December 28, 2015

Once, Hillary Clinton "went undercover" as a white woman in the South.

The NYT has an article "How Hillary Clinton Went Undercover to Examine Race in Education" that gets this comment:
As a 75-year old African-American am I supposed to be impressed by yet another piece of Clinton-propaganda from the NYTimes?? No thank you; been there, seen all of that and more, and find this effort to be sorely lacking in journalistic seriousness or any other kind of objective informational service. Has the intervening 43 years of history made a difference in us, her, the US? I'm beginning to have my doubts. Not to mention how a White female goes "undercover" in the White south?? What was she pretending to be, or not to be?
ADDED: To answer the question, Hillary was undercover in the sense that she was pretending to be a mother who wanted to place her child in a private school — in Dothan, Alabama in 1972 — and seeking to be assured that there would be no black children in the school. Hillary was a Yale law student, working on a project designed to test whether schools were engaged in race discrimination. The NYT portrays this work as daring:
“It was dangerous, being outsiders in these rural areas, talking about segregation academies,” said Cynthia G. Brown, a longtime education advocate who did work similar to Mrs. Clinton’s. She added, “We thought we were part of the civil rights struggle, definitely.”
So she was "undercover" in the sense that she was winning the confidence of people who would have closed themselves off to her if they knew what she was trying to do to them. If this is, indeed, propaganda for Hillary Clinton, it has a downside. She's good going undercover, winning confidence to get to a place where she can pursue an agenda, which, if known, would have caused people to keep her out? That's not, generally, the message a presidential candidate wants to send.

68 comments:

Bob said...

What was she pretending to be, or not to be?

That is the question.

Kevin said...

Can't wait for Bill to "introduce" her at the convention - the "private Hillary" that we never knew even after a lifetime of endless media coverage - with the fawning media telling us "we learned so much about her tonight!"

rhhardin said...

Has the intervening 43 years of history made a difference in us, her, the US?

43 years ago there was a huge supply of white good will. Black leaders developed to hijack it for their own purposes, and now whites don't care what blacks think.

Grow up and figure it out for yourself. Join the human race. It works out better.

Owen said...

rhhardin: "...don't care what blacks think." Funny how that works. A calls B out for bad behavior and B responds by correcting it and going to great lengths to demonstrate good will --with lavish gifts, attention and praise for A. A responds by bashing B, saying the evil is incorrigible and permeates every thought and deed. B tries again and again but A only redoubles the abuse. Well, at some point B is going to give that up and adopt a different strategy. You get more if the behavior you reward, less of that which you punish. While the public and political space is a crude and incomplete representation of what goes on in the minds of millions of individuals, it is nevertheless both representative and influential. And the drama has pretty much run its course.

Putting all that in simpler form: many of us out here have pretty much given up. Fifty years of goodwill have been torched. For what? Little roosters like Ta-Nehisi Coates strutting on his dung-hill. A very sad denouement.

AllenS said...

In other words, Hillary was telling lies to people to gain their trust.

Nothing has changed.

Owen said...

Who was supervising this Yale Law project? Names of faculty, please. And what ethics review was sought and obtained for a project that required students to make material misrepresentations to their targets in an effort to trap or seduce them into admitting they were breaking the law? This was not like refusing to sit in the back of the bus, or marching for equal rights legislation. This was in the nature of a criminal investigation, but one conducted without a warrant. What would happen to suspects who told Hillary things that were incriminating? Was she going to refer the case to prosecutors? Did she in fact do so? If not, why not: she was in possession of information that a federal law was being violated. The whole thing teems with questions.

This is a remarkable story and, as Prof. Althouse notes,it may backfire. Hillary has never been too careful about the moral exercise of power.

David Begley said...

Her first fake Southern accident.

And when will the NYT run a story about how the private Houstan Academy has forced the public schools to be better through competition?

Bruce Hayden said...

