Why did some people call Bill Clinton “America’s first black president”?
Cite?
(IOW, I’ve never heard it.)
Toni Morrison coined the phrase in 1998, in the New Yorker.
From Wiki:
I thought Warren G. Harding was the first black president. “One of my ancestors might have hopped the fence…”
Bill Clinton’s family was never really poor. For most of his childhood, his family was middle class. His stepfather, whom his mother married when Clinton was four years old, owned a car dealership. His mother was a nurse. Clinton went to a local parochial grade school instead of a public school.
Plus, he’s got a thing for women with big asses, so…
Clinton’s family wasn’t quite as well off as it might seem. Despite his mother’s work as a nurse and his stepfather’s car dealership, they were often not doing very well because of his stepfather’s alcoholism and the up-and-down state of the marriage. They weren’t remotely poor, but they weren’t quite comfortably middle class either. No recent president has been anything like poor. It’s just that in comparison to Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Bushes, the other recent presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton) look like they come from relatively poor backgrounds, even though they are all from middle-class families.
Johnson didn’t come from a wealthy background. Even though Sam Johnson did better than most of his neighbors, he wasn’t rich.
Johnson’s family wasn’t quite rich when he was young, but many of this ancestors were well off and important in local politics. I know that I’m overgeneralizing here, but if I were to split the last eleven presidents into a group that were old money and/or important ancestors and a group that were middle class with no important ancestors, it would be like this:
Old money: Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, G. H. W. Bush, and G. W. Bush
Middle class: Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton
And none of them were poor.