Discussion for article #239457
Phony right-wing outrage from the Faux noise machine that Sanders hates blacks in 3…2…1…
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Actually the group that shouted him off stage needs to apologize to him. Flaming a-holes.
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Of course he doesn’t have to apologize. You do that when you’ve harmed someone and he hasn’t. BLM can always vote for the FOX candidates and avoid Senator Sanders completely. If the BLM folks want to buy into the notion that Sanders or Clinton are racists bigots that don’t care about them they can have at it. If they’re so fucking misguided ( and they seem to be ) they can be played like that fuck 'em. Right now I care about black lives but don’t give a shit about BLM. And anyone can do that.
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Damn right you don’t need to apologize, Bernie.
Storming a stage and stealing the microphone from a presidential candidate…this gives BLM a good name? They must be taking stage etiquette advice from Kanye West.
Asshats.
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I think this is getting out of control now. I do think Bernie had a blind spot concerning racial matters. My charitable reading on it is that being Senator in a state without a lot of urban areas and a very small black population, some matters that concern that group were not of immediate concern to his constituency. I was fine with him being confronted at Netroots Nation but the continued piling on and what happened in Seattle has turned me off. I was there in the streets for weeks after the Ferguson non- indictment, so I’m familiar with the BLM movement. The thing is, now that the nation’s attention has been gotten, what do we want? Do we want catharsis? An extended primal scream? I’m not here for that.
There are two bills introduced by John Conyers that I never hear the “leaders” of the movement talk about would be a great start to getting things turned around. Rather than getting a one day sensationalist news story for storming Bernie’s speeches and the sniping with his campaign, the movement should have organized to have us at every town hall this summer pointedly asking their congressperson whether they would vote for this bill or not- and why. You know, like the tea party did to the Dems in August of 2010. But it seems like right now either there is a lack of organization or people are more interested in catharsis than actual change. No matter which it is, the movement will die on the vine if there isn’t a legislative aspect to it.
Despite my criticisms, I support the movement and am heavily invested in it succeeding. I hope that better tactics are employed in the future.
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I think that Sanders views racial injustice as being a subset of economic injustice. I think in this he’s tone-deaf, as attention must be paid to the very real animus this country has toward blacks, but I also happen to think that he’s fundamentally right. The oligarchs will kill to keep their advantages, and they find the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc., that divide us to be convenient tools to that end.
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As a white liberal guy, I’m really sickened and appalled by the unwillingness of so many white liberals to extend a modicum of empathy or understanding to #BLM. I doubt we can begin to imagine what it’s like to belong to a minority that is systematically impoverished, incarcerated, and even killed for petty offenses or no offense at all, but FFS can we at least pretend to make the effort? For everyone getting all red in the face about the activist engagement with Sanders, look—when choosing your battles is a luxury you can’t afford, you go to war on the battlefields you can reach. The all-white Democratic primary field represents #BLM’s closest ostensible allies, and it’s pretty clear that none of the candidates quite get it. Tamir Rice was summarily gunned down for being a child while black. Any candidate who fails to appreciate the gravity of horrors like that deserves to have their campaign events disrupted, and does owe an apology.
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We’re in agreement, I think. He’s blind to the fact that economic inequality is just an arrow in the quiver of racial injustice- not the root problem, but a tool in helping it along. Redlining, for example, as far as economic inequality goes, was a tool used toward the greater goals of racial injustice.
As far as the country as a whole, he’s absolutely right on economic inequality. I think Elizabeth Warren(huge fan) is much more sensitive to the historical racial elements and nuances of income inequality than Bernie is(was?).
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To be rather blunt, Senator Sanders has been a little overwhelmed by the speed at which his campaign has taken off. This has created a bit of chaos when it comes to reaching out to various groups in the coalition he is going to need to win.
Senator Sanders has quite often talked about issues vital to the #BLM movement. The problem is that he does not tend to frame them in terms of racial issues because, in many ways, Senator Sanders doesn’t see them as racial issues. For instance, he has talked about the need to demilitarize our police forces and eliminate poverty- two issues key to saving Black lives.
The only real blind spot I believe Senator Sanders has is regarding gun control- which he sees as a State’s Rights Issue. This is really the only urban/rural issue where Sanders has some difficulty. Vermont is not as rural as our image appears. We are about three-quarters forest. While Vermont is the 49th state regarding population, we are the 30th regarding population density. While we do not have huge cities, places like Bennington and Rutland have pretty high density populations and all the problems that come with that. The only thing we don’t have a lot of is murder and gun crime.
