Sistah Hillary's sympathetic minstrel show demeaned African-Americans in all of these crucial senses. Above all, it demeaned Martin Luther King himself, diminishing to a black plaster saint a challenging, racially transcendent moral hero, a fearless, unsparing social critic whose very stature renders white Hillary Clinton and black Barack Obama moral pygmies by comparison.
Instead, Hillary, an honorary "sistah" because her uterus gives her a share in the common pool of identity victimhood, wrapped Dr. King and Obama (and implicitly herself) in the same morally blind mantle of identity sanctity, never considering that King himself might object deeply to the moral company he was being forced to keep.
Indeed, Clinton and Obama, not Dr. King, seem very much cut from the same cloth; a type black Ivy League professor and public intellectual Adolph Reed frequently encounters among his ambitious minority students, who feel racial or gender justice is fully satisfied if it grants unlimited scope to their personal ambitions.
Hillary's shattering of the gender glass ceiling is as likely to be as much a victory for women generally, as Obama's shattering of the racial one was for blacks - an ideal chance for identity hero worship but almost nothing else. MLK, who selflessly fought his whole life for the poor and dispossessed of all races and genders, was certainly cut from different cloth.
Humbly as he might state his objections, based solely on moral principle and not any sense of diminished personal dignity, compelling evidence suggests that Dr. King's objections to keeping moral company with Obama and Clinton would be considerable. Adolph Reed notes, in the link I just cited, that the overwhelming majority of blacks are working class, and would benefit, perhaps more than any other group, from any measure that substantially benefits the working class. MLK, in fighting for the poor, obviously knew that.
It is impossible to believe King would endorse the devil's bargain, made by Obama and both Clintons, to abandon economic justice for workers for the sake of focusing on identity politics and the enrichment of Wall Street donors. Nor is it likely King, a fierce critic of the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism, would have endorsed Bill Clinton's genocidal sanctions against Iraq, Obama's illegal, murderous drone strikes and failure to prosecute the Bush war criminals, or Hillary's creation of a failed state in Libya and arms sales to human-rights-violating nations after they donated to the Clinton Foundation. It is also unlikely that King, had he known of climate change and its dire effects on the world's poorest and darkest-skinned nations, would have approved of Obama's "all of the above" energy policy, or Hillary's global push for fracking that top climatologist James Hansen described as screwing your children and grandchildren.
Nor, finally, is it fathomable that King, as a lifelong servant of truth, would have approved an especially shameful instance of Hillary's deceit, one occurring at the very debate she launched by paying lip service to his memory. Above all when this sleazy deceit, as documented by Truthdig editor Bill Scheer, served specifically to unjustly transfer blame to Bernie Sanders for Bill Clinton's financial policies that had horrendous effects on blacks. Those policies themselves served, unsurprisingly, to put Wall Street in a very favorable frame of mind to donate to Hillary's upcoming Senate campaign.
As Scheer notes, Hillary shamelessly accused Bernie of having voted for the deregulation of the financial markets, when in fact this was a Bill Clinton policy buried in an omnibus bill that Bernie, like the rest of Congress, was blackmailed into voting for just to keep the government operating. A policy, moreover, strongly endorsed by Hillary's current chief economic adviser Gary Gensler, whom Bernie, aware of having been played, later opposed when Obama nominated him to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
It is richly ironic, and extraordinarily sleazy, that Gensler would advise Hillary to call out Bernie for voting, under duress, for a pernicious policy of which he himself was chief architect. Gensler was likewise part of the set of Bill Clinton economic advisers who called for repeal of Glass Steagall. As Scheer writes, "That repeal, as well as preventing any regulation of the toxic mortgage packages and swaps that still hobble the world economy and wiped out the fortunes of black and brown people with particular severity, is Bill Clinton's horrid legacy, and it is one that his wife now attempts to blame on Bernie Sanders."
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