Posted on 04/26/2019 7:06:37 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Shortly after Sanders took the stage, Sayu Bhojwani, the founder and president of New American Leaders, asked him a pointed question about fighting white nationalism: “What do you believe is the federal government’s role to fight against the rise of white nationalism and white terrorist acts, and how do you plan to lead on that in your first year as president?”
Starting off by saying that the “demagoguery we are seeing from the Trump administration is not what this country is about” and that he would “do everything I can to help lead this country in a direction to end all forms of discrimination,” he then quickly pivoted to what has long been his core message: the need to address economic inequality. “The goal that we have got to establish is to bring our people together around an agenda that speaks to all people,” he said, an agenda that includes “guaranteeing health care to every man, woman, and child as a right, and not a privilege.” Sanders continued: “It means understanding that when we talk about minority communities, when we raise that federal minimum wage to a living wage of 15 bucks an hour, you’re going to do away with a lot of economic stress in this country. So those are some of the things I think we got to do.”
For all that Sanders has Done to embrace the language of combatting racial inequality and Better frame his economic platform as part of a platform of racial justice, he often fails to connect the dots in a way that demonstrates an intuitive or deeply felt grasp of the problem.
It was a curious and insufficient response to a very direct question, particularly at a time when the federal government is directing resources away from combating the threat of white nationalism and hate crimes are on the rise.
Sanders should be better at this by now. In 2015, shortly after one of his campaign speeches was disrupted by members of the Black Lives Matter movement and he was criticized for not taking the concerns of black Americans seriously, his campaign hurriedly released a racial justice platform that included everything from policing reforms to the restoration of voting rights. (This, as my colleague Katie McDonough wrote, “was the kind of responsive politics that can only really exist for a progressive candidate.”) The campaign brought on Symone Sanders, a young black progressive activist, as its national press secretary, who stressed to him that, in her words, “racial inequality and economic inequality are parallel issues.” After that, throughout the 2016 campaign, Sanders began to more consistently—though still unevenly—raise the need to target issues like mass incarceration and the racial wealth gap.
It’s worth examining his evolution on these issues. While Sanders is often derided for noting that he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington (as he was, understandably, on Wednesday at the She the People forum), it’s clear that his time in Chicago as a student activist was a formative one for him. What’s also true is that by the time he moved to Burlington, Vermont, and ran for mayor in 1981, he had largely changed his tune on issues like policing, and since his earliest days in public office, has had a laser-like focus on economic justice. And while he has often spoken out about issues that affect people of color, he typically frames them as issues that can and should be addressed by tackling economic ones. Take a speech he gave in Congress criticizing the 1994 crime bill, which he ultimately voted in favor of, championed by Bill Clinton and now-presidential candidate Joe Biden:
It is my firm belief that clearly there are people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them.
But it is also my view that through the neglect of our government and through a grossly irrational set of priorities, we are dooming today tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence. And, Mr. Speaker, all the jails in the world—and we already imprison more people per capita than any other country—and all of the executions… in the world will not make that situation right.
We can either educate or electrocute. We can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails. Mr. Speaker, let us create a society of hope and compassion, not one of hate and vengeance.
In 2014, Sanders reiterated those beliefs in a letter to the editor he wrote in response to the killing of teenager Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. “If there is anything that we can learn from the Ferguson tragedy, it should be a recognition that we need to address the extraordinary crises facing black youths,” he wrote. “That means, among other things, a major jobs program, job training and vastly improved educational opportunities.”
Sanders, like so many white progressives, has tended to erase the explicit racial dynamics that shape the injustice he’s describing.
But he has started to embraced a different language today—if unevenly. “Our campaign is about fundamentally ending the disparity of wealth and power in this country,” he said when he launched his presidential campaign earlier this year. “But as we do that, we must speak out against the disparity within the disparity”—the “racial disparities of wealth and income,” the “terrible level of police violence against unarmed people in the minority community,” and an “infant mortality rate in black communities [that] is more than double the rate for white communities.” (Earlier this week, Sanders also took a position—a lonely one in the current Democratic field—that incarcerated people should retain their voting rights, a proposal that would disproportionately benefit black men and women, though he framed the issue as one of democracy, not racial justice.)
On Wednesday, Sanders again raised those points, saying in his closing remarks: “Amidst all the income and wealth disparity at a national level, we have racial disparities as well.” He added:
When we talk about justice, we are also talking about the massive levels of racial disparities that exist in this country. It’s not just that we need health care for all people. We need to address the fact that infant mortality in the African American community is two and a half times what it is in the white community. That white families have ten times the wealth of black families. That in the criminal justice system, African Americans get arrested far more frequently than whites.
