African-American Voters Have an Understandable Reason to Support Hillary Clinton | The Nation

African-American Voters Have an Understandable Reason to Support Hillary Clinton | The Nation

"Needless to say, I cannot speak for black voters or for any individual’s choice of candidate other than my own. But I think that Sanders supporters too frequently fail to understand the conditions facing African Americans today, especially in Republican-controlled states like South Carolina. If you are a black Carolinian you know that politics is almost entirely polarized along racial lines. You have seen your governor (supposedly a forward-looking Republican) reject the expansion of Medicaid, which would enormously benefit low-income people of all races, but especially blacks. Your legislature has enacted laws designed to discourage voting by non-whites. You know that half a century after “integration” in a state where blacks make up over a quarter of the population, they represent only 10 percent of the students at the University of South Carolina and 7 percent at Clemson, the flagship public universities.

For black Carolinians, the challenge today seems to be holding on to gains that are under assault rather than seeking further progress. 

Those with an interest in history note that public representations of the state’s past almost entirely ignore the black population and that large numbers of whites are dismissive of efforts to memorialize slavery, Reconstruction, or the Jim Crow era. On the grounds of the state Capitol the Confederate flag, once prominently displayed, has been removed, but in the two dozen or so remaining monuments and markers, including the lone “African-American History Monument,” the only black person mentioned by name is Essie, the mixed-race daughter out of wedlock of Senator Strom Thurmond. When local politicians—and jurists all the way up to the Supreme—invoke the idea of state sovereignty, African Americans hear the voice of John C. Calhoun, Ben Tillman, and Thurmond himself. “Why are some people urged to ‘never forget,’” asked one member of the audience, “while we are constantly being told to ‘get over it’?”