2016 Postmortem
Showing Original Post only (View all)The "PoC don't support Bernie because they don't know him" claim is actually true [View all]
Despite all evidence to the contrary, many of Bernie Sanders supporters continue to claim that the only reason he is struggling with black voters is that "they don't know him," but if when they learn that "he's been fighting for civil rights for PoC his entire life" they will flock to support him.
But if Bernie really were the great civil rights crusader that his supporters claim he is, he wouldn't have to be "introduced" to black voters. They would already know who he is and what he has been doing for their community.
Bernie's problem is not that black people don't know enough about his record - and if only they are told about it again and again, louder and louder, they will fall in love with him, too. The problem is that if his civil rights record were as robust and exceptional as his supporters claim, they wouldn't have to explain it to black people since they would already know about it.
And this is not an instance where anyone can claim with a straight face that "Bernie doesn't seek attention or glory." This isn't about seeking attention. If he were actually working so hard for black people, the people he's supposedly been fighting so hard for would know it because they're in the arena fighting, too and they know that Bernie was not in the arena with them - at least not long enough or meaningfully enough to develop relationships with any of the people there or even to make enough of an impression that anyone remembered him.
This doesn't mean he hasn't supported civil rights for PoC - he clearly has. But for the past 50 years, he's been doing it from the sidelines, far away from the real, hard, day-to-day work that people who are fighting for civil rights must do. While he has occasionally leaned into the ring to offer encouragement and support, he has not been a presence in the arena. The people who ARE fighting in the ring doing that work know the other people who are also doing it - and if they don't know them firsthand, there aren't many degrees of separation between them. And they don't need to be introduced to them and have their record explained to them after they decide to run for President. If Bernie had been such a fighter for civil rights over the past several decades, black folk would already know it and Bernie's supporters (most of whom also have never been spent any time in the arena) would not need to try to explain it to them.
The fact that this isn't the case should tell you something because it speaks volumes about why Bernie is having so much difficulty getting the support of more than a handful of black voters.