Take, for example, Hillary's 2004 appearance at a fundraiser in St. Louis, Missouri. During a speech, she made a stereotypical joke about Mahatma Gandhi as she was introducing one of his most famous quotes.
"...Mahatma Gandhi. He ran a gas station down in St. Louis. A lot of wisdom came out of that gas station."
She later apologized for the poor judgment she'd exhibited in making a joke about Indians. But the fact remains, she chose to make a racist joke about a widely respected Indian civil rights leader based on an ethnic stereotype.
In 1996, while her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, was working to pass massive crime and welfare reform laws, she employed the use of racially coded language to refer to groups of kids as "superpredators." During that time, it didn't take much mental wrangling to realize she was referring to young black men.
In an interview with John Heilemann of Bloomberg's "All Due Respect," rapper Ice Cube called Clinton's remarks harsh and claimed it helped inspire the Black Lives Matter movement.
"...it's not really solving the problem -- it's just making it worse. Because now you have authorities that feel like they're justified in how they treat these so-called 'superpredators.' And what is that? Who is that? I mean, specifically, who are you talking about?"
He went on to explain that Clinton's description of "gangs of kids" being called superpredators harmed the Black community and young black kids in particular.
"The thing -- back in the 80s, Daryl Gates and the LAPD -- they did a 'war on gangs.' But if I"m a black kid that's not in a gang, but I look like a gang member to this white officer, then it's a war on me. That's the problem with a term like 'superpredators.'"
The result of Bill Clinton's crime policies, which Hillary supported, is the proliferation of private, for-profit prisons, and a disproportionately high percentage of African Americans in jail.
Black activist, civil rights lawyer, and legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes in the Nation, when President Clinton left office, his policies had such a negative impact on black communities that the rate of incarceration had skyrocketed.
"When Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world... African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison."
Alexander points out that it was Hillary Clinton who lobbied Congress to expand the drug war and mass incarceration. It was also Hillary Clinton who worked hard to reduce federal welfare benefits for women and children, many of whom were black. In her book Living History, the former First Lady tells the reader how proud she is of the 60-percent drop in welfare recipients.
The drop had nothing to do with a reduction of poverty, but the Clintons' roles in kicking the working poor off benefits.
And during the 2008 campaign, Hillary's campaign laid out a plan to discredit her opponent, then-Senator Barack Obama, as "other" and someone to be afraid of. Political strategist Mark Penn worked with Hillary Clinton to plan her line of attack against Obama.
