by Joan Morgan
“People fucking turned on her, inside and outside of the community and the music industry. And that had to play a role in her emotional health,” says Lynnée Denise. I’m not sure it was that simple. In the ’90s black women were squeezed between competing narratives. Mainstream feminism still championed the idea that women should be able to have it all. “It” being career, marriage, great sex, kids, etc. Of course, the whole thing was very cisgendered and none of it has questioned marriage itself as an institution or what viable families can look like outside those heteronormative models—but this was mid-2000s talk. The ’90s was the era of Waiting to Exhale. There was so much pressure for black women. The pressure to get chosen. The pressure not to be a statistic. The pressure to do it the “right” way, all the while well-publicized stats on drastic declines in marriage for black women constantly reminded us that having the option was increasingly a statistical improbability. These are the 1990s numbers that sounded the alarm: An estimated 25 percent of black women will never marry, a rate three times below that of white women. In 1990 only 39.4 percent of black families with children were two-parent households. These doomsday reports about marriage stats being on an increasing decline for black women would eventually become twisted narratives about black women being unmarriage-able that emerged in the early 2000s. And undesirable. (#FuckSteveHarvey)
As it turns out, in 2018, much of those anxieties were justified. The ’90s is when black women went from Waiting to Exhale to just . . . waiting. In her book, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower, Brittney Cooper reports the following: “Sometimes I run the numbers in my head, but this, too, is a double-edged sword. When I see the abysmal state of black love by the numbers, it’s hard to blame myself. It’s hard to have any sense of hope either. Only 49 percent of black women with a college degree marry men with some post-secondary education. Fifty-eight percent of black women college graduates marry men with an overall level of education that they have. Moreover, more than 60 percent of black women college graduates between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, peak childbearing years, have never been married. Compare that number with a mere 38 percent of white women overall for whom this is true . . . Black women who have never married outnumber black men who have never married at a rate of 100 to 92.” Statistics, however, don’t tell the full story. In order to fully understand the emotional resonance that Miseducation holds for black women, both then and now, requires revisiting when and where it entered. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was born between two love triangles, the personal one between Hill, Wyclef Jean, and his fiancée, and a political one between a married President, his wife, and a White House intern.
Bill Clinton arrived in the presidential arena as a saxophone-playing, forty-six-year-old baby boomer and a liberal Democrat whose campaign ushered in an optimism and youthfulness about the future. His early presidency, however, was quickly mired in a rapid succession of controversies, political failures, and scandal. Among them was a failed attempt at health reform, sexual harassment accusations, and, perhaps most damning, the Whitewater scandal, a botched real estate deal that hinted at financial impropriety and accusations of a cover-up. The latter turned into a formal investigation led by a particularly rabid special prosecutor named Ken Starr. Clinton became Starr’s white whale. When Clinton managed to emerge from Whitewater with his presidency still intact, Starr turned his full attention to allegations of an affair between the president and a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. The president’s decision to lie about it was an act Starr, contrary to the opinions of most Americans and the rest of the free world, considered an impeachable offense. Starr failed to topple the presidency, of course, but the cumulative conflama left Clinton scurrying to regain the political capital necessary to secure a second term. How did he do it? By deploying a political strategy that turned the black women who comprised part of his base into sacrificial lambs: Clinton the liberal morphed into Clinton the moderate. Shifting sharply to the right, the embattled president continued to jack the Republican agenda by implementing two key pieces of legislation that not only had devastating effects on black women, but also destabilized the social conditions necessary for healthy black relationships to flourish for decades to come.
Dr. Treva Lindsey, a hip-hop feminist and Ohio State Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, marvels at the irony. “It’s always intriguing to me how much love the Clintons, particularly Bill Clinton, gets from black women, because so many of his policies both indirectly and directly attack[ed] the livelihood and lives of black women in the ’90s.” Two pieces of legislation in particular demonstrate this: the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, otherwise known colloquially as the “Three Strikes Bill” and “Welfare to Work,” respectively.
The history of the Three Strikes Bill is as follows, reports Thomas Frank in a Guardian article entitled, “Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill Destroyed Lives and There’s No Point Denying It”: “Back in the early 1990s, and although they were chemically almost identical, crack and powder cocaine were regarded very differently by the law. The drug identified with black users (crack) was treated as though it were 100 times as villainous as the same amount of cocaine, a drug popular with affluent professionals. This ‘now-notorious 100-to-one’ sentencing disparity, as The New York Times put it, had been enacted back in 1986, and the 1994 crime law instructed the US Sentencing Commission to study the subject and adjust federal sentencing guidelines as it saw fit.”
The Sentencing Commission duly recommended that the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity be abolished, largely because (as their lengthy report on the subject puts it) “The 100-to-1 crack cocaine to powder cocaine quantity ratio is a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and white federal defendants.” By the time their report was released, however, Republicans had gained control of Congress, and they passed a bill explicitly overturning the decision of the Sentencing Commission.
