Michael Eric Dyson from the Campaign Trail with Hillary Clinton
This is a long read. Dyson calls it a journey right up front. But it
is a rewarding trek if you choose to tag along as he did with Hillary
on the trail. It is not an endorsement. It it an analysis, to some
degree a comparative one, and an odyssey.
There
is good reason to be skeptical about Hillary Clinton and race. It’s
never been anything explicit, necessarily, but she has sinned in the
realm of signification, the place where innuendo and plausible
deniability live. Let us start with her first presidential campaign in
2008, and the infamous “3 a.m. phone call” television ad
that so spooked folks in the nation’s white hinterland. “It’s 3 a.m.
and your children are safe and asleep,” a concerned narrator intoned.
“Who do you want answering the phone?”
On the surface, there was
nothing especially racially troubling about an advertisement that said
the nation’s first female commander in chief had the chops and bravura
to answer the call. But to seasoned observers of racial coding, myself
included, the image of innocent sleeping children and a nervously
attentive mother evoked an uglier racial epoch.