Beyond that, Senator Sanders is one of the few members of Congress to have participated in the March on Washington and who has been outspoken about Civil Rights his whole life. After Net Roots, Sanders reached out to his contacts among the networks of Civil Rights Groups, including the ones he use to coordinate for, and put together a Civil Justice platform that was ready to go pretty quickly.
As for #BLM…they are a decentralized group which means that, outside of these disruptions, they don’t have any political power, nor any money with which to affect change. They want to cause disruptions because, like the Occupy Wall Street crowds, they believe that the only way to affect change is through protest.
Larry Wilmore finally did address the issue of the disruptions and I liked what he said “Black Lives matter, but so do Black manners!”
And just to point this out, Senator Sanders appeared as one of the first rounds of panelists on the Nightly Show.
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Can you summarize what these bills would do?
Have either Sanders or Clinton mentioned the legislation in their campaign appearances? If not, they should be.
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But he’s wrong. There’s a lot of overlap between economic inequality and racial injustice, but they are not the same. Economic inequality is a tool of racial injustice for blacks in this country, while for whites, it’s the root of a deep systemic problem. The relationship between them is nuanced depending on your race.
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Specifically, H.R. 2875, Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act of 2015 aims to:
· Help improve standards for law enforcement accreditation and encourage law enforcement agencies to obtain accreditation.
· Provide grants to state and local government and private organizations to develop pilot programs to implement best practices focused on law enforcement recruitment, training, hiring, management, and oversight of officers.
· Authorize funding assistance to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Community Relations Service.
· Create a task force within the Justice Department to coordinate investigations and cases involving instances of law enforcement misconduct that violates federal law.
· Establish better data collection concerning traffic stops, pedestrian stops and detentions, and use of deadly force by andagainst law enforcement officers.
S. 1038 / H.R. 2581 WOULD CREATE A NATIONAL PROHIBITION AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING BY LAW ENFORCEMENT
The End Racial Profiling Act has now been introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senator Cardin (MD) (S. 1038) and in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (MI) (H.R. 2851). The End Racial Profiling Act comprehensively addresses the insidious practice of racial profiling by law enforcement on five levels: first, it clearly defines the racially discriminatory practice of racial profiling by law enforcement at all levels; second, it creates a federal prohibition against racial profiling; thirdly, it mandates data collection so we can fully assess the true extent of the problem; fourth, it provides funding for the retraining of law enforcement officials on how to discontinue and prevent the use of racial profiling; and fifth, it holds law enforcement agencies that continue to use racial profiling accountable.
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The problem is- what is he going to be able to do about racism? He can’t tell the media not to run racist stereotypes. He can’t force states like South Carolina to tear down every single Confederate Monument and Confederate Flag in the state. What he can do is push laws alleviating economic inequality, force police forces to give up their military weapons, push sensitivity training for law enforcement…the problem is that no President is going to be able to affect change to the core racism because that is an issue of Free Speech and Press. He can denounce the speech, but he can’t stop it. He has spoken out quite clearly against the terrorist acts perpetuated against Blacks, but he cannot ban the speech that created those acts.
The problem here may be that Sanders is a rather pragmatic person and he’s focusing on what he can change as opposed to what he cannot. If we want to start putting the kibosh on the racism flowing through the media, we have to target the media- which is something I’ve been doing, honestly.
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As a white, liberal woman I could not agree more. It makes me sad to hear some "liberal’ voices here taking the positions they are.
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I totally agree.
I’m not a person who is looking for catharsis. I could give two shits about symbolic measures. That’s why I mentioned objective, measurable goals in my original post. That’s the definition of pragmatism. If he wants to show his pragmatism, he should use his bully pulpit to get behind those bills, I think. He has a lot of media attention these days and he can use his message about income inequality to pivot to two of the biggest constituencies of the Democratic party’s concerns- racial inequality in the area of criminal justice and immigration issues. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to weave those two issues into his messaging. The fact that HRC is speaking stronger on it than him is unfortunate.
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The summer of 1967, the year BEFORE King was assassinated, is called The Long Hot Summer because there were 159 race riots in the US.
LBJ did what politician do. He put together a blue ribbon commission, The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders a.k.a. the Kerner Commission, to investigate the causes. Guess what they found?
They are not flaming assholes just because what they did is uncomfortable. This is what activism looks like. I don’t remember all this bitching when the dreamers were interrupting town halls and speeches or when the LGBT community was crying out?. Why are BLM not entitled to be heard and make their point.
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Bingo. I personally am envious of the way that the Latino community haven’t given themselves wholesale to the Democratic party. It gives them leverage. I wish that my community had some of that leverage instead of being taken as a given every election cycle we will vote Dem 85%+.
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