(ThyBlackMan.com) Sen. Bernie Sanders doesn’t get race! He gets economics, he gets Wall Street, he gets trade, and he gets distribution. He just doesn’t get race. Perhaps one of his lowest moments in this campaign happened about a month ago (Feb. 13) in Minneapolis. A woman asked him to directly address “Black people and reparations.” He replied by pulling some lines from his stump speech, talking about wealth inequality, child poverty and investing in poor countries. From the audience, someone hollered, “say Black,” and Sanders, in a fit of pique, declared that he’d said “Black” 50 times, “Alright,” he said, “that makes it fifty-one.” How churlish!
His crass response to an honest concern made it clear that Sanders thinks that race matters are less important than economic issues. He’d hit a home run if he ever decided to acknowledge the ways the two are intertwined. Our capitalist economic system was buttressed by the use of people as property and it still is. Profits in the prison industrial complex are determined by the number of people our paramilitary police forces can incarcerate for crimes major or petty.
Some of the companies that incarcerate use African-Americ
an male population to project their capacity and profits years into the future. Race is a social construction designed to maximize the potential for capitalistic exploitation of a subset of the population. Even as all working people are exploited (and Bernie gets that), African-American workers and the unemployed are all the more exploited. The reality of Black joblessness facilitates the exploitation of working-class Whites who fear that African-Americans (or immigrants) will “take” their jobs.
Bernie Sanders gets joblessness, homelessness and hopelessness, but he is nearly clueless when it comes to race. He belongs to the rising-tide school, the same one both President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton belong to. If economic conditions improve, they think, then black folks will be better off, too. Better off, I say, but still behind, and with a huge income and wealth gap. And if the economic system changes, as democratic socialist Sanders would advocate, African-Americans would be better off. Would that deal with the gap? You can’t deal with economics without dealing with race if you hope to address the concerns of African-American people. Sanders’ testy show of impatience when a woman asked him to speak to race in Minneapolis labeled him as clueless.
While Bernie Sanders is clueless, Hillary Clinton comes off as smugly condescending. She knows race matters, she knows Black folks, and we are her friends. Beginning with her association with Children’s Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman and moving through her more than three decades in public life, she has been an advocate for children, for civil rights and for women’s rights. But then there is that prison thing. She regrets, she says, her 1994 support of the Omnibus Crime Bill that fast-tracked so many African-Americans to long-term incarceration. She backs away from incendiary language when she described people as “predators.” But she presents with a tone of entitlement. She expects the Black vote, and she counted on that vote to get her through Michigan. It didn’t happen.
Written By Julianne Malveaux
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