Before diving into what shouldn’t be controversial article, but inevitably will be, I want to set the record straight. While this may come as a shock to my friends and family, I am indeed not black, nor do I know what it is like to be black. Through this article I am not attempting to explain the black experience, or pass judgement on the black community. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I do benefit from white privilege, but given my druthers that privilege would just be the norm for everyone regardless of skin color. And finally, I am not attempting to be patronizing or…
Before diving into what shouldn’t be controversial article, but inevitably will be, I want to set the record straight.
While this may come as a shock to my friends and family, I am indeed not black, nor do I know what it is like to be black. Through this article I am not attempting to explain the black experience, or pass judgement on the black community. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I do benefit from white privilege, but given my druthers that privilege would just be the norm for everyone regardless of skin color. And finally, I am not attempting to be patronizing or paternal.
With that out of the way, let’s begin.
I was excited when I first heard about the Black Lives Matter Movement following the death of Trayvon Martin. As the number of unarmed black men gunned down by white police officers (or in Trayvon’s case, cop wannabes) I was relieved to see a growing backlash.
Our country has never adequately acknowledged its race problem, and yet racism has always existed at virtually every level of our society. It is institutional, systemic, and cultural. The problem with this willful ignorance is that so long as black Americans are overrepresented in prisons and below the poverty line, while simultaneously underrepresented in government; so long as one of America’s two political parties exploits white fears of minorities (the Southern strategy) to get elected, we will never live up to our ideals as a nation. But not only that, the economy will suffer.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement promised to be the medicine to our ailment: to take racism head on and crush it. With a simple message, it spread around America, capturing the hearts and minds of not only black Americans, but people like me.
That said, I was bewildered and disappointed to read that BLM was targeting Bernie Sanders. It all started at Netroots Nation where the Independent senator from Vermont was confronted by BLM activists, and did not say the name “Sandra Bland,” the black woman who recently died in police custody in Texas. Then again in Seattle, Bernie found himself the target of another protest.
The arguments we’ve heard thus far from BLM have been that Sanders doesn’t focus enough on race as an issue separate from economic opportunity, believing the latter to be a panacea. I can appreciate that argument. Still though, to me and progressives like me, there is a disconnect that we are struggling to understand. Here is why:
1) Bernie’s civil rights record:
Throughout his life/career Sanders has been a champion of civil rights–earning him a 93 percent rating by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on his voting record, and a 97 percent from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
When he was in college at the University of Chicago, Sanders was a student activist, involved in the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for which he was an organizer. He earned himself a reputation as an “outside agitator” when he posted flyers calling out police brutality. In 1962, he found himself under arrest for protesting segregation in public schools. Then in 1963, he participated in the March on Washington where, he saw Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his “I Have A Dream” speech.
Some have suggested that this activism should not be cheered simply because it was the “right thing to do.” But such a position demonstrates a complete lack of historical understanding, and trivializes what the protesters went through. In the 1960’s, civil rights activism was extremely dangerous work.
Of course, Sanders didn’t stop after the Civil Rights Movement. He continued to ally himself with the cause, endorsing Jesse Jackson for President twice. Sanders was instrumental to Jackson’s win in the Vermont caucuses in 1988.
Perhaps the most relevant piece of Bernie Sanders’ past is the fact that he broke with Democrats, then with the New Democrats, over Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. I’ve written it before: Clinton’s worst mistake while in office was ceding the narrative to the GOP. One way he did that was by passing legislation, which cut the number of people receiving government assistance, and led to a huge spike in extreme poverty.
Cutting welfare has been a Republican initiative for decades, and major part of the GOP’s Southern Strategy. Republicans, and Reagan in particular, popularized the idea that welfare provided for lazy black people who didn’t want to work, with money earned by hard-working white Americans. Lee Atwater, the godfather of Republican strategy, admitted this fact openly in an interview I have cited many times.
With that in mind, when Bill Clinton, the first Democrat since the Reagan Realignment, pushed for so-called “welfare reform” with the support of his party in Congress, and his wife, Hillary, Sanders called it out as dog whistle politics, and voted against it:
“The crown jewel of the Republican agenda is their so-called welfare reform proposal. The bill, which combines an assault on the poor, women and children, minorities, and immigrants is the grand slam of scapegoating legislation, and appeals to the frustrations and ignorance of the American people along a wide spectrum of prejudices.”
Other examples of Bernie’s civil rights advocacy are his opposition to the Drug War, private prisons, immigrant detention facilities, and police brutality. He was talking about these problems long before the other candidates, and long before he was running for president.
In August of 2014, following the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, Sanders proposed a jobs bill to empower poor and minority communities. He also called for a federal investigation into the incident. Speaking on the matter, Sanders said, “All of us have a responsibility to make sure that what happened in Ferguson never happens again…We also must recognize, however, that there is an economic crisis facing our nation’s youth, particularly young African-Americans.”
Today, Sanders continues to speak out and fight against the same problems he’s fought since college: economic injustice, police brutality, and racial inequality. The day after being interrupted by BLM protesters, he released a far-reaching plan to combat racial inequality in America that calls for, among other things, the demilitarization of police forces, body cameras on officers, an end to mandatory minimum sentences on nonviolent crimes, and an expansion and restoration of the Voting Rights Act.
It is true he tends to view economic opportunity as the means to solve America’s problems. That might seem to some as though he’s sweeping race under the rug, but there is no denying his record.
2) The other candidates’ civil rights records:
I cannot say the same thing for the rest of the candidates as I can for Bernie Sanders. It is worth mentioning here that Hillary Clinton defended her husband’s Welfare Reform legislation as recently as 2008. She called the legislation a success in spite of evidence that it hurt the poorest Americans–and minorities. (I recently wrote that Hillary is straddling two narratives like her New Democrat husband before her…this is an example of that.)
The GOP continues to use the Southern Strategy. After white supremacist, Dylan Roof, shot up a black church in Charleston, SC, several Republican presidential candidates found themselves in an awkward position because avoiding the topic of race directly is central to the strategy. Jeb Bush came out and said he wasn’t sure race was the motivating factor. Rick Santorum called it an attack on religious liberty.
If the standard has become such that Bernie Sanders needs to be “held accountable for his actions,” he is surely not the only one — or even the worst offender. This brings me to my last point.
3) The tactics:
Some have suggested that targeting Sanders was the right move because he has responded with his recent announcement of a plan for tackling racial inequality, and hired a black woman as the face of his campaign. Alright, but consider this:
Sanders has, throughout his career, shown a willingness to sit down with minority groups, and have a dialogue. A private meeting might have sufficed. Still, at the very least, the protesters were offered speaking time after Sanders, and they could have done that.
Instead, what could have been a constructive, educational dialogue quickly devolved into yelling and emphatic gesturing. The protesters shouted down the event organizer, refused to even shake Sanders’ hand, and accused the entire crowd of racism. To an outside observer the incident itself was jarring.
While it certainly generated a newsworthy spectacle, this was not the kind of demonstration that wins people over, or furthers the discussion of race in America. It promoted the false narrative that Sanders is unsympathetic to the cause of civil rights, and it alienated potential allies among his supporters, both at the rally and online. If BLM turns off the left wing of the Democratic Party, who will its allies be? Regardless of whether or not it should, these actions have called into question the movement’s motivations, and what impact if any it will have, or wants to have, on the political dialogue.
And that is a shame, because as I mentioned in the beginning, the black community is in crisis in America. Every day black men and women are killed under a system that has been oppressive for generations. The direness of the situation makes cooperation on the left all the more necessary.
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