The bill then went to President Clinton for approval. Two weeks after publicly delivering a speech supporting the findings of the Sentencing Commission, Clinton blithely affixed his signature to the bill “retaining the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity, a disparity that had brought about the lopsided incarceration of black people. Clinton could have vetoed it, but he didn’t. He signed it.”
While the Three Strikes Bill is routinely discussed in terms of mass incarceration and the legislation’s damaging impact on black men, its impact on black women is given considerably less attention. Black women were deeply affected by the War on Drugs in ways that started with the Reagan and Bush agendas and continued under Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s. Drug laws began targeting nonviolent offenders and hitting them with mandatory minimum sentences. According to Amnesty International, in 1997, 138,000 women served time as a result of the War on Drugs. This is because police officers arrested not only drug dealers, but also addicts, their wives, and their lovers. Beginning in 1985, female prisoner population grew at a rate of 11.1 percent, which was higher than the 7.9 percent increase in male prisoners. From 1986–1996, the number of women’s state facilities increased by 888 percent. Black women were 46 percent of the prison population. The number of women in state prisons increased between 1985 and 1991 by 828 percent for black women vs. 241 percent for white women.
“What this does in terms of black women,” says Lindsey, “is literally destroy families. In addition to incarcerating them at obscene rates, it also leaves black women not only as single-headed households but it also leaves them seeing their fathers, uncles, romantic partners, friends—their communities—largely decimated for drug offenses and drug use.” It had a disparate impact on black women not only because more black women went to jail, she explains, but also because of the position black women held as economic providers in their families. Nineties’ job prospects also experienced a severe decline, due to another Clinton initiative c
alled the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that created zones in places like the Caribbean to basically provide sweatshop labor to American corporations that were exempted from basic labor requirements like standard wages. “As these jobs are moved out of the country,” says Lindsey, “black women, who used to work two or three of these lower-income jobs to make ends meet, find it increasingly difficult to find work.”
But while NAFTA and the Three Strikes Bill impacted black women in ways that were deleterious but, at least in terms of intent, incidental, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act seemed deliberately targeted and personal. Black women found themselves on the losing end of several winning acts of political genius that capitalized on sentiments established by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notorious 1965 study “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.” Often cited, the study erroneously blamed single black women and poor parenting skills for the alleged pathologies of the black community. Clinton capitalized on American’s long-standing unease about welfare queens and tendencies to cast black women as the system’s greatest abusers, despite the statistical reality that the majority of welfare recipients are actually white. “Sixty-one percent of the population receiving welfare, listed as ‘means-tested cash assistance’ by the Census Bureau, is identified as white,” wrote Barbara Ehrenreich in a 2001 Time magazine article entitled “Welfare. A White Secret.” “Only 33 percent is identified as black.”
The title of the bill itself was a diabolical-but-effective act of political framing, explains Rutgers University Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Dr. Akissi Britton. “The very name of the 1996 act illustrates how politicians and citizens, both Republican and Democrat, viewed the persistence of poverty. The title of the act states that the bill would bring poor people’s personal responsibility in line with their work opportunities. The act focused on intervening in the personal lives of the poor (especially poor black women) to rehabilitate their deviant cultural behaviors.” According to Britton, Clinton successfully drew on changing perceptions about poverty that had been in play for at least forty years. “The shifting narrative reframed poverty as the outcome of pathological cultural behaviors rather than as the result of economic and political policies that further entrenched poverty in inner-city areas,” says Britton. “Supported by the ‘culture of poverty’ thesis—which argued that persistent poverty was the result of poor morals, debauched values, and deviant cultural behaviors—politicians campaigned on the idea that the government was being defrauded by people who refused to work, eschewed marriages, and had multiple children in order to get aid from the government. This ideology was buoyed by the image of the ‘welfare queen,’ a black unwed mother with multiple babies collecting checks from the government while refusing to work, which was used by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 presidential campaign. Welfare fraud became the defining argument of the reframing of poverty that was used to justify slashing government support of struggling citizens during a time when the US economy was in decline.”
Even the signing of the bill was a well-orchestrated act of political theater at black women’s expense. “When Clinton signed the bill, he trotted out Lillie Harden, a black Arkansas woman who had been unemployed and dependent on welfare benefits,” Britton continues. “As part of the program Clinton put in place as governor of Arkansas, Harden stated that taking part in the state’s welfare-to-work programs gave both her and her children a sense of pride in her new role as a wage earner.” What neither Clinton, Harden, or the rest of the bill’s supporters made clear that day was that PRWORA would require those recipients to take part in the new “welfare-to-work” programs that primarily consisted of jobs too low-paying to survive on, effectively preventing recipients from managing their households. They did, however, states Britton, “provide government contractors with an abundant source of low-wage workers.”
For black women especially, Welfare to Work was Clinton’s Trojan horse. It imposed work-activity sanctions and family cap policies if work activity requirements weren’t met. Black women were kicked off welfare rolls at higher rates than whites, while white women received more work support. The work support built into the bill did include childcare assistance, transportation, and job training but it was implemented unequally, leaving a gap in assistance to black women. Family cap policies also meant children born after the mother began receiving welfare benefits didn’t receive support, again disproportionately affecting black women. Racism also meant that employment opportunities weren’t always equal. Overall, employers looked less favorably at hiring black welfare recipients than white ones.
