Is there any state where Sanders is winning the black vote? I know he's getting crushed in South Carolina and nationally.
Hillary won Nevada because black people backed Clinton more than 3 to 1. Sanders actually won Latinos... by eight points! (According to
entrance polls which Clinton's side disputes-- either way, she was supposed to beat him soundly with Latinos and they were the group everyone was watching). Nevada could be the beginning of a downward spiral for the Sanders campaign and it was the black community that decided the result there.
Sanders seems to have the academic class with blacks and that's about it-- Clinton has the political establishment and the masses. It seems to all be on the basis of Bill Clinton's reputation and Obama making her Secretary of State in 2009. That seems to be a wall Sanders just can't break through. I don't know what more he can do.
Black thinkers like Bernie Sanders. They've studied the Clintons' true cost
Steven W Thrasher
Spike Lee is the latest black public intellectual to endorse Bernie Sanders and to question the sanity of black voters and politicians pledging their allegiance to the Clintons, who have done as much harm to black America as any living political couple. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am mystified by robust black support for Bill and
Hillary Clinton.
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing helped me
wake up about race in America when I first watched it as a teenager. That’s why I was delighted to read that Spike Lee
encouraged South Carolina democrats to “wake up” in a
radio ad on Tuesday and to vote for “Brother Bernie”.
Bill Clinton governed through playing to white fears by hurting, locking up or even executing black Americans. He left the campaign trail in 1992 to
oversee the
execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man so mentally incapacitated, he reportedly did not eat the dessert from his final meal
because he was “saving it for later”. When in office, Bill Clinton
ended welfare for poor children and destroyed countless black families through a crime bill even he
now admits made mass incarceration worse, while Hillary Clinton would go out and whip up support for this accelerated disenfranchisement and marginalization of black America, even when it meant
referring to children as “superpredators”.
The case against Clintonian neoliberalism is compelling. I am glad to see black thinkers making a case for Sanders’ democratic socialism and its potential to address structural racism as an alternative. If anyone is smart enough to effectively make Sanders’ case to black America, it would be the intellectual leaders who have endorsed him thus far.
Take Spike Lee. He is one of the contemporary black geniuses who have helped the nation (and me personally) reconsider race in transformative ways – and the latest to be feeling the Bern. Or Cornel West, who has been stumping for “Brother Bernie” for
months. Just as I understood race differently after watching Crooklyn and Jungle Fever, I grew to understand black liberation theology and the radical potential of Christianity by reading West’s
books – his influence been immeasurable. And, like much of America, I learned how to better think about
the case for reparations after Ta-Nehisi Coates made it in the Atlantic. That’s why it matters so much that he said he would
vote for Sanders.
Similarly, much of the country first
got woke about the scale and racism of mass incarceration when they read Michelle Alexander’s
The New Jim Crow. Alexander has not endorsed Sanders or any candidate – “I endorse the revolution” she
wrote– but she has offered the most skewering critique on why “Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve the black vote” in the
Nation. She has also reminded black voters
that“we are not checkmated” – that we can approach politics with a sense of possibility.
No one speaks for “the black community” or the mythical “black voter”. But the Black Lives Matter movement has upped the level of discourse and critique in racial politics. So, it’s fantastic to see such serious black minds from American film, letters and academia making their cases in public with
insight and
heft. And, given their decades of deep intellectual work on race (along with Sanders’ commitment to
universal public college tuition and
healthcare and his aversion to Wall Street and
private prisons), their cases for Sanders are sound.
Much less intellectually sound are the arguments of Clinton’s black surrogates. When she was endorsed by the
corporate-funded Super Pac of the Congressional Black Caucus (not by the CBC itself or
by its members), the only reason seemed to be political expediency. The black members of congress seemed intent on maintaining their relationship within the Clinton power structure, no matter how deeply invested it may be in white supremacy. Like
Clinton, much of the CBC is
beholden to Wall Street. So Sanders – with no connection to Wall Street or to a
global foundation ripe for harvesting political chits – offers CBC members little possibility of power except by way of his gamble for the White House.
To me, Sanders is not only appealing because he marched with Martin Luther King Jr or was
arrested fighting racism (though I like the idea of a president who has been arrested for social justice). Sanders is most interesting because he offers black Americans a real possibility for change, thanks to his
willingness to genuinely critique capitalism. You don’t get to take
millions in speaking fees over the years as Hillary Clinton has done – much of it from banks – and get to critique capitalism.
This critique is not without specific implications for black Americans. Malcolm X infamously
said: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” The Clinton machine is the friend of unfettered capitalism, which makes them the friend of
racial capitalism, too. Sanders and his dreams of democratic socialism are the enemy of cowboy capitalism – and the racist system in enables.
This is just one of the many intellectual arguments to be made in his favor. As more black geniuses feel the Bern, our arsenal of arguments in favor of the revolution will only grow. For those of us longing for change, they could not have spoken out at a better time.