If Bill introduces her, I still don't expect that she will depicted the least bit accurately. Do you think that he will mention the rule that underlings are not to make eye contact with her, and she will get any of them bold enough to wish her Good Day fired? That with her knawing greed, nothing is ever enough (which is probably why she stole silverware when she moved out of the White House)? That she has a violent temper that resulted in physical injury on multiple occasions to said spouse - even when he was POTUS? That if you get on her enemies list, she will destroy you? Politicians tend not to be nice people, but Hillary appears to be in a class of her own.

Brando said...

And yet when she managed to send her daughter to Sidwell Friends, an exclusive private school in D.C., I'm sure she did not need anyone to assure her that no troublesome minorities (outside of a few token rich minorities) would be there.

What an absolute slime of a person. A perfect example of the "genteel racist" that considers themselves so far above the hoi polloi racist.

William Teach said...

So, the NY Times can "investigate" what Hillary did back in 1972, but cannot provide any details on Obama's time in college? Really?

JAORE said...

I believe the tale. And I understand she was on the team that developed the polio vaccine. Salk was only given the main share of credit because ... sexism.



Michael K said...

"now whites don't care what blacks think."

Good pint. Now, when we read a piece about murders or riots and "youths" are involved, we look for pictures.

In Britain it's "South Asians."

Neighborhood Retail Alliance said...

Will the Times-a la the Romney childhood look back dare to report the following?

Hillary Rodham served a:) clerkship in 1971 at one of America's most radical law firms, San Francisco based Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein:

"One partner at the firm, Doris Brin Walker, was a lifelong Communist Party USA member at the time. Another partner, Robert Treuhaft, had left the party in 1958, several years after being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and labeled as one of America's most "dangerously subversive" lawyers. The Oakland-based firm was renowned for taking clients others rejected as too controversial, including Communists, draft resisters, and members of the African-American militant group known as the Black Panther Party. The other partner Malcolm Burnstein, maintained a lifetime commitment to radical causes."

Will they demand that Wellesley release her thesis on the beloved Saul AlinskY?

Don't think so

Karen of Texas said...

Forty-three years ago I was ten years old. Judge Luther Bohanon ruled on desegregating the Oklahoma City school district. The solution involved cross district busing. My elementary school was one block away. My younger sister and I would have found ourselves on a bus for a 40 minute ride across town to go to a predominately black neighborhood school. It was not a nice area. We were raised in a blue collar, low-middle class neighborhood. Small homes. All white. Stay-at-home moms while kids were small. The black kids would make the reverse trip. Neither group was happy about it. There was ugly fallout.

As a result, my sister and I were enrolled in our Catholic elementary school. I know my parents weren't pleased with the length of the bus ride nor the area to which we would be going. I never heard them say anything about it simply being a "black" issue for them. I attended my small, Catholic, private school and had several black classmates. They weren't "kept out" of my "southern private school".

Neener, neener, Hillary...

B said...

She's good going undercover, winning confidence to get to a place where she can pursue an agenda, which, if known, would have caused people to keep her out? That's not, generally, the message a presidential candidate wants to send.

Yeah but she used that tactic against bad people. I'm a good liberal. She'd never betray me like that.

PB said...

I'd want proof. We must assume everything she says is a lie.

MadisonMan said...

All the Clinton Propaganda that's fit to print.

Big Mike said...

“It was dangerous, being outsiders in these rural areas, talking about segregation academies."

Not by 1972 it wasn't. The dangerous times were the mid-1960s (Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were murdered in 1964, Medgar Evers in 1963). Just some more of the "landing under sniper fire in Tuzla" crap, but this time the Times gets someone else to assert that it was dangerous so they and she have at least learned something about insulating her from the most preposterous statements in the intervening seven years.

chickelit said...

Yay it's 1972 again! So now can we objectively and honestly hear about Hillary's role in the Nixon persecution? I think this is important because some one of your readers has been propagating lies (again).

Maddad said...

There is no Southern woman, black or white, who would ever believe that Hillary Clinton was a Southern woman.

David said...

“It was dangerous, being outsiders in these rural areas, talking about segregation academies,” said Cynthia G. Brown, a longtime education advocate who did work similar to Mrs. Clinton’s. She added, “We thought we were part of the civil rights struggle, definitely.”

