BUBBA GOES TO HARLEM
#496 Column Written 2/13/2001

News Item: Former U.S. President, Bill Clinton, stung by criticism stemming from the almost $600,000 a year costs of his offices in mid-town Manhattan, has sought offices in the city's uptown Harlem district, where costs are expected to be half the mid-town rate.

Not since the slim, ascetic Muslim Minister, Malcolm X, strolled Harlem streets, has the chocolate colony seen such excitement. This time, an ex-president, one both loathed and loved, comes to Harlem to establish his base of operations, and by so doing, has demonstrated the twin, contradictory sides of his political persona.

Former president Clinton has, in his long 8 years at the helm of the U.S. Ship of State, presided over an explosion in the crippling prison industrial complex, the expansion of the U.S. death penalty, and the related contraction of the constitutional right to habeas corpus, all of which have had a demonstratively injurious effect on America's Black population. In order to obtain his office, he traded in Black death, by overseeing the state murder of brain-damaged death row captive, Ricky Ray Rector; in order to retain his office, he leapt to betray the Black bourgeoisie, by the abandonment of high justice dept. candidate, law professor, Lani Guinier, and former Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders.

That said, Clinton remains a genuinely beloved figure in Black America, so much so that when he was attacked by his political adversaries on the right, Blacks felt almost as if they were attacked, and were, by far, the most vigorous in his defense among American constituencies. America's perhaps greatest living writer, Toni Morrison, went just a tad beyond hyperbole when she affectionately dubbed the Arkansan "America's first Black president."

Beyond his almost legendary political skills, there must be other reasons for this weird political courtship between African-Americans and Bill Clinton. It's not his much-vaunted upbringing in poverty, for despite the conventional wisdom, several U.S. presidents (for example, Garfield, Andrew Johnson, and Andrew Jackson) had an impoverished youth.

It seems like it's not so much Clinton, the man, as it is Clinton, the man who spent his youth on the periphery of the Civil Rights Movement and adulthood in the proximity of the largest generation of Black professionals in U.S. history.

It is therefore a case of interaction, and as Clinton courted the black bourgies, he studiously ignored the wretched suffering, imprisonment, scapegoating, and cop repression against the black poor in the urban centers.

And the black bourgeoisie, following their own class interests, joined him in either ignoring or damning the so-called "black underclass." For what else was that so-called Welfare Reform but more war on the poor?

Now, as the nation's former chief executive takes up digs in Harlem, the bourgies once again preen at their new neighbor, while for the poor, it just means more gentrification, and therefore a harder struggle to afford rapidly rising rents.

It's about time millions of African-Americans learned who their real friends are.