New York Times: Bill Clinton Paid $20,000 to Play Golf in All-White Club

You want to talk about elitism? Well how about paying $20,000 simply for the dubious privilege of playing golf away from black people? According to The New York Times, Bill Clinton, often called the "first black president", was a member of an all-white golf club in Arkansas, The Country Club of Little Rock. An excerpt from the March 23, 1992 article reads thus:

"A guy asked me to play nine holes of golf," he [Bill Clinton] said on Friday. "It was the only place we had time to play. I should not have done it."

But he did not explain why he had played at the club for years despite its all-white membership. Today, Mike Gauldin, his spokesman in Arkansas, was asked that question; he said, "No one ever complained about it before."
Mr. Clinton's mea culpa has not defused the criticism. In New York today, his chief rival, Edmund G. Brown Jr. of California, said that "even George Bush wouldn't dare play golf at an all-white golf club."

Now here is where things get interesting. Clinton paid $20,000 in initiation fees and a $150 monthly fee for the dubious "privilege" of playing in a white-only club.

Mr. Clinton's chief of staff in the Governor's office, William Bowen, said that he and others were sponsoring nonwhite candidates for membership at Little Rock, but that none of the applications had been acted on.

Little Rock Country Club's members are admitted by a board of governors. The initiation fee is said to be $20,000, with dues of $150 a month.

I don't know about you, but if I was stupid and insecure enough to shell out $20,000 to play golf with a bunch of racist snobs and pay a $150 a month fee, it's a given I or any half-sentient biped would know all there is about this club and who its members are beforehand. And I don't know about you, but if I ever came to spend $20,000 to play golf with a litter of slack-jawed Arkansas bigots, I would eventually disembowel myself with the sharp end of a broken, rusty 9-iron in shame. Even if others did not judge me by the company I keep, I know God does, and I will inevitably judge myself.

That said, Clinton's later protestations that he didn't know of their all-white policy after all those years falls on deaf ears, especially since he didn't leave the club until after The New York Times hounded him about it.

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