Brother Bill: President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class by Daryl A. Carter (review)

In Brother Bill: President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class, Daryl A. Carter offers one of the first historical inquiries into the intersection of race and the presidency of Bill Clinton. In so doing, he offers scholars of both U.S. and black politics new insights that challenge contemporary narratives about race and politics in twenty-first-century America. Central to Carter's thesis is the complicity of New Democrats like Clinton in continuing the programs of Ronald Reagan that disproportionately harmed black communities, including slashes to welfare, "tough-on-crime" legislation, mass incarceration, and a rhetoric that often blamed the struggles of black Americans on themselves rather than on structural racism. To Carter, Clinton "did not so much as pivot from the Reagan era as he simply reconfigured it to serve the Democratic Party's needs" (p. 116). Moreover, it was less the case that Clinton "cave[d] in to Republican demands," though the Republican Party controlled Congress for much of his presidency, but rather he worked hand-in-hand with conservative Republicans "as he fulfilled the New Democratic vision" (p. 133).

This argument is a significant contribution to our ongoing national conversation about race. It is also not unique. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012) and other works by today's legal scholars and social commentators have noted Clinton's role in harming African American communities. However, historians have lagged behind their contemporaries in critically examining Clinton's racial legacy. The ever-expanding historiography of the rise of modern conservativism tends to place "backlash" politics in the hands of right-wing Republicans, and minimizes the role of complacent, moderate Democrats who not only accommodated conservative ideas but often embraced them.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of Carter's book is his analysis of post–civil rights era black politics. The black middle class made enormous gains in the aftermath of the civil-rights and affirmative-action legislation passed during the 1960s. By the 1990s, according to Carter, many within the black middle class had themselves warmed to the ideas of Clinton and the New Democrats. They disliked paying taxes and were drawn to popular tropes about their tax dollars being spent on the undeserving poor who did not "work." They were similarly drawn to hard-line stances against crime, drugs, and gang violence, and they largely accepted Clinton's harsh criminal reform stances. To Carter, the role of the black middle class in supporting many of Clinton's policies that negatively affected poor black communities signified that "the problem of the twenty-first century concerned both the color line and the class line" (p. 14).

To this end, according to Carter, Clinton did not focus black outreach on the working class but rather almost exclusively on the black middle class. The one issue of race where he refused to concede to conservative demands—the issue of affirmative-action—is indicative of his desire to maintain the support of the black middle class, which disproportionately benefitted from affirmative action programs in college admissions, in government contracts, and in corporate employment. Clinton's vehement support of affirmative action paralleled that of the black middle class, his most loyal constituency.

Though sometimes Carter's writing style can be a bit stodgy, especially when he delves into the historical literature and historiographic discussions mid-chapter, this is an important book. As an opening salvo of historical analysis of the Clinton years, Carter has done an admirable job.