An excerpt from Hillary Clinton’s famous 1996 book “It Takes A Village” has been circulating online and courting controversy for its depiction of prison inmates working at the Arkansas governor’s mansion.
Posted by activist Jeanette Jing, the first-person passage describes how Clinton “enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule.” The inmates, who Clinton said were typically “African American men in their thirties who had already served twelve to eighteen years of their sentences,” worked on the grounds without compensation.
Still can’t get over this part of Hillary Clinton’s book. h/t @JeanetteJing pic.twitter.com/R7MMXoODEg
— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) June 6, 2017
The Internet is admittedly not impressed.
WHAT THE FUCK LMAO https://t.co/hKRKW0f7IQ
— Godzilla Mindset (@ByYourLogic) June 6, 2017
Hillary Clinton accepting modern-day slave institutions because the inmates there were some of “the good ones,” is disgusting. https://t.co/3g4LH2sB2A
— Erykah (@queseryto) June 6, 2017
haven’t been super online today but I see that uhhhhh (checks again) Hillary Clinton had slaves
— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) June 6, 2017
The comments are indicative of Clinton’s tumultuous relationship with the African-African community and rhetoric that’s come across to many as racist. This past election, the former presidential candidate came under fire by Black Lives Matter protesters for previously alluding to black youth as “superpredators” while advocating for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Bill, which is considered to have exacerbated mass incarceration by creating harsher prison sentencing.
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