Hillary Clinton addressed the the racially charged joke included in a skit she participated in over the weekend, telling Cosmopolitan on Tuesday that she was just a participant in New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s skit.
“Well, look, it was Mayor de Blasio’s skit. He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he’s already talked about,” Clinton told Cosmopolitan when asked whether the joke was inappropriate.
Clinton made a brief appearance in a skit at the annual Inner Circle dinner on Saturday, where she joked to de Blasio, “Thanks for the endorsement, Bill. Took you long enough.”
“Sorry Hillary, I was running on C.P. time,” he responded, referencing the negative stereotype “Colored People Time.”
Leslie Odom Jr., a star of the Broadway show “Hamilton,” who was also participating in the skit, responded to de Blasio, “That’s not – I don’t like jokes like that, Bill.”
Clinton then jumped in to joke that she’s dealt with “cautious politician time.”
Following outcry over the joke, de Blasio defended the skit.
“It was clearly a staged show, it was a scripted show. The whole idea was to do the counterintuitive,” he told CNN. “Every actor involved, including Hillary Clinton and Leslie Odom Jr., thought it was a joke on a different convention, that was the whole idea of it, so I think people are missing the point here.”
Correction: The original version of this post incorrectly stated that Clinton told de Blasio, “I don’t like jokes like that” in the Saturday skit. That line belonged to Leslie Odom Jr. We regret the error.
What, there’s no intern to throw under the bus?
it wasn’t Clinton who said she doesn’t like jokes like that (in the “skit”). it was the guy from Hamilton.
Hillary likely won’t have the luxury of deferring come November.
Ooh, you better rethink that, Hill. First, I don’t think DeBlasio will fit under a bus and second, it would go against his whole Vision Zero program.
Christ, there’s no bus to throw anyone under. This is an extremely common inside joke among black folks about ourselves. Attempts to turn this into something else, into some racial joke, only really reveal your own ignorance about black culture. And continuing to try to paint either Clinton or DiBlasio as some kind of racist is, I believe, one of the numerous examples of why Sanders is doing so poorly with black folks.