I think people need to acknowledge the fact that Hillary has had problems in regards to her feelings on race. In the 2008 election she equated hard working voters to only white voters and she was constantly underfire for racist comments against Obama. She also called Paul Fray a Jewish bastard after Bill lost his big for congress. Maybe she has changed but I have always thought she was racist in her past and only changed because of Bill.
I don’t think that’s exactly what she said, she said hard working voters and white voters as two different categories in the same sentence, so admittedly perhaps not the most tactful wording in the world but she was talking through the numbers and listing the people you have to win. I really don’t believe she was being racist, although during the campaign I think there was a lot of efforts to make her appear that way so I suppose a lot of people will have formed their opinions based on that and not dug any deeper.
The Paul Fray story also has very shaky credibility and I guess it comes down to simply who’s side of the story you believe, taking into account both the accused and the accusers character and record. I wouldn’t say that any of the witnesses who claimed she had said it were coming from a completely unbiased position, and it’s basically their word against somebody else’s. I don’t believe she said it.
“I was there and she never said it. In 29 years, my wife has never, ever uttered an ethnic or racial slur against anybody, ever. She’s so straight on this, she squeaks. She might have called him a bastard. I wouldn’t rule that out. She’s never claimed that she was pure on profanity. I’ve never heard her tell a joke with an ethnic connotation. She’s so fanatic about it. She can’t tell an ethnic joke - it’s not in her.” - Bill Clinton
“I have never said anything like that, ever. I have in the past certainly, you know maybe, called somebody a name. But I have never used an ethnic, racial, anti-Semitic, bigoted, discriminatory, prejudiced, accusation against anybody. I’ve never done it. I’ve never thought it.” - Hillary Clinton
“I have spent a lifetime devoted to increasing tolerance. This never happened.” - Hillary’s initial statement responding to the allegation
As far as the idea of her being racist in her past is concerned, she has literally been advocating for and advancing racial justice for decades before she even considered running for office. When she was at Wellesley she was part of the efforts to push for increased recruitment of black students and an increase in black faculty members. One student, the president of the Ethos group, recalled she was the only white student to call and express her sympathy and how upset she was when Martin Luther King was killed. As a young graduate she went undercover to expose racial discrimination in education, she has been doing this work long before she was a public figure and had any reason to present herself a certain way for politically motivated reasons and I think her record speaks louder than the efforts to paint her as somebody who has issues with race.
