speculated about what Martin Luther King would say if he "were to reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last 25 years."
"But," he would say, "I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see 13-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down 9-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see people destroy their own lives with drugs and build drug fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do."
"I fought for freedom," he would say, "but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to impregnate each other with babies and then abandon them, nor for the freedom of adult fathers of children to walk away from the children they created and abandon them, as if they didn't amount to anything."
More recently, here's hip-hopper Missy Elliott, trying to do what Dr. Dean says is unnecessary, in the song "Wake Up" on her most recent album:
If you dont gotta gun (its alright)
If yah makin legal money, (its alright)
If you gotta keep yah clothes on, (its alright)
You aint gotta [a cellular] phone, (its alright)
And yah wheels dont spin, (its alright)
And you gotta wear them jeans again, (its alright)
Yeah if you tried oh well, (its alright)
Now why would Elliott feel a need to say this - say that "makin legal money" is allright!--if "dealing with race" entirely involved educating white folks? (I know most rap fans are white. But the people glorified in hip-hop for not "makin legal money" are mainly black. Elliott pretty clearly isn't worried here about suburban white hip-hop fans. One subtle clue: The phrase "Black wake up" turns up in the second verse. )
Is there really nothing in "dealing with race" that involves changing African-American attitudes along with white attitudes? Dean's comment would be more depressing if weren't also the sort of cluelessly pre-Clinton utterance that virtually guarantees he will never be president. [Thanks to reader D.M. for the Memphis cite.] 2:32 A.M.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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