Hillary Clinton & Black Voters

Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign was indeed responsible for circulating some of the earliest rumors questioning Barack Obama's citizenship. Her role in the Obama administration is now a major selling point in her campaign-one that James Rucker of this Salon article (How Can Black People Trust Hillary Clinton After 2008, published on February 25, 2016) claims she is exploiting in order to appeal with black voters. Whenever xenophobic statements about Obama resurface, either ones that she made herself during the 2008 primaries or simply stood by, detractors are quick to use them to portray Clinton as a hypocrite or an opportunist. The way she currently portrays herself as being a candidate who will carry on Obama's legacy is indeed undermined by some of these past statements, however, there is much more to consider when it comes to the impact of these statements on Clinton's popularity with the black community.

One of the most questionable assumptions that the author makes is that Clinton's past statements criticizing Obama will turn off black voters because of "Black folks' desire to defend the president," but this ignores the decades long relationship that the Clintons have cultivated with the black community. While the color of Obama's skin and Sanders' experiences with the civil rights movement during his youth may make them seem like ideal candidates for black voters to rally around, the Clintons have strong ties to the African American community, with writer Toni Morrison even famously referring to Bill Clinton as the "first black president." Hillary Clinton has dedicated support from the black community that rivals Obama's, and it is unlikely that years-old statements criticizing him on the campaign trail would do much to alienate black voters.

While the statements made by Clinton and her campaign quoted in the article are certainly xenophobic and offensive, they do not contain anything that directly attacks qualities of the majority of the African-American community. Obama's experience as a black man in America is a unique one, not only because his mother was white, but also because his father was from Kenya. The racially-charged attacks on Obama that have permeated the mainstream since his first campaign have been mostly reactions to his perceived "foreignness," rather than his identity as a black American. If Clinton had made statements denigrating Obama for qualities inherent to the African Americans who have been in this country for generations, she would no doubt lose a great deal of support from the black community and those sympathetic to them, but these criticisms against Obama question his nationality and his religion. The most prominent of these fear-mongering tactics used against Obama employ stereotypes that are not often levied against the black community at large: he is accused of being a Muslim (the fact that this is even considered a "smear" is inherently Islamophobic) or supporting terrorism. While such baseless criticisms of Obama coming from Clinton's camp could obviously cause her to lose credibility with voters, there is no reason to believe they would turn off black voters any more than they would voters of any other race.