I’ll admit it: I’m prejudiced.

Whenever I see a conflict between a gutsy protester who is trying to show how black lives matter by interrupting a powerful white politician who has a microphone, I’m always going to be rooting for the protester.

I cheer when protesters interrupt Donald Trump, risking their safety to stop the demagoguery. I was gleeful when Ashley Williams interrupted Hillary Clinton to talk about how the former first lady had once championed bringing black children “to heel” at a South Carolina fundraiser. I hailed the black women who interrupted Bernie Sanders in Seattle to commemorate Mike Brown (and I applauded Sanders for being the only politician to give these voices the floor).

Protesters put Bill Clinton on the defensive at Hillary rally in Philadelphia Read more

And on Thursday, I cheered on protesters who interrupted Bill Clinton and exposed how ugly, racist and narcissistic he really is.

I am used to him dog-whistling – trying to speak to conservatives in a frequency only they can hear. But like Hillary on Aids, we could all hear exactly what he was saying when he tried, and failed on Thursday, to defend his punitive 1994 crime bill and the 1996 so-called welfare reform bill, both of which were disastrous for black America. And he did so while acting like black people have been controlling the national narrative for 400 years and he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“Can I answer?” He asked the screaming crowd. “Here’s the thing, I like protesters. But the ones who won’t let you answer are afraid of the truth.” In the next 10 minutes, he managed to threaten the Clintons’ inexplicable, decades-long lock on black voters.

“When somebody won’t hush and listen to you, that ain’t democracy,” he continued, defensively. Actually, the freedom to speak truth to power is democracy in action – even if the speakers are black and Bill Clinton doesn’t like what they have to say.

It would seem, though, that it is Bill Clinton who doesn’t want to hush and who is afraid of the truth – the inconvenient truth of his own record. He bragged about adding police to the streets, making a case not for black liberation but for increased black surveillance, and he actually equated the Black Lives Matter activists to obstructionist Republicans in Congress.

Then, he went nuclear: “I’ll tell you another story about a place where black lives matter: Africa,” before telling a charming tale about his white wife’s good deeds for dark-skinned folks. (Subtext: if y’all Negroes don’t like it here, go back to where you came from – and wait for Hillary to save you there if you’re lucky.)

He was also happy to throw black people from the 1990s under the bus: “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out into the street to murder other African American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens – she didn’t.” This goes to the heart of the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement, which ignited with the death of Mike Brown – “no angel” to the New York Times, but beloved by a new generation who see beyond the racist spin.

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Bill Clinton doesn’t get this. He is still living in a world of 1990s respectability politics, trying to separate the “good” blacks he thinks will vote from “unworthy” blacks who’ve been marginalized. But Black Lives Matter is not interested in a world where black children must be made “to heel” and where fear-mongering is achieved by mentioning the racist trope of “13-year-old kids hopped up on crack”.

To me, this movement demands a reimagining of American society – thinking not in terms of how to punish a black child in a gang, but of how to undo what has kept black people from having equal access to education, employment, wealth and opportunity in the first place, so that our families and communities aren’t destroyed and so we don’t literally lead shorter lives.

Let’s not forget: the assault on black life continues apace. According to the Guardian’s The Counted project, 277 people – some 57 of them black – have been killed by US police in 2016. And a recent brutal beating of a girl by a school officer in Texas caught on video shows we’ve learned little after a similar horror in South Carolina last year or the McKinney Pool incident last summer.

Cruz, Trump, Sanders and both Clintons – not to mention a media happy to obsess over the minutiae of their horse race – would be happy not to talk about any of these inconvenient truths.

All hail the protesters, who keep forcing the conversation with cowards who’d be happy to get back into the White House without wrestling with the ongoing scourge of structural racism.