And throughout the week, Mistress Hillary R. Clinton showcased enough black help to build a new White House. The Lou Rawls Parade Of Stars got nothing on HRC. Her melanin rich lineup included: Oprah Winfrey, Rev. William Barber, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Congressman John Lewis, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Lenny Kravitz, Senator Corey Booker, Morgan Freeman, and the Obamas.
“It’s a hell of a show, “ declared journalist and Pennsylvania inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, one of the few negroes in the state not on stage at the DNC. “It has writers and directors and stage managers. And it’s a hell of a show. But never forget: It’s just a show.”
“For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony?”
Ogling grieving black mothers is as synonymous with Americana as shackled black bodies or the Liberty Bell. Whites gazed as enslaved black mothers watched their children auctioned from the womb. White voyeurs devoured images of Mamie Till-Mobley recounting how Mississippi terrorists butchered her son, Emmett. Hollywood reflects this Racist fetish; Viola Davis’ The Help and Halle Berry’s Monster’s Ball deliver Oscar-celebrated renditions of bereaved black motherhood.
Tell us about your pain. Tell us what we took from you.
Mrs. Clinton continued this tradition at the DNC, brandishing the black mothers of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown Jr., Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, Dantré Hamilton, Trayvon Martin, and Hadiya Pendleton. Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, told the convention:
"One year ago yesterday, I lived the worst nightmare anyone could imagine. I watched as my daughter, Sandra Bland, was lowered into the ground in a coffin. She was my fourth of five daughters, and she was gone. No, no, not on administrative leave, but on permanent leave from this Earth, found hanging in a jail cell after an unlawful traffic stop and an unlawful arrest."
Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace appraised the value of black life: “You’re nobody ‘til somebody kills you.” The notorious HRC only developed an interest, said the names Sandra Bland and Eric Garner once they were corpses. Well-publicized black deaths provided Clinton a chance to campaign on the caskets of black bodies, plaster their graves with “Ready For Hillary” buttons.
Clinton insists: I care about the negro. Months before the Philadelphia extravaganza, the former Secretary of State didn’t just break bread with these violated black mothers. Amy Chozik writes that for almost three hours, the presidential hopeful munched “pork chops and gravy, fried okra and rice.” Presumably, Clinton proffered her concealed hot sauce to authenticate her “blackness.”
This motherhood of black grief became “an unlikely linchpin of Mrs. Clinton’s success.” And with nauseating similarity to Kunta Kinte’s painful rebirth as Toby in Roots, “The Clinton campaign named this sisterhood… ‘Mothers of the Movement.’” A branding calculated to keep black people shackled to the Clinton brand.
A trail to the White House paved with black tears.
But as First Lady, Mrs. Clinton championed the White Supremacist ideology that mandates and rationalizes the death of black children like Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Tamir Rice. Former Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson practically plagiarized Clinton’s 1994 crime bill talking points when he justified killing Brown. Wilson articulated the essence of Clinton’s “super-predator.” He called the unarmed 18-year-old a “demon” and claimed he “felt like a five-year-old holding onto [black] Hulk Hogan.” Clinton’s mid 90’s oratory can be seamlessly incorporated to explain why Michael Brown's black life didn't matter. He and Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown when he was killed, were “not just a gang of kids.” Emmett, Michael and Tamir are probable rapists, strong-arm robbers, (toy) gun-toting black predators. As HRC declared: “We have to bring them to heel.”
Logically, we don’t call it “murder” or
But the repulsive, treacherous irony is that Hillary Rodham Clinton best exemplifies a “super-predator.” Her calculated, shameless exploitation of vulnerable, traumatized black mothers and their deceased children is the epitome and pattern of White parasitic behavior. Clinton gnaws the corpse of Sandra Bland to nourish her reputation as a “White ally,” the “not racist” option to Donald J. Trump. This isn’t pandering to black citizens; it’s a necrophilic scavenger hunt. Clinton’s a grave robber thirsty for black ballots.
She may be scrambling to add the mothers of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling to her macabre sorority.
This conclusion could be repudiated if Clinton proposed authentic measures to value and protect black life while making history in Philadelphia. She did not. Dr. Cornel West castigated her for “trotting out [black] mothers,” but failing to mumble a syllable about policy changes designed to permanently annihilate Racist police practices. In fact, the remarks of Clinton’s “club of heartbroken mothers” reveal the handiwork of the writers and directors Mumia credited. Geneva Reed-Veal, Lucia McBath, and Sybrina Fulton discussed God, “commonsense gun legislation,” and helping a White Woman get to the White House. No one – including Hillary Clinton – said “Racism,” which is the primary reason these black mothers have a child “on permanent leave from this earth.”
In Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington details the White tradition of looting black burial sites, trafficking in dead black bodies. She describes how White medical students took commemorative selfies with cadavers that were often black. Washington compares this "important medical rite of passage" to the lynchings of black citizens, which necessitates gruesome portraits of White terrorism and the celebration of black death.
Clinton revised this tradition by mugging for the cameras with the lynching victims' relatives. Then asking for their votes.