Sanders’s updated racial justice platform is one of the most wide-ranging and ambitiously progressive of all of the candidates, encompassing everything from the need to end cash bail to abolishing redlining. But a platform will not be enough to convince voters—for all that Sanders has done to embrace the language of combatting racial inequality and frame his economic platform as part of a platform of racial justice, he often fails to connect the dots in a way that demonstrates an intuitive or deeply felt grasp of the problem. For Sanders’s supporters, it can be frustrating how this lends to easy caricature—as an old white man who is out of touch and doesn’t get it. But it is a real problem for Sanders, running as one of the frontrunners in a racially diverse field that has to a large extent embraced some of his more radical reforms like Medicare for All. He needs more than just the policies—he needs a level of analysis that better integrates racial and economic justice and an ability to communicate that clearly.
Aimee Allison, the president and founder of She the People, had explained to the New York Times that “the broad thing I was hoping to do was to get a sense for the competency and comfort that each candidate had talking about racial, gender and economic justice. “Are they even comfortable talking about it, and can they engender trust?” Allison said. Sanders’s campaign will have to answer that question for itself.
Sanders is like the old Communist Five Year Plans that were tried over and over and always promising things Communism and Socialism was not capable of delivering. He’ll never get better. He’ll die a failure, too.
He's old and not too bright to begin with. The old dog never had many tricks.
Whenever I hear him speak I’m reminded of Mr. Magoo but more goofy.
What white terrorist attacks??????
He’s got that arm waving thing as well, like Bob Frank O’Rourke.
Is that from eating too much soy? Kasich has it too.
Isn’t it nice how the left conveniently substitutes the word, “nationalist”, when they really mean, “supremacist”?
I’m a white nationalist, but definitely not a white supremacist.
Didn't you hear?
It's so bad in Chicago that even black people are putting on white face and attacking black people.
77 is too old to change, and if the guy has stuck with socialism all these years doesn’t that tell you that he’s not somebody who changes?
What white terrorist attacks???
I think that’s what they call “breathing when white”.
What white terrorist attacks???
I think that’s what they call “breathing when white”.
“What do you believe is the federal government’s role to fight against the rise of white nationalism and white terrorist acts, and how do you plan to lead on that in your first year as president?”>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Bernie knows that the leftist liberal fascists are challenging him. And he also knows that this is an attack on the notion of patriots being described as nationalists. The question is based on a fundamental untruth.
Dr. Sayu Bhojwani is a liberal fascist of the 1st water. She should immigrate to Zimbabwe under the tender mercy of Mugabe, a thing she is trying to establish in America, via incremental colonization of the United States by anti American foreign nationals, of which she is one.
exactly- this isn’t the 60’s anymore when the4 liberals were ordering the KKK to attack black people- what attacks are they referring to these days? The ONLY people i see attacker anyone are liberals, blacks included, attacking conservatives who wear MAGA hats or Pres Trump T-Shirts
Don’t you know that the majority of terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11 have been committed by “White Nationalists™”? It’s true, just ask Cory Booker. (Bear in mind that having voted for Donald Trump in 2016 is considered a terrorist attack by these morons.)
I have no doubt that the failed Jussie Smollett hoax was orchestrated by DNC higher-ups both to stir up race riots and to provide anti-Trump talking points for this stage of the presidential primaries. This is why there was such a quick cover-up, and why Chicago’s mayor kept insisting that Trump should “stay out of it”.
“What white terrorist attacks??????”
what “white nationalism”?
Ummm, Michael Brown was a liar, violent, and a thief... The idea that he was an innocent victim in need of 'education and a good job' is nuts.
Sanders and the Left know what is causing the violence in the black neighborhoods. When Sanders says this,
“If there is anything that we can learn from the Ferguson tragedy, it should be a recognition that we need to address the extraordinary crises facing black youths. That means, among other things, a major jobs program, job training and vastly improved educational opportunities,”
he is avoiding the real problem: The illegal industry in the black neighborhoods. Black youth would have all the educational opportunities, all the job training and jobs handed out like candy and they would go for the drug dealing. In fact, school is not for education, it is a drug market and a place to chase women. They can earn far more money selling drugs than any student coming out of a university with a Doctorate. It all money tax free. For them, that black kid trying to get an education is the stupid one.
Sanders should know this and he sure isn’t talking about it. I wonder if he is on the take from the Drug Cartels?
Sanders is being derided here because he wasn’t an intersectional politician before intersectional politics existed.
Honestly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer commie.
Don’t forget the rash of “fake but accurate” hate attacks perpetrated by liberals on themselves to show how violent conservatives are!
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