Dothan isn't rural. It's presently a city of 65,000 people. Back when the Yalies were down their trying to prove some point, the population was about half that amount. In other words, Dothan has grown and prospered. It has remained bi-racial, with most census districts having a mix of races. It was the home of Richmond Flowers, who as attorney general of Alabama opposed George Wallace's segregationist policies and was a lifetime opponent of segregation. Dothan is a typical southern community where black and white interact cordially on a daily basis. Black and white know that they are part of the same community and treat each other well as a result. The two high schools are about half black and half white and have been at roughly that mix for nearly two decades.

Here's the real bottom line: The real "civil rights struggle" these days, at least in the south, is being fought by ordinary people, black and white, who you will never hear of. After 11 years living in the south in a mixed race community I am convinced that the Southerners are doing a far better job of this than the northerners, who seem stuck in the past with their perceptions and prejudices.

Anonymous said...

AllenS and David Begley => You win this thread.

Have the Twits at the Times every before admitted that Hillary is a good liar?

cubanbob said...

As there is no evidence of actual worthwhile achievement by Hillary Clinton (other than marrying Bill and handling the bimbo eruptions) something needs to be concocted. Leave it to The Democratic Party House Organ Of Record to fill the need.

Ann Althouse said...

"Who was supervising this Yale Law project? Names of faculty, please. And what ethics review was sought and obtained for a project that required students to make material misrepresentations to their targets in an effort to trap or seduce them into admitting they were breaking the law? This was not like refusing to sit in the back of the bus, or marching for equal rights legislation. This was in the nature of a criminal investigation, but one conducted without a warrant. What would happen to suspects who told Hillary things that were incriminating? Was she going to refer the case to prosecutors? Did she in fact do so? If not, why not: she was in possession of information that a federal law was being violated. The whole thing teems with questions."

The answers to some of this in the article. Sending "testers" into places to discover evidence of race discrimination has been used routinely. The legal goal was to deprive these schools of their tax exemptions. There were lawsuits about this, trying to get the IRS to impose a financial disincentives on schools that were accommodating white flight from desegregating public schools.

Ann Althouse said...

"There is no Southern woman, black or white, who would ever believe that Hillary Clinton was a Southern woman."

She wasn't pretending to be a Southern woman. She was pretending to be a woman who was moving, with her husband, into the town and wanted to place her son in a school where there would be no black children.

Like the commenter I quoted, I don't think she would have found it hard to be accepted by other white women. Yes, she was from out of town and relocating, but why would there be any reason to think the white people at the southern school wouldn't be completely gracious to her?

Ann Althouse said...

Actually, I'm not sure whether she said that she wanted a school with no black children. It might have been that they sent her and then sent a black testers so they could compare the reception the 2 women got for saying exactly the same thing. For example, the black woman might have been told that there were no spaces left or advised in some subtle way that her child might not be suited to the environment for some reason.

chickelit said...

Althouse admits: Actually, I'm not sure whether she said that she wanted a school with no black children.

But sure fits your narrative better and sounds worse so go ahead and keep it!

MacMacConnell said...

Why would Hillary go to the South for such an experiment,the South's public schools were far more integrated by 1972 than Chicago's or anywhere within a hundred miles of Harvard or Yale Law? Think of the target rich private schools and prep schools attended by her fellow alum from Wellesley and Yale Law.

Owen said...

Prof. Althouse: thanks for your clarification/explanation. I should have read further before asking all those questions. But I am still interested in the legal and ethical complications of this activity. Analogy is getting hired at some firm (supermarket, slaughterhouse, drug company, whatever) in order to investigate and expose wrongdoing. At a minimum it is tacky and it may well breach the employment contract (or local law?) but it is excused because of the public good it supposedly serves. But "noble cause corruption" is a constant danger. There is probably nobody more self-righteous than a Yale Law intern working for Marian Edelman in 1972 to root out Southern racism.

