In the past several weeks, Bernie Sanders has been confronted by #BlackLivesMatters activists on multiple occasions. Many of his supporters got uncomfortable about this and lashed out at the activists. “Bernie is the best candidate for racial issues,” this largely white network of progressives responded to activists emphasizing the #BlackLivesMatter message. “This is not the time, place, or appropriate way to bring these issues to the fore.” In other words, we’ve got this for you. “Don’t screw it up by talking out of turn.” It was unsettling to watch this privileged collective, claiming to care about racial justice, tell an oppressed group how best to fight their oppression.
This generalization of pro-Sanders and related anti-BLM action, by the way, is much kinder than some of the individual responses that exist online. Critics of the Seattle BLM action writing on PoliticusUSA call for the activists to be arrested and write them off as religious fanatics. One person wrote, “What other politician supports Black people? Idiots…” Another supposed that “those women may wind up as token Negros on Fox next month.”
After repeated confrontation, Sanders’ campaign responded more gracefully to this engagement by local BLM activists by further diversifying its staff (namely by hiring Symone Sanders) and adding policy suggestions specific to racial justice to its platform. A white, defensive chorus of how “Bernie totally gets it” is not what led to these actions. The Sanders campaign has illustrated a degree of openness to re-examining what it remains ignorant about — a strength — while also suggesting the BLM approach is more fruitful than it was written off as by defensive supporters.
After the confrontation in Seattle, I read and ran into a number of indignant supporters who suggested that of course Sanders cares about black lives. He has, as he has himself pointed out when confronted by activists at Netroots Nation, spent decades fighting for civil rights, and he is especially concerned with class and poverty. At the end of the day, that is at the root of all of these issues, isn’t it?
It isn’t, and this disconnect is part of the problem noted by the Seattle-based protesters. Marissa Johnson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Seattle, explained to Tamron Hall of MSNBC that Sanders was identified as a target of the Seattle-based action because he is a class reductionist, having never looked comprehensively at race. In other words, Sanders is singularly focused on class and nothing else. In a column about Sanders’ cluelessness about these issues, Judith Levine reiterates the “reductionist” argument, claiming “Sanders’ cluelessness is ideological”:
“Old New Leftists had a name for it: ‘vulgar Marxism.’ A vulgar Marxist is a guy (and they’re pretty much all white guys) for whom there is one explanation and one explanation only for everything wrong with the world — indeed, for everything in the world: economic class,” Levine said.
That ideological cluelessness extends to the Sanders supporters who insisted that their candidate was in the right. There is a time and a place for contention with platform, and that the BLM message is good and all but these tactics aren’t appropriate. But telling black activists how to protest black issues is a problem. And beyond the fact that telling activists who are responding to the Fergusons, the Baltimores, and the Sandra Bland prison cells that there is an appropriate time, place and style for focusing outrage, continued direct action has led to the aforementioned constructive changes within the Sanders campaign. Nitpicking about decorum did not.
When a group blindly offers support and shuns the prospect of being thoughtfully critical, they miss opportunities to challenge that which they support to grow by becoming better.
The point supporters missed when they defended Sanders’ “ideological cluelessness” is that part of what makes his involvement interesting and valuable is that his presence makes exchanges like these possible. Sanders may need to learn a great deal about race-specific issues, but it is his willingness to engage with this subject matter that makes significant his participation in this conversation and contest. Sanders’ approval rating, which is shockingly high for a candidate not sanctioned by the Democratic Party itself, provides the spectacle around which we are afforded the luxury of not only being confronted by but actually engaging these issues.
Sanders should not be revered because he has all of the answers — he does not. What he brings to the table is the space to have occasionally rocky conversations about grave issues. Real engagement goes beyond offering meme-worthy soundbites about how capitalism as we know it benefits only a very privileged few. Sanders’ willingness to do so, and being forced to take a meaningful stand on these issues, helps to challenge other candidates to respond as thoughtfully.
Many of Sanders’ supporters should consider following suit. It is good for Sanders and his campaign to engage in these issues and discussions; it is not appropriate for members of the privileged groups to tell the oppressed group how to fight their oppression.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
