One of the popular narratives that was disseminated in mainstream American media to explain Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign loss to Donald Trump was post-Obama voter apathy in the African American community. According to the Washington Post , “In 2016, a seven-point drop in black voter turnout was perceived to have cost Clinton the election.

Political commentators often cite black voters’ “enthusiasm gap” as the primary reason for low turnout. This short-sighted perspective fails to consider that Mrs. Clinton ran a terrible campaign. She took the African American vote for granted and failed to craft a message that spoke to the needs and interests of the community. Blaming the community played into a stereotype that labeled African Americans as uninformed and monolithic in thought, instead of being introspective and recognizing her own short-comings. Her campaign ignored a simple reality…African Americans are as “political” as the rest of the country and there are real and substantive political interests that motivate the Community.

The crime act, also known as “3 Strikes and are Out,” contributed greatly to the mass incarceration of African Americans. So-called welfare reform, that Hilary Clinton encouraged her husband to sign, removed hundreds of thousands of poor people of color from the welfare safety-net and plunged them into the ranks of the desperately working poor. Many African Americans never forgot nor forgave her for supporting these pieces of legislation, as well as her referring to members of the Community as “superpredators ” who needed to be brought “to heel .” It was not voter apathy or an “enthusiasm gap” that turned the African American community against the Hilary Clinton campaign, it was the realpolitik of Hilary Clinton.