Back to the specifics: if a target school in Dothan had claimed the tax benefits but had practiced segregation, what's the penalty? Simply to deny the benefits in the future? To recoup past benefits plus interest and penalties? To prosecute the school's organizers and operators for tax fraud, with a distinct possibility of jail time?

Hillary was packing a powerful weapon in her quest for justice. How responsibly did she wield it?

Etienne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Q. said...

In other words: She's really good at lying.

Ambrose said...

So this is where she learned to use that Southern accent....

MacMacConnell said...

Evidently, there were no prosecutions stemming from Hillary's first dangerous expedition south of the Mason-Dixon Line, no sniper fire either. My guess is that the Southerners could smell the stench of Yankee carpetbagging grifter mendacity of Hillary long before she hit the exit ramp.

JAORE said...

"The answers to some of this in the article. Sending "testers" into places to discover evidence of race discrimination has been used routinely."

And there WERE snipers used in Bosnia. Not at all proof that Hillary was involved.

And, as noted, Dothan, Alabama is likely more integrated now (and was in 1972) than many of the areas frequented by Hillary and our other betters.

Bruce Hayden said...

Ann - what I think that we are talking about here with the ethics is the character element of admission to the bar. At least here in CO, and I know in some other states, prosecutors cannot lie to suspects. The cops can, if they aren't being supervised by an attorney. But, not a lawyer. And, that is why doing so in law school is iffy - if disclosed to state bar admissions people, it should at least require a second look, if not outright denial of licensing as an attorney. And, esp. if done in law school (apparently Teddy Kennedy's father had to buy a building at UVA to get him into LS after being thrown out of Harvard for cheating (as an undergrad)).

This is part of honesty that I don't think that we always get in the ethics classes in LS. I first really became aware of it almost 25 years ago, when reading the ethics decisions for the CO Supreme Ct (I still have that bad habit, because they really are interesting). An (elected) DA set up a sting for another attorney. They dummied up a criminal record for an investigator, and then he went into see a criminal defense attorney, and offered to trade (likely illegal) guns for legal services. When the defense lawyer agreed, he was arrested, convicted, and ultimately disbarred. BUT, the DA was disciplined too - I think it was a couple month suspension. His offense? Operating the sting, which involved dishonesty. And, I am pretty sure that they commented that it would have been fine if the police had done so without his help, but this was under his supervision, and, thus something that he could not do ethically as an attorney.

Of course, you are the one working in a law school, and the rules may be quite different there.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

Ann Althouse said...
"There is no Southern woman, black or white, who would ever believe that Hillary Clinton was a Southern woman."

She wasn't pretending to be a Southern woman. She was pretending to be a woman who was moving, with her husband, into the town and wanted to place her son in a school where there would be no black children.


Maybe this is what Hillary was doing:

In algebra, if A = B, then where you would use A, you can use B without changing things.
If mean IQ varies by race (and it does), then if IQ is unknown, but race is known, then one can use race as a proxy for IQ. So if someone wants to place a child in a certain IQ arena (more challenging, to push the child, or less challenging, to insure the child will excel), then one can inquire about racial makeup instead, and get a decent approximation.

jacksonjay said...


Hillary is a lot of things, but she ain't an Arkansan. Her sojourn in Arkansas must have been quite of challenge.

This was before she went undercover to join the Marines, right?

David Begley said...

Autocorrect typo. "Her first fake Southern ACCENT." Not accident.

But there is a contemporary point to this story. Expect LGBT "testers" and "undercover plaintiffs" from the Seven Sisters running "investigations" at religious colleges for the purpose of securing married student housing for LGBT married people and for the right to rent churches for marriage ceremonies.

If they are refused, then the Clinton IRS will try to deny the schools their tax exempt status. Georgetown should be the first target followed by Liberty, Baylor, Notre Dame, Boston College and SMU. Lambda Legal needs a new project. Gotta get that federal circuit split so Tony Kennedy can issue another 5-4 edict.

Fernandinande said...

"Once, Hillary Clinton "went undercover" as a white woman in the South."

I doubt it.

LYNNDH said...

Did she use her fake "Southern" accent?
Did she still look like a hippie?

jacksonjay said...


