Michelle Alexander, legal scholar, human rights activist, and author of a recent essay in The Nation titled, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” joined MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to talk about the presidential campaign, criminal justice, race, and the Democratic Party. You can click and watch the interview above.
I appreciated the way Chris Hayes contextualized the issue of crime in the early nineteen-nineties in response to her critique of the Clintons and mass incarceration. It was good to see her admit to the fact that at that period of time, violent crime ran rampant across the nation.
As I pointed out in a previous post, most critics of the 1994 Crime Bill signed by then president Bill Clinton, often fail to acknowledge the reality that was violent crime at that time. In doing so, they ignore the fact that gun homicides in America peaked in 1993 at the very height of the drug wars. Instead, their argument against the Clintons borders on yet another grand conspiracy against black people by the government.