Commentary: No, You’re Wrong, Andrew Young -- Bill Clinton is Not ‘Every Bit as Black as Barack’
Date: Monday, December 10, 2007
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com
Many of us remember when Andrew Young was the “It” guy among black American political figures -- a protege of Dr. Martin Luther King turned mayor of Atlanta turned U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. If anyone seemed destined to become a genuine eminence grise, it was Andy Young.
But his post-political life has become a cautionary tale about the assumption that wisdom comes with age. Alas, it isn’t necessarily so, and Young is proof. He seems to have left wisdom in the rear view mirror of his youth.
Since exiting the public stage, Young has been involved in selling Africa, whence he has presumably made a lot of money and friends in high places, albeit some of dubious character.
Last year, he offended Jews, Koreans and Arabs in one fell swoop in an interview in which he accused them of setting up rip-off stores in black communities. This, he said, in the context of a question about Wal-Mart’s habit of overpowering mom-and-pop businesses.
You’d think a former diplomat would know better, but no. Wal-Mart, who paid Young to be a goodwill ambassador (notwithstanding the retail behemoth’s shaky reputation in the black community), cut him loose.
Now it has come to light that Young recently told an audience that he wants Barack Obama to be president, only not now, but in 2016. “It’s not a matter of being inexperienced,” he said. “It’s a matter of being young.”
That might not have been so bad had, in the same discussion, Young not compared Obama to Hillary Clinton -- or, more pointedly, to her husband, the former president, who he described as “every bit as black as Barack.”
Now, it is no secret that many black people have a special affinity for Bill Clinton, and some seem to honestly think of him as a brother, but Young’s statement is as preposterous as author Toni Morrison’s assertion that Clinton was the country’s first black president.
Granted, Clinton exhibits more soulfulness than we’re used to seeing in the average white man, which makes him not average, but it does not make him not white (Follow that?).
Meanwhile, Obama may enjoy a better reception among whites than the average black man, but that only makes him not average, it does not make him not black. In short, Clinton cannot be as black as Obama because he’s not black at all. This might appear to be a sophomoric and unnecessary point, but apparently it bears iteration.
Young would have had no better luck had he just stuck to the youthfulness argument. At 46, Sen. Obama is three years older than the venerable John F. Kennedy was when he ascended the presidency and is exactly the same age that Clinton was when he won the White House in 1992.
So why would he say such things? Michelle Obama, the candidate’s wife, may have put her finger on it: “the natural fear of possibility.”
“There's always that doubt in the back of the minds of people of color -- people who have been oppressed, who have never been given the real opportunities -- (so) that you never really believe,” she told MSNBC last month. “Deep down inside, you doubt that you can really do this because all you've been told is, ‘No; wait.’ That's all you hear. And you hear it from people who love you, not because they don't care about you, but because they're afraid.”
“I would not be where I am,” she continued. “I wouldn't have gone to Princeton; I wouldn't have gone to Harvard. I certainly wouldn't be a practicing attorney -- neither would Barack -- if we listened to that doubt.”
Or to Andy Young.
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