On her way to Selma (Alabama), presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have found Jesus and a southern accent to boot. Insofar as a human being can be said to have chameleon powers, surely this can be said of her. Like me, you probably did not know that she could do a southern accident. And I am equally certain that you did not know that she had deep religious convictions. But at her speech in Selma, she found one of those old black gospel songs “I don’t feel no ways tired”; and with a southern accent she spoke one of the verses of that song.
Well, the blacks in the audience ate it up. Never mind that it was painfully obvious that she was trying to mimic a southern accent; and never mind that it is abundantly clear that the words of that gospel song no more resonate with her life than they do with the life of an atheist.
In some circles, this is called hypocrisy. On the one hand, there is the opaque hypocrite: someone who does not appear as a hypocrite in the eyes of others. On the other, there is the transparent hypocrite: it is painfully obvious to all that the person is being hypocritical. At her speech in Selma, only if she were clear glass could it have been more obvious that she was being hypocritical.
But it gets even worse: she was actually mocking her audience. It is thing to support a cause and to be proud of what people have done in support of that cause. It is quite another to adopt a mode of self-presentation that implies that there is no distinction between oneself and those who had suffered in support of that cause.
No matter how supportive a man might be of the anti-rape efforts of women, nothing on the face of this earth could justify his dressing like a woman in delivering a speech before an audience of women who have supported the anti-rape cause. Again, it would never have occurred to gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from Hitler’s army to present themselves as Jews in terms of attire and mannerisms.
True, they say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. But there is a very thin line between imitating someone and mocking them. And Hillary Rodham Clinton crossed that line.
At this juncture, it will no doubt seem that I merely want to excoriate Hillary Rodham Clinton. But one would be wrong, as should become abundantly clear in what follows.
Now, what intrigues me in all of this is just how receptive her the audience of blacks were. You could not pay me to applaud anyone who mocked my life and the lives of those who had struggled for a just cause. Indeed, you could not even pay me to sit and listen to someone who did that. My integrity and dignity would have compelled me to leave the room.
It is indeed quite amazing to me that blacks who seem to have trouble with a white who sings like Aretha Franklin have no trouble at all with a white who pretends to be cut from the mold of the black church. Why, it is has taken years for white women to feel comfortable braiding their hair. And that is just a hairstyle.
In this regard, a deeper blame attaches to the black audience. After all, Hillary Rodham Clinton was merely playing her audience and she played the audience masterfully. But my experience has been that people only do what they can think they can get away with doing.
Flirting is a case in point. At the risk of sounding sexist, every man recognizes the difference between a woman with whom he can easily flirt and one who draws a quite immutable line in the sand. And experience shows that when a woman does the latter, men will by large respect that line. I am about as playful as they come, but there is no end to the sorts of things that I will absolutely not do because I am very clear about the moral and personal boundaries, not to be crossed, of those with whom I am interacting.
So where there are boundaries, respect for those boundaries typically follows in their wake. As one can surmise, then, the real problem was not so much Hillary Rodham Clinton, but the blacks in her audience.
I mean she should not have behaved as she behaved in any case. But the fact that her audience of blacks was receptive of her behavior reveals mountains about them; and what is reveled is a very, very long ways from being flattering.
There can be no justification for anyone abiding mocking behavior in order to get attention. When I reflect upon the extraordinarily profound role that the black church played in the advancement of civil rights for blacks, it is despicable that blacks should tolerate anyone masquerading as if she or he had been a part of that struggle or had some legacy rights to that struggle.
I, myself, can only claim gratitude for what took place. It would be fulsome of me to present myself as having gone through that struggle when the only claim that I have with regard to it is that of being one of its (intended) beneficiaries.
There is a dignity and an appreciation that is appropriate to that struggle and to the role that the black church played in it that absolutely demands the respect of all others, regardless of race or ethnicity.
It is my considered viewed that in effect the behavior of the audience of blacks in the face of Clinton’s manifest hypocrisy reveals to me that the members of that audience fail to have the respect that they should towards that experience.
In visiting Yaad Vashem in Israel or Auschwitz in Poland, one thinks of oneself as walking upon sacred ground. No one, Jew or gentile gets to make a mockery of the moment while walking upon those grounds. The civil rights struggle can be understood as a sacred period in American history. No one is morally entitled to make a mockery of that history. Not even blacks are entitled to do so in order to advance their self-interests.
You will notice at this point that I have said nothing at all regarding Hillary Clinton’s message. Her actual message may very well be appropriate and to the point. Her message could be the right message. Presentation, however, reveals much about our character.
Hillary Clinton did not in her Selma address humble herself and speak of her profound admiration for those who gave in the successful attempt to reconfigure America. She did not speak of her gratitude to those who made America a better place. Nor, again, did she speak to her hope that all Americans would one day grasp the moral debt that they owe to those who gave so dearly of themselves in order to advance the cause of freedom for all. What a majestic lecture that would have been. And there is no doubt in my mind that, in giving such a lecture, she could have marvelously animated the blacks in the room—and rightly so.
But no, Hillary Rodham Clinton presented herself as one of the home-grown folks. And the blacks in the audience was more than a little besotted with her doing so.
To close, I am reminded of the ever so poignant words of Martin Luther King: “A man can’t ride your back unless it is bent”. Well, the blacks in the Selma audience roundly prostrated themselves, giving Clinton one of the political rides of her life upon their backs. Clinton should be ashamed of herself, as there are some things that a decent person does not do even if she or can get away with doing them.
But the blacks who bent their backs have shown themselves fit for none other than unqualified moral opprobrium. They modeled servility in the name of advancing their self-interests. And there is nothing on the face of this earth that is morally redeeming about that. And it doesn’t matter whether one is black or white.