Clinton to NAACP: "I think I was the first black president"

[Gary Ashwill]

I remembered Morrison's piece as "gushing" too, but if you look at the
relevant passage it's a little more complicated than that---more about how
representations of Clinton display (racist) "tropes of blackness," how he's
criminalized/sexualized, etc. in the same way that black men are.  Now it's
mutated into something positive for Bill to gloat about, which doesn't seem
to be what Morrison or Chris Rock had in mind.

By the way, note that Morrison attributes the notion to unnamed "black men"
during Whitewater, so maybe it was Chris Rock's idea in the first place.

Gary Ashwill 

This is the passage:

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the
middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white
skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any
actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime.
After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent
household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing,
McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all
the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear,
when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the
focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and
bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?
The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how
much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of
the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will
be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe
sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e.,
assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."

on 3/5/01 10:18 AM, jf noonan at jfn1 at msc.com wrote:


> On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Chris Kromm wrote:
> 
>> But didn't Toni Morrison write a gushing piece (in The
>> Nation? elsewhere?) claiming Bill was our first black prez
>> -- without humor? It's an ongoing theme...
> 
> Yes, in the _New Yorker_ and I imagine that is what started
> Chris Rock's riff...
> 
> 
> Toni Morrison
> 
> Clinton as the first black president
> 
> New Yorker, October 1998
> 
> http://wings.buffalo.edu/philosophy/faculty/smith/clinton/morrison.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Joseph Noonan
> Houston, TX
> jfn1 at msc.com
> 
> 
> Computers hate being anthropomorphized.
> 
>