The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

“This is our first black president,” it was written of Bill Clinton. “Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food loving boy from Arkansas.” It now seems unfathomable that such sentiments were ever expressed nonsarcastically about any white person, Clinton or otherwise. But they were indeed expressed, in 1998, only one decade before an actual Black president was elected in a landslide. And they were expressed by Black Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and they were published in The New Yorker, and they were not perceived as controversial or particularly contrarian. Things of this nature were often written about Clinton, and they cannot be unwritten. The only way to escape this, it seems, is to write over these things and hope no once notices.