Does Hillary Really Deserve the Black Vote?

On October 26, former President Bill Clinton, visited Fayetteville State University in support of his wife and presidential candidate Hilary Clinton.
The thing I have noticed is that black people love the Clintons. We have lined up for them, endorsed them, and I have a hunch that we are more eager to vote for her than ever think of voting for Donald Trump.
What I cannot understand is why. Are we so eager to prove our loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that our faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded?
I am a black woman, and I was born in 1994, so I am not entirely sure why when my community became such devotees to the Clintons, but I believe this relationship stems all the way back to 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He put on shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly, and embarrassingly simple, that many of us fell for that. At the time a popular slogan stated, “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” so perhaps we believed that Bill Clinton seemed to get us. I think that is where we went wrong.
Again, I fail to see what the Clintons have done for Black people to earn such devotion. Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they lead us into a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, gentrification, globalization or the disappearance of work? No. Neither one of them did.
The basis of my opinion comes from an enlightening article written by Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law, a civil rights advocate and writer. She wrote an article published by theNation.com entitled, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.”
When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, urban black communities across America were suffering from economic collapse. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs had vanished as factories moved overseas in search of cheaper labor. Although globalization and deindustrialization affected all workers, particularly African Americans were hit the hardest. Unemployment rates among young black men had quadrupled as the rate of industrial employment plummeted. The devastating effect increased crime rates in inner-city communities that had been dependent on factory jobs, while hopelessness, despair, and crack addiction swept neighborhoods that had once been a working-class community. Clinton succumbed to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes.
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Clinton did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs—those wars were declared before Reagan was elected and long before crack hit the streets, but he did escalate it. He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement. Bill Clinton enforced the idea of a federal “three strikes” law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces.
Once Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Human Rights Watch reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell them. In 2000, drug offenses during prison admission reached a level for Blacks of more than 26 times the level in 1983. All of the presidents since 1980 have contributed to mass incarceration, but Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative founder stated, “President Clinton’s tenure was the worst.”
Michelle Alexander wrote: “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.”
So is it unfair to discredit Secretary Clinton for polices her husband enforced? I say no and here is why, in 1994, she supported the crime bill, she goes even further to use racially-coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
Now in our present day, the Clintons express remorse over the crime bill, and Hillary Clinton claims to support criminal justice reforms to undo some of the damage that was done by her husband’s administration. However, in her campaign she continues to invoke the economy and country that her husband left behind as a legacy she plans on continuing. So what exactly did the Clinton economy look like for black Americans? Taking a hard look at this recent past is about more than just a choice between two candidates. Bill Clinton may have had the support of many African-Americans, but, today, some have deemed the Clinton-era legislative achievements a failure for black America.
https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/01/468185698/understanding-the-clintons-popularity-with-black-voters

Chart of the Week: The black-white gap in incarceration rates