Surely the NYT has gained new respect for James O'Keefe and the various groups going undercover to examine illegalities at Planned Parenthood.

Richard Dolan said...

So Hillary! had a little Project Veritas thing going, once upon a time, long before undercover cameras were widely available? And all in service of the very best of causes, too. Well, she's always been good at lying, so no reason to think she wasn't successful. If she loses in 2016, maybe James O'Keefe will find a spot for her.

walter said...

The Alparse is deep on this one.
Not hard to understand the angle.
She was part of a sting operation in the service of "social justice"..perhaps a pioneer.
No harm in a little SJW Al-taqiyya...

FullMoon said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Drago said...

We have only begun to see the backflips and lies in service to creating the newest Hillary Myths that will be necessary to get this "Smartest Woman in The World" over the electoral finish line.

A new cult mythology must be in place for the leftists to rally around.

"Vaginas Up, Don't Micro-Aggress!"

traditionalguy said...

The Hillary's entire life has been under covers that are under covers that are under more covers. It can all be found in the wiped server, the White House Travel Office, and Vince Foster's memoirs. Find those, if you can, as The Hillery cackles her special victory cackle.

Sammy Finkelman said...

You see, Sanders can campaign in the south, where he needs black votes - and blacks are not much interested in his policy positions, and tend to vote for the more "regular" person - Sanders can campaign on his Civil Rights Record, and he has some,

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/20-examples-bernie-sanders-powerful-record-civil-and-human-rights-1950s

and that could take away votes from Hillary, so Hillary needs something of a Civil Rights record too.

So she reveals this thing, which is probably true, but we don't know how many other things she is keeping from us, to be revealed if useful.

Hillary Rodham probably got paid for this, by the way. What? You think all those testers work for free?

It is printed in the New York Times sometime in advance of campaigning there in February and March and an image of the headline can be printed in direct mail pieces.

Sammy Finkelman said...

James O'Keefe's cameramen don't work for free, either.

Qwinn said...

No one is complaining that Hillary used O'Keefe tactics.

We're complaining because it's almost certainly a lie. And also the hypocrisy that in *this* case, unlike when O'Keefe does anything, the media finds nothing objectionable at all about it. Surprise!

HoodlumDoodlum said...

I'll bet if there was audio or video the Media'd make sure to let us know it was edited--probably even "heavily edited." Oh, well, it's too long ago for that kind of recording, I guess, so we're fine with taking their word(s) for it. Gotcha.

Sammy Finkelman said...

It seems like Hillary mentioned this in a book, but in no source does Hillary name the school, nor does she want to be interviewd about this now.

For some reason, she doesn't want people to look too much into this thing. They may have been fabricating or trying to fabricate evidence. The effort to make a case against these schools was abandoned the next year. This school probably did not absolutely refuse to accept blacks, and in fact had to openly state in an obscure newspaper ad that it had an open enrollment policy. (Lack of advertising - the promotion probably came mainly from 99% plus white churches - also real estate agents and some others; the widespread idea that black students would not be admitted or that the students there, or even the teachers there, would be prejudiced and mean; the cost of tuition; and the idea that the public schools were good, or better than those newly sprung up ones, would have limited applications from non-whites.)

The New York Times article manages to omit Hillary's stint with the House Judiciary Committee impeachment inquiry. I guess nobody reminded or alerted the reporter to that.

And Bill Clinton was not just registering voters. He (and Hillary, and Taylor Branch) were running the McGovern campaign in Texas, and lived in the same place as their base. A big part of that was registering voters. There was nobody higher than him in the McGovern campaign in Texas in 1972. Or so we've been led to believe.

Unknown said...

"...She's good going undercover, winning confidence to get to a place where she can pursue an agenda, which, if known, would have caused people to keep her out?..."
That her whole life story. She's been pretty good at it.

n.n said...

I once went undercover masquerading as myself.

n.n said...

I once went undercover masquerading as myself.

damikesc said...

James O'Keefe's Project Veritas is our favorite for exposing the bad guys.
Here you are complaining about Clinton attempting similar activity?


