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49 minutes in Texas, and the coming of America's 3rd black* president

Hillary Clinton shows that she "gets" the #BlackLivesMatter movement politically, but will she help blacks as president?

    by Will Bunch | Columnist
    Published 

It is the most excruciating, painful 20 or so minutes of video that I've ever watched in my life. I'm talking about the first part of the encounter in Waller County, Texas, between 28-year-old Sandra Bland and the Texas state trooper who pulled her over, Brian Encinia. There is a tension in their exchange that even a master Hollywood director, a Scorcese or a Hitchcock, would not be able to evoke -- because the viewer knows the all-too-real ending, that a promising young woman would end up dead in a jail cell three days later.

And so every escalation -- when Bland insists, in often crude language, that she can't be compelled to put our her cigarette or exit her vehicle, when the trooper shockingly pulls out his Taser and exclaims, "I will light you up!", and when first Bland and then a bystander are told they can't exercise their constitutional right to film the encounter ("I need you to leave!) -- carries the sharp, jabbing sting of mortality.
And the film of what happened on a hot afternoon in Waller County in July 10 will also, most certainly, serve as a Rorschach test for a nation that can be so divided not just on matters of race but what constitutes civil authority that I guarantee no two citizens who take the time to watch the incident -- 49 minutes in all -- will see the same thing.
I certainly know a lot of people who will watch this and say that while Bland's death -- initially ruled a suicide by hanging, now under intensive investigation -- was tragic, her arrest was inevitable. That if she had only shown the proper deference to authority-- yes sir, no sir -- that she would have received a mere warning for changing lanes without signaling and would today be alive and starting her new job at Prairie View A&M.
That's not the way I saw it, and that's not the way a lot of voices I've heard and read since last night -- many of them black, many of them not -- saw it either. I saw a young woman standing up for herself and asserting her basic constitutional, and human, rights. I saw a women struggling  to understand why she was being asked to leave her car, why she was being arrested -- a perfectly rational and lawful question she asks a dozen times, without answer -- and, in essence, why this state officer was continually escalating the situation, the exact thing he is supposedly trained not to do.
It would have been so, so easy for Sandra Bland to give in, to be compliant, to take the warning slip and to move on...minus only her dignity. But in that moment, acquiescence is death to her, and so it's really not so easy at all. Sandra Bland chose to be defiant...to be alive in that moment. Which makes her passing all that much sadder, if that's possible.
The video should also be required viewing for folks trying to understand the Byzantine political events this past weekend, when arguably the two most liberal of the 21 announced presidential candidates-- Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley -- were interrupted at the uber-liberal Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, and seriously flummoxed by protesters from the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Sanders -- whose first political activism was fighting for black civil rights during the 1960s -- couldn't understand why the young activists didn't see why his progressive platform of free college tuition and a $15 minimum wage would do far more for African-Americans than any other candidate's program. O'Malley said that sure, "black lives matter" but then "white lives matter" and "all lives matter," not realizing, at least at first, how patronizing that sounded.

If you understand the Sandra Bland video, then you understand why #BlackLivesMatter. If you drive though a neighborhood, you might be thinking that all houses matter...but also seems a fairly banal thought if one of the houses that you're driving past happens to be ON FIRE. Personally, I still believe that Bernie Sanders has the best ideas for America of any candidate in a generation or two, but it was more than a little disappointing that he drove right past the burning building. Economic justice is not the same thing as...justice. That's why in the moment in Waller County, Sandra Bland was determined to make her life matter.

Hillary Clinton gets it....as a politician. (She stayed away from Phoenix, which managed to be clever and cowardly at the same time.) More than any of the 21 White House wannabes, she understands the importance of the African-American vote and the core issues that are important to them. And why wouldn't she? -- her husband was called "America's first black president," after all.

When Sanders was drawing headlines for big crowds in ultra-white locales like Maine or Minneapolis, Clinton was talking to folks in Ferguson. In the carefully rehearsed space of Facebook, the former Secretary of State asserted this week that "Black lives matter," and she followed up today with a post about the Sandra Bland case. "From what I've seen, the circumstances of this case are incredibly disturbing," Clinton wrote. She called for an investigation and called what happened a "tragic reminder of the ongoing systemic issues of race and justice in America that we must address with urgency, and we have to do more than talk — we have to take action."

That kind of response -- not to mention familiarity and loyalty -- is why Clinton has led among non-white Democrats by a margin as high at times as 72-to-5 percent. That standing may change by the time the Democrats get to Philadelphia next summer, but not by much. Given the still rising prominence of the "Obama Coalition" in American politics, it's also still hard not to imagine -- despite her awkward campaign style and her ethical foibles -- that with solid African-American support she'll be sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017, as the 45th POTUS...

...and America's "third black president."

But if elected, can Clinton "do more than talk"? Since she seems to have been thinking about the presidency for the last, oh, six decades or so, what's her plan for action? I just watched a woman named Sandra Bland spend 49 minutes under a Texas sun fighting to prove that her life mattered. Can any president pick up where she left off?

    WB
    Will Bunch