Thank You Hillary Clinton?

Okay, I have no time for foreplay today.

Recently, Jimmy Fallon had Secretary Hillary Clinton on his late night show, and during one segment, he paraded a group of white women across the stage to write fake “thank you” letters to Hillary Clinton. Now, let me offer a small disclaimer: I’m not sure they were all white women, because there were definitely one or two where I wasn’t quite sure, but there was literally a woman named Becky on that stage. Enough said.

And to top all that off, they added Miley Cyrus, in her best picnic basket right outside of a roadside country diner that’s guaranteed to have shit all over the toilets, at the end. We watch as Miley Cyrus “tearfully” asks Hillary for a hug as she calls Hillary a beacon of strength and hope and a voice of reason. Give me a fucking break.

I’m sorry. Where were these thank you letters during the 2016 election? Anybody know? I’ll wait.

Jimmy, you don’t have any black people on your staff? Oh, I’m sorry. Please don’t let me forget your personal jukeboxes, The Roots. Yes, even though they went from putting out banging albums to being your personal iPod, we can’t possibly forget about them. But seriously, there’s no black people in the writing room? Okay, fine, I’ll put that to the side. You mean to tell me that you couldn’t find one black woman to walk across that stage to write a letter to Hillary? There was no one in the audience? Hell, no one on the street?!  

I mean, 94 percent of us did vote for her in the election. We’re the ones who set aside our own internal battles and humbled ourselves to vote for a white woman who shooed us out of her events and blatantly ignored us when we tried to bring our issues to the front. Don’t even get me started about how she didn’t acknowledge us until she needed to parade the Mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown across the stage at the DNC.

We can’t write a damn thank you letter to tell her “thanks sis for not even acknowledging the fact that 94 percent of us voted for you while your own kin folk acted like you were the scum on the bottom of their shoe. Now that they’ve seen what they actually purchased in that election, they want to act like you’re the greatest thing since Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits.” This brings me to my second part.

Why are ya’ll wasting time writing thank you letters to Hillary when you really should be sending her letters of apology? Just like you hold black people responsible for the actions of every black person on the entire planet, we should be able to hold you responsible for the actions of every white person across the planet.

And trust me, ya’ll have a lot of shit to be held responsible for lately, but we can start here. Why aren’t you writing Hillary letters saying, “I’m sorry we let you down Hillary. I’m sorry that our white sisters didn’t have enough faith in you, that they didn’t trust you. I’m sorry that they would rather vote for a man that admitted to sexual assault than you. I’m sorry that we still refuse to acknowledge how we screwed up the election, even though we all know that if you had won, we would have tried to take all of the credit for it.

We’re sorry that we allowed ourselves to fall for a few stupid lines about emails when it’s clear that you weren’t the only one all along. We’re sorry that we laughed at the “lock her up” chants and his calls to shoot you. We seriously didn’t think it was a big deal. Some of us would rather hide in our house and cut eye holes in white sheets for our husbands than do something for the greater good. We are sorry beings who just aren’t sick of being sorry yet, but don’t give up on us! One day, we just might get it right.” 

And if anybody deserves a thank you note, it's black women. Hillary should write one to us. Yeah, I said it, and I meant it. We, black women, deserve a thank you note from Hillary. We were in the trenches campaigning for her, and we put aside a lot of her character flaws to do so.

The things that I mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg, and by all of my accounts, black women were NOT going to be included in her Cabinet (outside of Loretta Lynch, who was already Attorney General at that time). Ain’t that a kick in the head? To show up and show out for someone, and not even get an acknowledgement? A line in the end credits? Not even a footnote or an asterisk at the bottom. We would have gotten nothing, but we would have been okay with it. Why? Because we knew that she was better than the alternative.

The world would’ve been a better place with her in the White House. We knew it. We were willing to sacrifice our own internal discord to make sure that a white woman, who only called on us when she needed something, ascended to the highest position of power in the world. Thank you Hillary? No, thank US Hillary.

And it’s still, fuck you Miley Cyrus.