General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why all the hate towards Cornell West? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Bernie led with economic issues because nobody else was doing that. I agree that he should have incorporated race into his proposals from the get-go(he did after a month or so, and had stronger language on that than HRC when he did).
But even when he did, there were endless threads here arguing that NOTHING had changed, that Bernie still hadn't proved he cared(I think that's probably the reason the freedom movement era stuff kept getting brought back up), even threads screaming that Bernie and his supporters didn't give a damn that young POC are getting murdered by the cops.
I think it read to a lot of younger Sanders supporters as if the only way they could prove they cared about racism was to switch to supporting HRC-in other words, to give up on fighting for anything they cared about.
As to the Stockholm Syndrome post...look, the guy who posted that was an idiot, but that wasn't the fault of the entire Sanders movement and a lot of us did call him out on that(he's banned now, and I'd say deservedly so...I've wondered what his actual motivations were for his comments on race). How many more times is that thread going to be brought back up and treated as if it was something Bernie himself posted? It was a world-historical stupid thing for that poster to post...but we weren't COLLECTIVELY responsible for his posting it. It was that guy...not all of us.
What the Sanders campaign was and is trying to do, in our flawed way, was to make this a campaign in which the victims of hate and the victims of greed and exploitation(a fair amount of whom are the same people) joined forces in a crusade for justice for all.
Most of us would argue that both justice struggles need to prevail if either is to win(HRC seems to think that it's possible to just address institutional bigotry and grassroots bigotry in isolation to economic justice-that was tried in the Sixties, and the result was the white backlash, a phenomenon largely driven by the way economic interests used things like property values to stoke and spread white working-class racism).
The restoration of the natural alliance between the justice struggles is still a worthwhile objective, a necessary thing if we are stop any forms of group injustice aga all. It will be a tragedy if it doesn't.
And I'll end by saying this:
If HRC gets elected and sells out the AA community, the first people you will see joining POC in the protests against that will be people who were in the Sanders campaign and the continuing Sanders movement that will be built. I hope you can accept us as allies in those struggles when they come.
Thank you for your thoughtful posts in this exchange. I've learned from them.