The point is Progressives LOATHE O'Keefe for doing exactly what they did for years. He's like a more honest network news "expose".

Sammy Finkelman said...

We're complaining because it's almost certainly a lie.

It seems to be definite that she worked for Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project - which later morphed into the Children’s Defense Fund, and that a report was published, put togetehr by that and some other groups, called “It’s Not Over in the South: School Desegregation in 43 Southern Cities 18 Years After Brown.”

And that she was among a handful of young researchers and interns who worked in Washington reviewing documents, and coordinating with activists and lawyers in the South.

She said something already in her 2004 book "Living History"

As part of my investigation, I drove to Dothan, Alabama, for the purpose of posing as a young mother moving to the area, interested in enrolling my child in the local all-white academy. I stopped first in the "black" section of Dothan to have lunch ... At a local private school, I had an appointment with an administrator to discuss enrolling my imaginary child. I went through my role-playing, asking questions about the curriculum and makeup of the student body. I was assured that no black students would be enrolled.

I would suspect if she went there, one day, and the claim is only one time, it was not so much to do testing, but to test the testers or the tetsing system - or to supervise them. To critique them, and give advice for the next tester. But it could be, though, maybe they needed a stranger in one particular place.

It would seem from what she says that they were also interested in finding out whether the local schools were giving away books and equipment, which would tie them into the public schools. It seems to be that they may have been interested in trying to categorize them as a public schools, rather than revoking any tax exemption, which wouldn't change anything really.

This was shortly before the Democratic convention. I see also that registering voters in Texas was Hillary's specific job in Texas later, but Bill was running the campaign. The book mentions a fourth person, besides Taylor Branch, Julius Glickman, but he was local in Texas.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Hillary has also claimed she did this also in 1975 with joining the Marines, except she pretends she was serious. (and not role playing)

If she had been serious about the MArines, or mentioned that she was a lawyer, they would have grabbed her.

Sammy Finkelman said...

The New York Times also doesn't mention that the original Dothan is the city or location where Joseph caught up wih his brothers, and they saw him coming, and discussed what to do with him, and stripped him of his coat, and threw him in the pit, and all the other things happened that followed it.

Michael said...

You could go "under cover" in 1972 in Dothan Ala to find that there were private schools that had only white students. You could also go not-under-cover and discover the same thing. You could also save yourself the trauma of having to go into the deep dark dangerous south and discover private schools that only had white students in Connecticut or New Jersey or New York or Maine or New Hampshire. You could discover this either under or not under cover. It is precious to think, as the NYT seems to think, that racism and racial admissions policies are and always have been confined to the south.

BTW, there would be absolutely zero danger associated with her under-cover work in Dothan Ala in 1972. None.

Wince said...

Maybe this is why Hillary flunked the D.C. Bar Exam after graduating Yale?

Meade said...

Hillary under cover.

mikee said...

As a kid whose older brother saw the school riots in the 1960s in NC, when busing for integration started, I recall that the riots in Boston where worse in the 1970s when busing for integration started there. Ha-ha.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

A moron's dozen of farm fresh eggs. Leave it to Dothan!

SoLastMillennium said...

The subject is about Hilary "going undercover", and not one comment about Bill "going under the covers"?


Is there no Snark left here?

ken in tx said...

She was pretending to be white racist. Maybe she didn't have to pretend all that hard. How well did she treat black Secret service agents?

Ann Althouse said...

On the question of how far she went playong the role of a racist, the text at the link is:

""""""“I went through my role-playing, asking questions about the curriculum and makeup of the student body,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in “Living History.” “I was assured that no black students would be enrolled.”"""""""

Ann Althouse said...

That's cagey. She could very well be making facts sound more racist than they are. If she merely asked are there any black kids and the answer was no, then the "assured" business is misleading. From the article, it seems likely that the school had no black kids because none sought to attend. The black parents may all have wanted integrated free public schools. That's what most white liberals like Hillary wanted.

MacMacConnell said...

Gee, can't imagine why this wasn't reported prior to Clinton's elections in Arkansas?