With his 1994 crime bill and his 1996 welfare reform package, Clinton, with the help of a Republican Congress, sounded a late-twentieth-century death knell for Black social progress, all rooted in an insidious narrative about the danger of Black sexuality—it turned Black men into rapists and Black women into baby machines. In this narrative, white women were everything Black women were not—socially responsible, well-behaved, marriageable. Therefore, they were the kind of women that Black men should desire but of which they should never ever understand themselves to be worthy.
