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.

Cover photo by Kim White

Yes She Can

Why Hillary Clinton will do more for black people than Obama

By Michael Eric Dyson

November 29, 2015

Photographs by Michael Schwarz

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.

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