During a speaking event at Reverend Jesse Jackson’s annual Rainbow Coalition Convention in 1992, Democratic presidential candidate and former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton excoriated a fellow convention participant, hip-hop artist and entertainer Sister Souljah (Lisa Williamson), for stridently militant remarks that she had previously voiced during an interview with the Washington Post when reacting to the “not guilty” verdict in the infamous Rodney King police brutality trial and subsequent rioting in Los Angeles, remarks in which she had pointedly suggested, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? . . . [If] you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?” Exercised by her remarks, candidate Clinton upbraided the rapper for engaging in “the kind of hatred we do not honor,” further observing that “if you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke”—a notorious white supremacist and member of the Ku Klux Klan—“was giving that speech.” Gov. Clinton’s comments in the presence of Rev. Jackson were, significantly, intended as a public rebuke of a combative and extremist position that could be associated with more ideologically polarized but influential elements within his own party and among his supporters, especially within a small segment of the African American community. By doing so, Gov. Clinton vociferously repudiated ongoing sentiments that either were shared by a certain minority contingent within the party, or at were least aligned with the sympathies of some of his potential supporters from the party’s left wing. “Sister Souljah moment” has since denoted any example of a politician publically and intentionally denouncing or repudiating an extreme or polarizing and yet influential position within his or her own party, or among his or her supporters more broadly, so as to appear to the wider voting population as even-handed and judicious. More cynically it has also come to connote any statement by a candidate or politician calculated to publically challenge or repudiate a position or attitude held by a comparatively extremist group, or even a special interest, as a way to manipulate potential voters—a staged show of one’s political fortitude.
In this specific case, Gov. Clinton’s protest raised the ire of Rev. Jackson, who had already previously complained of “a pattern of incidents” that purportedly demonstrated Clinton’s deliberate strategy directed at party centrists and independents and designed to illustrate his independence from the “black vote.” Controversy stirred by this episode drove a wedge between Clinton and Jackson—who was at the time an important national voice in the African American community and himself a former candidate for president—that remained in place throughout the campaign of 1992. While the Reverend Jesse Jackson was convinced that the content, timing, and venue for Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” was an unscrupulous “Machiavellian maneuver,” one that was not aimed at the party’s center but rather, in reality, an act of pandering to “conservative whites,” Clinton, in his defense, explained his own version:
Two of my most important core concerns were combatting youth violence and healing the racial divide. After challenging white voters all across America to abandon racism, if I kept silent on Sister Souljah I might look weak or phony. . . . We have an obligation, all of us, to call attention to prejudice whenever we see it. . . . The political press reported my comments as a calculated attempt to appeal to moderate and conservative swing voters by standing up to a Democratic core constituency. That’s how Jesse Jackson saw it, too. He thought I had abused his hospitality to make a demagogic pitch to white voters. . . . I think I was right to speak out against Sister Souljah’s apparent advocacy of race-based violence, and I believe most African-Americans agreed with what I said.
Clinton’s sincerity notwithstanding, the Sister Souljah moment is, fairly or unfairly, frequently construed as a rhetorical ploy, a calculating device intended to separate a candidate from more controversial attitudes and ideas with which the candidate would otherwise be identified by association. Other examples of Sister Souljah moments in presidential campaigns might include Sen. Bob Dole’s comments critical of pro-life Republicans in 1996; comments from both Sen. John McCain and former Gov. Mitt Romney in the 2008 primary campaign season, the former critical of Robert Bork’s analysis of the state of American culture (“slouching toward Gomorrah,” a popular theme among the GOP’s conservative wing), and the latter denouncing divisive positions from the “religious right” (to appease more moderate elements in the party); and perhaps more famously, and more aptly, Senator Obama’s repudiation, during the campaign of 2008, of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary comments damning America during a sermon delivered at a church that had been attended by the Obama family.
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson recently suggested that Texas governor Rick Perry, in denouncing Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric against immigration issues as they pertain to undocumented immigrants, had a Sister Souljah moment. Mr. Gerson goes further in noting that perhaps the best model for these “small declarations of ideological independence” can be traced back to none other than Abraham Lincoln, “the first great Republican,” who rejected influential nativist elements in the early Republican Party by drawing upon the party’s own stance against slavery as leverage to lend strength to his own position. Gerson punctuates his point by aptly quoting Lincoln:
I am not a Know-Nothing . . . That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty.
Gerson showcases this quote as perhaps the best example, a century prior, of a candidate denouncing an extreme but potentially prominent minority segment from within his own party—many anti-slavery Know-Nothings shifted their allegiance to the new Republican Party upon the dissolution of the American (or “Know Nothing”) Party in the mid-1850s—and risking diminished public support as a consequence. Today Lincoln’s comments might be described as something akin to a Sister Souljah moment, but more in the first sense than in the second, more cynical sense. In any event, the legacy of Lisa Williamson and her connection to the ascent of Bill Clinton is refreshed whenever a presidential candidate assumes the role of contrarian against otherwise supportive interests, whether calculated, as some claim, or not, as President Clinton has held in his own account.
See also Campaign of 1992
Broder, David S. “Clinton’s Daring Rebuke to Jackson Sends a Message to White Voters.” Columbus Dispatch, June 17, 1992.
Clinton, Bill. My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Gerson, Michael. “In Opposition to Trumpism, Rick Perry Emerges as a Responsible Voice.” Washington Post, July 21, 2015.
Piliawsky, Monte. “Racism or Realpolitik? The Clinton Administration and African-Americans.” The Black Scholar 24, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 2–10.