Hillary Clinton’s black conversion

FAILING TO win white voters in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton needs her black firewall like never before. Her speech yesterday in Harlem touched on criminal justice and economic opportunity. Those remarks follow a stop in majority-black Flint, Mich., to decry its lead-water crisis, and a debate in segregated Milwaukee, where she pledged to “tackle” discrimination. She also took a shot at Bernie Sanders’ criticism of Wall Street with the question: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”

Never mind that Wall Street investors and bankers play a huge role in discriminatory redlining, predatory lending, and foreclosures. Clinton, who earned an estimated $1.8 million in big-bank speaking fees in 2013 and 2014, shamelessly counts on blacks for support while she is engaged with the system that holds back the aspirations of too many black people. She is hoping that no one remembers how husband Bill put the black poor before the criminal-justice firing squad and how she is in bed with the big banks that stole the American dream from black homeowners.

Eight years later, she is again watching a coronation become a conundrum of her own centrist making. Sanders has begun to campaign seriously in black communities, with a brand of democratic socialism that is starting to earn black endorsements, including from writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.

That is not yet enough to suggest that Clinton will lose South Carolina. But she is running on a fundamental and untenable racial contradiction. She claims she will fight “systemic racism” at a time when the system and Bill’s role in it is under a fresh microscope from a new generation represented by the Black Lives Matter movement. At some point, the firewall cannot hold back the flames the Clintons fanned