The Last (Hopefully) On Bernie Sanders And Race... [View all]

[WillyT]

Why Bernie Sanders doesn't talk about race
Dara Lind - Vox
May 27, 2015, 1:50 p.m. ET

<snip>
...

But there's a reason I say "those progressives" instead of just "progressives": because not everyone in the Democratic base shares those particular passions, or those passions alone. For other progressives — many of them black or Latino — economic inequality is important, but so is racial inequality. They're extremely concerned about racial bias in policing, and about ending mass incarceration. They're concerned about the treatment of unauthorized immigrants, and about protecting voting rights (an issue like campaign finance where progressives are worried the integrity of the political system is at stake — and where the outcome doesn't look good for them).

And Bernie Sanders doesn't speak to those concerns. He didn't mention those issues in his campaign launch yesterday, or in his email announcement to his supporters last month, and they're not on the issues page of his website.

This isn't an accidental oversight. These simply aren't issues Sanders is passionate about in the way he's passionate about economic injustice. When my colleague Andrew Prokop profiled Sanders last year, he pointed out astutely that Sanders's career has been "laser-focused on checking the power of the wealthy above all else." Sanders believes in racial equality, sure, but he believes it will only come as the result of economic equality. To him, focusing on racial issues first is merely treating the symptom, not the disease.

Even as a student at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, influenced by the hours he spent in the library stacks reading famous philosophers, (Sanders) became frustrated with his fellow student activists, who were more interested in race or imperialism than the class struggle. They couldn't see that everything they protested, he later said, was rooted in "an economic system in which the rich controls, to a large degree, the political and economic life of the country."

"Bernie is in many ways a 1930s radical as opposed to a 1960s radical," says professor Garrison Nelson of the University of Vermont. "The 1930s radicals were all about unions, corporations — basically economic issues rather than cultural ones." Richard Sugarman, an old friend who worked closely with Sanders during his early political career, concurs. "We spent much less time on social issues and much more time on economic issues," he told me. "Bernard always began with the question of, 'What is the economic fairness of the situation?'

So while there's one group of progressives who look at Sanders and see someone who has spent his career voicing their most deeply held beliefs about America, there are others who don't. And they don't have a Bernie Sanders — a decades-long champion — of their own in the race. Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb was interested in mass incarceration before it was cool, but also thinks the Democratic Party needs to do more to appeal to the white working class — so it's hard to imagine his campaign becoming the standard-bearer for nonwhite progressive concerns. And while former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley has been trying to make a name for himself by running to Hillary Clinton's left on immigration, the protests over the killing of Freddie Gray and police behavior in Baltimore have reminded America of the role O'Malley played as mayor of Baltimore in creating the system that's so dysfunctional today.

<snip>

More: http://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/8671135/bernie-sanders-race

Put in a similar way...

To be clear, Sanders hasn’t avoided talking about race throughout his career because he’s a bigot. His motivations have been unsentimental and practical (again: Vermont is about as diverse as a Simon & Garfunkel concert). But they’ve been ideological, too. “Sanders believes in racial equality, sure,” writes Lind, “but he believes it will only come as the result of economic equality.” A politics of racial justice that neglects the question of economic power — or treats it as a secondary, separate issue — is, in Sanders’ mind, equivalent to “treating the symptom, not the disease.”

Link: http://www.salon.com/2015/05/29/hillary_clintons_latest_hard_choice_how_will_she_solve_her_bernie_sanders_problem/