The act also cut provisions that had been critical in social advancement. Under AFDC (Assistance for Families with Dependent Children), welfare recipients with high school diplomas were more likely to attend college than nonrecipients. Under Welfare to Work, AFDC was cut and replaced with TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). TANF welfare recipients were less likely to attend college. In addition, under TANF rules college enrollment was not considered valid work activity, reducing college attendance by welfare recipients. Welfare to Work also placed a lifetime ban on people convicted of a state or federal drug offense, which prevented them from receiving cash assistance and food stamps. According to the Sentencing Project, this ban affected more than 92,000 women and 135,000 children, half of whom were black or Latina. Immigrants were affected too. Under the new bill, immigrants were now ineligible to receive welfare for their first five years in the country, the period when they were likely to need it the most.
“It was a heartless bill,” says Lindsey. “Three of [Clinton’s] assistant secretaries at Health and Human Services resigned in protest.” In light of these political and social realities, Zion, both the child and the song, feels more and more like a revolutionary act. Black women rarely get credit for the strength it takes to choose motherhood in the face of both stigma and what the rest of society considers imperfect circumstances. “Black motherhood is maligned on one hand, and an impossible category for black women to occupy in ‘the right way’ on another,” says Lindsey. The right way. Fast-forward twenty years and I’ve spent a lot of time holding hands of girlfriends who waited for “the right way” to manifest and the heartbreak of realizing “the right way” was a perpetual no-show. The pain that comes with having to accept that the realization that the children you always took for granted that you would “just have” is no longer a biological possibility? That’s real. Lindsey agrees. “As black women, we’re offered a very limited range of choices based on our structural realities. For black women, so often reproductive justice and choice is talked about in terms of the ways we decide not to have children. But in order for real reproductive justice and choice to exist, we also have to talk more honestly about how black women are also talked out of becoming mothers.” It makes sense that “To Zion” became an anthem for so many black women, especially those who found themselves making the decision to become mothers while facing “imperfect” circumstances. “There was something so powerful about Lauryn, a black woman who [made] a defiant choice about how she was going to do black motherhood,” says Lindsey, “because everything, politically and personally, was telling her that she shouldn’t.” Lynnée Denise agrees. “That song has been affirming for so many children, period, but especially for black children. My neighbor actually named her son Zion. He grew up listening to that song.”
And yet, there are so many ways it could have gone left. Strongly evangelistic with distinctly gospel overtones, it could have been the perfect pro-life track and yet Hill beautifully and vulnerably created a vehicle that tenderly supports choice. This is a testimony to the wisdom of Hill’s choices, starting with her choice in vocal arrangement. “She stays in a tenor almost the whole time, when we’re used to hearing her in alto,” Lynnée Denise remarks. It’s a decision that conveys another level of vulnerability. “She understands her range. She’s definitely taking a cue from the black church and moving between pitches to set the
mood. Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, and Prince all did a similar thing. They have entire songs that switch between vocal styles.” The arrangement also reminds us that Hill is marrying diasporas: an African American deep soul tradition of hip hop weds the legacy of becoming a Marley. “She couples these black American gospel roots with a drum roll that I associate with reggae. That drumming is kind of like a marching band, but there’s a one-drop element that’s similar to dub,” says Lynnée Denise. “She uses lots of space. That reggae bass line lets you know she was listening to Sly and Robbie—and that she was a good student. And of course, Carlos Santana’s guitar is ridiculous. I love that she forged this musical relationship with not just the Marleys but Aretha, Carlos Santana, and CeCe Winans. She placed herself in the conversation with legends, but she did it as a student who learned so much from them it put her within the lineage of the greats. Lauryn took the music seriously and continued traditions. I love ‘To Zion’ for that. It’s a pretty-ass song.”
It was also a universally powerful moment of possibility, relatable for all women faced with pregnancy under unconventional circumstances. For black women, however, it was a deeply needed affirmation—one we rarely get. “The decision to do motherhood on one’s own terms is a kind of resistance,” says Lynnée Denise. “And however black women decide to do it, is the ‘right way.’ Lauryn’s response was to create a beautiful lullaby.”
Tarana Burke “To Zion”:
I was consumed with The Miseducation when it came out, and the song “To Zion” in particular. Remember, this was the reign of the cocky female emcee in hip hop, the era of Foxy Brown and Lil’ Kim. They were all about storytelling, over-the-top extravagance, and sex. I mean, Lil’ Kim was bragging about fucking and whatnot. That was cool and fun, but Lauryn was something in hip hop we hadn’t seen. She was bringing a truth and a perspective to hip hop that I’d never heard before. She got at your heartstrings. Who writes about this? Who talks about this kind of black girl pain? That was reserved for girlfriends and journals. “To Zion” perfectly captured what I’d gone through in the early stages of my pregnancy and the deep, deep, deep feelings of love I was experiencing for my daughter, Kaia, this new human being.