President Bill Clinton has one of the highest approval ratings among African American of any US leader – past or present – but some blacks are questioning whether he deserved such support.

One respected leftist black scholar, professor Manning Marable of Columbia University, drew scorn from his peers recently when he referred to Clinton as “a positive good” and even “a black president”.

Nobel laureate and novelist Toni Morrison last year made the same claim, contending that the Republican Party wanted Clinton impeached because his roots in a poor, single-parent household and his friendships with African Americans made him “our first black president”.

That view is in a distinct minority among most black leaders and intellectuals, many of whom regard Clinton as a political opportunist who has frequently snubbed African Americans.

“This is the most dangerous white man to sit in the White House this century,” argued Tony Monteiro, a professor at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, at the Socialist Scholars Conference, held over the past weekend at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

He sneered at African Americans “who might be confused” about Clinton’s race. “Clinton is a master of disguise,” Monteiro contended.

“The empathy he shows black people is patently contrived…with this Democratic Party in power, you don’t need a Republican Party.”

Monteiro pointed to Clinton’s support for draconian anti-crime measures, which have led to rising prison incarceration rates for African Americans and to a restriction in ‘habeas corpus’ appeals challenging the use of the death penalty.

Clinton’s emphasis on law and order, Monteiro argued, earned him the label of “a pro- police-brutality president”.

Angela Ards, a fellow at the Nation Institute, a New York-based research group, added that Clinton has pushed for a shift toward building more prisons and hiring more police, rather than investing in education or other social policies. In California, she said, spending on prisons has been double the level of spending on public schools in recent years.

Even Marable, despite his defense of Clinton, cautioned that the modern-day United States has become a prison state for many African Americans, Latinos and poor whites.

He noted at the weekend conference that 1.9 million people are in federal, state or county jails currently, and that the US prison industry hires more people than any ‘Fortune 500′ company except for General Motors, the automobile giant.

“We are being dissed (disrespected) in the very house that we constructed,” Marable said of African Americans.

Scholars and politicians disagreed about how much impact Clinton’s own policies have had on black America. But it remained clear that, despite African Americans’ stagnant fortunes for much of the past decade, Clinton has ridden high with black support.

Clinton’s approval ratings among African American voters normally stood above 90 percent and were particularly high when he needed support the most.

Over the past year, when the president faced impeachment on perjury allegations about his sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, black voters tipped the edge for Democrats during November legislative elections in many key regions.

The Democrat’s November gains in turn were a major factor in convincing Senate leaders to wrap up impeachment proceedings this February without removing Clinton.

“Without the African American vote…the Democratic Party would have been down the tubes,” Joe Beasley, southern regional director of the National Rainbow Coalition, told IPS after the November vote. “African Americans must be respected, and they should reciprocate what we’re doing in kind.”

Despite Clinton’s heavy black support, however, many black leaders have a long list of grievances against Clinton, beginning with his first presidential campaign in 1992.

Then-Arkansas Governor Clinton earned the wrath of many black leaders when he oversaw the execution of a mentally-impaired black Arkansan, Ricky Ray Rector, and attacked the rap songs of Sister Souljah in what Ards and others have called a ploy to attract white votes.

Since then, Clinton has supported stiff prison sentencing policies, including mandatory drug sentences which punish users of ‘crack’ cocaine more than those of powdered cocaine – a disparity which experts claim disproportionately penalised blacks.

In 1996, he rode to re-election after signing a Republican- approved bill to cut off all direct federal welfare payments.

Nevertheless, Clinton’s stance on race is complex, as Marable and others have noted. The president has appointed many African Americans to several Cabinet positions and has authorised the work of a special panel on racial issues, led by black scholar John Hope Franklin.

His closest advisers include several prominent African Americans, including lawyer-lobbyist Vernon Jordan of the Akin, Gump legal firm, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder of the National Rainbow Coalition and a “spiritual counselor” to the Clinton family.

Part of the problem is that Clinton’s Democratic Party has relied on black voters heavily ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration during 1933-45, and have needed to do little to earn that vote.

Beasley argued that black voters should rally behind a third party, representing progressive causes, as an alternative to support for Republicans or Democrats.

Ards told the Socialist Scholars Conference that many successful black leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, have built grassroots movements on issues like police brutality while remaining largely free of the Democrats.