Black lives don’t matter to Hillary Clinton – Black votes matter to Hillary Clinton

As a young, black, educated millennial from the South Side of Chicago, I grew up seeing politicians come into my community every election year, promising better schools, crime reduction, and jobs. After each election was over my community never saw any of those commitments fulfilled, and would rarely see the politicians who promised them. African-Americans have grown weary of the same song and dance we have seen for years. This election cycle Hillary Clinton continues the tradition of empty promises to the black community.

I like how “The New Jim Crow” author Michelle Alexander put it: “Hillary Clinton’s legacy is black impoverishment.” From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies that Bill Clinton enacted—and Hillary Clinton supported—decimated black America.

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, supported and advocated for by Hillary Clinton, proved detrimental to the African-American community with its mandatory minimum sentencing that included nonviolent, low-level drug offenders.

Clinton’s tough-on-crime posturing created an incarceration generation that mostly affected the African-American community. The law set aside billions of dollars all in the name of crime reduction, but didn’t dedicate funding for rehabilitation for things like job training and education programs that inmates could obtain while incarcerated. Without those programs, recently released individuals had virtually zero chance of economic progression, leaving many to resort to illegal activity and a recidivism rate of 75 percent after five years.

There are 2.4 million people in prison (almost one million of them are black) and 160,000 Americans serving life sentences — many, some would argue, due to the overreach of Clinton’s policies. To be fair, Hillary Clinton has apologized for her role in the mass incarceration of African-Americans, or what I call modern day slavery. Her retort is often that the African-American community wanted the crime bill. Let me correct that narrative. Jessie Jackson, arguably the most influential voice in the black community during the 90s, ardently fought against the crime bill. Others within the Congressional Black Caucus and community leaders across the country did so as well.

Clinton was a U.S. Senator for eight years. She had many opportunities to have a discussion on the ‘94 crime bill and modern day slavery, which was essentially enacted via the crime bill, but she did not. Not once did she sponsor a bill or bring this up in a committee hearing. Why? My opinion — because her Senate race wasn’t largely dependent on black votes like her White House race is. Time after time we have seen Hillary Clinton make politically expedient decisions when it comes to black America. Never have we seen her stand up for the black community simply because it was the right thing to do.

As Michelle Alexander writes, “An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for black unemployment rates.” Not true. “As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn’t have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate.”

Why is this not common knowledge? Because government statistics like poverty and unemployment rates do not include incarcerated people. As Harvard sociologist Bruce Western explains: “Much of the optimism about declines in racial inequality and the power of the U.S. model of economic growth is misplaced once we account for the invisible poor, behind the walls of America’s prisons and jails.”

When the Clintons left office in 2001, the true jobless rate for young, non-college-educated black men (including those behind bars) was 42 percent.

You may ask, why does this matter now? It matters because the Clintons are flying around the country pretending that they were the best thing that happened to the black community since MLK. That is factually incorrect and intellectually dishonest. African-Americans often ask me who they should vote for in this election and I always respond that people should research both presidential candidates and make a determination for themselves. Here’s the research you will not find anywhere else.