Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton faces off against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump tonight in their first debate of the 2016 election season, a spectacle that is expected to draw up to 100 million viewers, according to the New York Times.
This debate is sure to focus heavily on women’s issues to draw stark parallels between Clinton and Trump; it many even descend into the absurd and repugnant. But it is also the perfect opportunity for Clinton to “speak directly to white people,” something that she said “maybe” she could do when she called in to The Steve Harvey Morning Show last week, as reported by The Root.
Clinton not only weighed in on the police shooting of Terence Crutcher but said that “maybe” she could tell white people that this is “not who we are”:
“This horrible shooting—again. How many times do we have to see this in our country?” Clinton asked. “In Tulsa? An unarmed man? With his hands in the air? I mean, this is just unbearable, and it needs to be intolerable.
“You know, maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people, say, ‘Look, this is not who we are.’ We’ve got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias,” Clinton said. “There are good, honorable, cool-headed police officers. … We can do better. We have got to rein in what is absolutely inexplicable, and we’ve got to have law enforcement respect communities and communities respect law enforcement because they have to work together.
Let me “speak directly” to Clinton here.
Mrs. Clinton, I understand and appreciate the need to issue a statement on these latest instances of black trauma and death that will continue infinitely under the current police state. Despite your saying that police officers and black communities in particular need to “work together”—as if there isn’t a dangerous and often fatal imbalance of power that makes that impossible—you are at least attempting to build a platform that is inclusive of people of color, unlike your Republican opponent, who is building a platform that is depending on the racist roaches of society to hoist him on top of the U.S. flag.
Many of my friends with me on the left will say that your statement was nothing more than desperate pandering—and I’m not here to argue that point because it is more than likely true, considering that you said in 2008 that it was “hardworking Americans, white Americans,” who were really needed to win elections. But it is election season, after all, and a statement had to be made. The loud outcry over your saying nothing at all would have been much louder than any charges of dishonesty or hypocrisy.
Perhaps, most importantly, I do believe that the unrelenting power of the Movement for Black Lives has been effective in charting a political course that even you may not have foreseen when you began your second presidential campaign. You called it yourself: It’s not about changing hearts; it’s about changing systems.
Still, we need to be clear here: Killers like Tulsa, Okla., Police Officer Betty Shelby are not unfamiliar to white people. Genocidal white people in power have pillaged, plundered, raped and murdered their way across the globe. And white people not in power have mimicked that savagery and licked the boots of those in power just to taste it.
That is exactly what whiteness is, what it has done and what it continues to find new ways to do. “Not all white people” is only necessary for babies and racists who don’t have the capacity to understand that white supremacy is institutional and racist oppression, not individual indictments.
It is all well and good to tell Steve Harvey and the NAACP that “maybe [you] should talk directly to white people,” but, please, go ahead and talk directly to white people tonight about the cruelty and evil that lie at the roots of patriotism and that false idol of a flag. Talk to white people the way President Barack Obama talks to black people. Tell them not to be lazy and not to rely on whiteness to propel them through life; remind them that their whiteness is a construct built on the bones of indigenous people and Latinx people and black people, and they would be nothing if they weren’t blessed to live in the “greatest country on earth.”