What White Moderates Miss About Bill Clinton's Fabled 'Sister Souljah' Moment
Having a ball with Arsenio Hall ...
Someone annoying on social media — I know that hardly narrows it down — lamented that Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow has not dramatically benefitted from criticizing her Democratic primary rival Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for campaigning with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Apparently, this was supposed to be McMorrow’s “Sister Souljah moment.”
There’s a reason McMorrow’s “moment” never materialized, but first some background for those who came in late: Back in 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton spoke at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition where he repudiated statements rapper and political activist Sister Souljah had made in a Washington Post interview, as well as some specific lyrics in her music. Souljah had been a guest at the Rainbow Coalition the previous night, and this was a calculated effort on the Clinton’s campaign part to distance the “New Democrat” from Jackson, who was both politically and socially progressive (Bernie Sanders endorsed his presidential run in 1988).
The real, non-metaphorical Sister Souljah, whose name is Lisa Williamson, wasn’t Bill Clinton’s actual target. She was simply collateral damage. In a 2019 New York Times column, Brett Stephens wrote that we need “more Sister Souljah moments” and claimed Clinton had courageously broken with his base when publicly scolding a minor Black rapper. His version of events was so ahistorical it could count as fiction.
During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, very concerned conservatives such as George Will and Amanda Carpenter argued that Democratic nominee Joe Biden needed “a Sister Souljah moment.”
In 1992, this rap singer was pleased by the deadly Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Candidate Bill Clinton’s criticism, not of extremism in general, but of her explicitly, reassured temperate voters that he was not intimidated by inhabitants of the wilder shores of American politics.
Yep, scratch a Never Trumper and you find someone who says “inhabitants of the wilder shores.”
Sister Souljah was just exercising her constitutional right to free speech. Her words weren’t marching orders or proposed political policy. They were also taken out of context, as she tried to explain shortly after Clinton turned her into a household name like Gennifer Flowers and later Monica Lewinsky. (Watch below.)
Biden was president for all of twelve minutes before Anti-Trump conservative Max Boot declared that he “needs a ‘Sister Souljah moment’: He needs to attack the far-left activists who want to defund the police, boycott Israel and divide Americans by race. He could start by criticizing what liberal columnist Jonathan Chait describes as the ‘kooky, harmful, and outright racist ideas’ peddled by White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo. Biden should champion liberalism, not leftism.”
Joe Walsh suggested in August 2024 that “Biden would really benefit politically from a Sister Souljah moment with these keffiyeh-wearing college kids. And it would be the right thing to do. But he’s just not capable of it.”
Even the term “Sister Souljah moment” obfuscates the larger political context: Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas, one of the nation’s poorest states with a population of a little more than 2 million people. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition were far more prominent and influential. Thus, Clinton was seen as taking on the “liberal establishment.” Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is hardly Jesse Jackson, who wasn’t running against Clinton.
Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” was a white Democratic leader’s expression of dominance over a Black Democratic leader. This is probably why white moderates and conservatives recall this moment so fondly. They find it comforting when white Democratic leaders show they have their party under control. This is what McMorrow and Slotkin were attempting to achieve, but they failed because they didn’t nail the dismount that Clinton mastered.
Notice that white moderates rarely mentionn Clinton’s contemporaneous “Arsenio Hall moment,” when Bill and Hillary Clinton appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show — the hippest and Blackest program on television. Arsenio Hall was openly liberal, decades before Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Meyers. David Letterman was hip but not as earnestly political. Jay Leno, who had just replaced Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, was, well, Jay Leno.
So, although Clinton criticized Sister Souljah, he’d also engaged with Black culture, and not just the (at the time) “respectable Bill Cosby” wing but the hip-hop culture that “mainstream” talk shows would never book prior to Hall’s show.
During the interview, Clinton name-dropped Maxine Waters, the very liberal representative from California who white moderates considered the Ilhan Omar and Zohran Mamdani of the day. He talked about visting South Central, Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, and he acknowledged why the people there might feel that both parties were the same. He didn’t mock or lecture them but spoke about their concerns with empathy.
CLINTON: You tell [young people in South Central] to register and vote get an education and go to work and they say, I may not have a job but if I deal drugs I can make money. You tell them that they ought to register and vote and they say why I’ll still be unsafe on my streets uh you tell them to register and vote and they look at most people in South Central, L.A., they obeyed the law. They didn’t loot they didn’t burn they rio, they didn’t steal, but a lot of them are still living below the poverty line even though they’re working 40 hours a week so there are real problems there that that have divorced a whole lot of Americans from the rest of us and I think what this election is about in a way is reconnecting more folks to the American dream making them feel like they’re a part of our community and making them feel that tomorrow can be better than today.
These current prescriptions for two “Sister Souljah moments” and call Bill Maher in the morning usually boil down to picking fights with random people of color and “preachy females.” It’s transparently performative with no attempt at true empathy.
A few months after Clinton’s Arsenio Hall appearance, during the second presidential debate, a young Black woman asked the candidates, “I know people who cannot afford to pay the mortgage on their homes, their car payment. I have personal problems with the national debt. But how has it affected you and if you have no experience in it, how can you help us, if you don’t know what we’re feeling?”
President George H.W. Bush and eccentric billonaire Ross Perot both bombed this question. Bush himself struggled to even understand it. However, Clinton’s response was one for the ages. (Watch below.)
CLINTON: I’ve been governor of a small state for 12 years. I’ll tell you how it’s affected me. Every year Congress and the president sign laws that make us do more things and gives us less money to do it with. I see people in my state, middle class people — their taxes have gone up in Washington and their services have gone down while the wealthy have gotten tax cuts.
I have seen what’s happened in this last 4 years when — in my state, when people lose their jobs there’s a good chance I’ll know them by their names. When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them.
And I’ve been out here for 13 months meeting in meetings just like this ever since October, with people like you all over America, people that have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, lost their health insurance.
Democrats don’t need more “Sister Souljah moments.” They need more moments like this when they can demonstrate empathy for the people who they’re asking to put them in power. McMorrow has had those moments in the past. She went viral years ago when she stood up against the bullies who want to torment queer kids. Empathy will always deliver more successful “moments” than whatever the centrist think thanks and think pieces advise.
If those Clinton clips had initially aired today, it would be unacceptable and super cringe...It's like rewatching shows I originally watched in the 60s and seeing how UNBELIEVABLY fucking sexist they were! I had NO memory of how pervasive and fucked that was...The very definition of 'baked in'. you simply cannot see things that are considered baseline normal at the time
Very good piece. And perhaps we can have a "George Will Moment" or a "Brett Stephens Moment," in which a powerful left-centrist says, "It sounds like George/Brett is having uncomfortable feelings about someone else bringing attention to an injustice. Well, they're entitled to their feelings! Moving on..."