COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – Stefanie Brown James, the director of African-American outreach for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, thought that the changes must have been typos.
The statement she’d written for the president honoring Black History Month had been immediately returned with every instance of the word “black” crossed out. They’d been replaced by “African-American,” a term, she was later informed, was considered by his team to be “more generally acceptable.”
“It was my first example as to how nuanced the conversations had to be,” she said. “It was a tight wire act.”
Four years later, Hillary Clinton seems far less worried about that balancing act.
As the race turns to Southern states, where black voters make up a significant portion of the Democratic electorate, Clinton is addressing race in increasingly blunt terms, talking about discrimination and inequality in ways that haven’t been heard on a presidential stage since civil rights leader Jesse Jackson’s 1988 run.