Hillary’s Billionaire Minstrel

Black billionaire Bob Johnson, CEO and founder of the internationally embarrassing Black Entertainment Television, took his turn serving as a blackface minstrel for Hillary Clinton at a South Carolina black church.

Sounding like the fictional Pierre Delacroix in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, he lodged the following bomb at Barack Obama, “As an African American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues, when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood, that I won’t say what he was doing in the neighborhood but he said it in his book…”

His allusion to Barack Obama’s youthful indiscretion with drugs, discussed in his book “Dreams of My Father,” is unmistakably clear despite his later denial.

After smearing on another coat of burnt cork and adjusting his snappy corporate minstrel costume, he defended Bill and Hillary against their unjustified and racially patronizing comments that inflamed prominent African Americans like House Majority Whip James Clyburn and former Gore Campaign Manager Donna Brazile. He characterized as crazy the thought that “these two people would denigrate the accomplishments of civil rights marchers.”

In one fell swoop, Johnson unraveled Bill’s and Hillary’s damage control efforts of this weekend. After his remarks were disseminated to the media, they were immediately challenged by the Obama campaign.

They issued a statement from former state representative “I.S.” Leevy Johnson of Columbia, an African American and one of the first blacks elected to the legislature since reconstruction.“It’s offensive that Senator Clinton literally stood by and said nothing as another one of her campaign’s top supporters launched a personal, divisive attack on Barack Obama,” former representative Johnson said. “For someone who decries the politics of personal destruction, she should’ve immediately denounced these attacks on the spot.”

Senator Clinton said on Meet the Press that, “I don’t think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it’s not about race. It needs to be about the individuals. Each of us is running for the highest position, the most difficult job in the world. And, you know, I am, I think, very clearly someone who’s gone through a tremendous amount of criticism, you know. That’s fine. I’m more than willing to shoulder that. I think voters and viewers can draw their own conclusions when they watch whatever it is that we are doing.”

We damn sure can draw our own conclusions. Hillary’s calculated actions and those of her surrogates deliberately use criminal stereotypes about black men to raise suspicions and doubt about Obama. Her transparent efforts to manipulate folks into voting for her does not speak well of her or her blackface minstrels.

Lastly, her use of Bob Johnson, a corporate vampire willing to sell out black folks on social security, sends an unmistakable signal to brotha’s like me that another Clinton term will lead to a further evisceration of the social safety net with powerful corporate minstrels like Johnson enlisted to play defense against the financial interests of their own people.