(ThyBlackMan.com) I’m black and burn deep in my heart for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and here’s why other people of color should also kindle the “Bern.” Sanders, who just experienced a major win in Michigan, is a credible and tireless crusader against wealth and income inequality and other social justice issues. Wealth inequality draws a distinct and treacherous racial fault line with African Americans in larger numbers falling into the dark abyss of poverty, joblessness and economic instability. Blacks are much more likely to be unemployed and impoverished than their white counterparts.
Buttressing this alarming fact is a recent February 8th article in The Atlantic, “How Black Middle-Class Kids Become Poor Adults,” which states:
In 2013, the poverty rate among white Americans was 9.6 percent; among black Americans it was 27.2 percent. And the gap between the wealth of white families and black families has widened to its highest levels since 1989, according to a 2014 study by Pew Research Center.
Bernie Sanders is the intellectual black choice, given that economic
injustice is directly linked to racial injustice, which is why naturally he scooped up the endorsement of two key intellectuals: Ben Jealous, former president of the NAACP, and Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. They are both fairly young—Sanders’ demographic—and critically aware that economic injustice is not severable from racial injustice. Jealous and Alexander are both strident critics of the prison industrial complex and injustice in the criminal justice system.
Sanders is energizing the youth vote and radicalizing the liberal democratic base with his ideas of free health care and higher education, as well as the reform of the criminal justice system, including the end of private prisons.
Even if Sanders, the irascible and beloved democratic socialist, impassioned orator, and populist prophet doesn’t win the democratic nomination for president, he and his supporters have made emphatically clear that the ideals and values that undergird his campaign will not be left behind in the general election. While more and more people of color and voters generally are feeling the “Bern” it has become obvious that all other candidates cannot help but be singed by the heat of Sander’s idealism. Our imperatives for social justice cannot and will not be ignored.
Staff Writer; J. Freeman-Coulbary
This talented sister is also a civil rights and disability lawyer, native Washingtonian, blogger, mother and pacifist. You can contact her at freemancoulbary@gmail.com.