FOLLOWING QUOTATIONS ARE EXCERPTED FROM:
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-populists-like-bernie-sanders-should-talk-about-racism/?nc=1
PHOTO: IAN HANEY-LOPEZ and HEATHER MCGHEE
How Populists Like Bernie Sanders Should Talk About Racism
To mobilize a multiracial coalition, progressives need to demonstrate how racism hurts us all.
by Ian Haney-López and Heather McGhee
January 28, 2016
The Nation
...Far from speaking only to people of color, the promise of the Sanders campaign is that his unabashed class message can win back white voters. Here he is in a bind. Many white people deeply sense that, from police killings to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tirades, our politics remain poisoned by racism. And yet, conversations about racial harms to communities of color make many white voters anxious. Even among the progressive millennial generation, many of whom enthusiastically identify as Bernie supporters, colorblind etiquette dictates that good people should not bring up race, even to address racism. Three out of four young whites now believe that “society would be better off if it were truly colorblind and never considered race or ethnicity.” For these folks, a race-conscious agenda seems morally wrong and even borderline racist.
This is no accident. Conservatives have been working hard to convince white people that addressing racism is itself anti-white discrimination. For 50 years, conservatives have hammered the message that liberalism is excessively sympathetic to people of color, claiming that major institutions—from the Democratic Party to the federal government, from universities to unions—care more about people of color than about white people. In this context, when Sanders repeats the refrain that Black Lives Matter, many white people hear him as kowtowing to a powerful special interest, or even engaging in a form of racial betrayal.
It’s time for Sanders and other white economic populists to take up the race conversation with white voters.
We think a different approach is necessary, one that links, rather than counterposes, class and race. The progressive movement should expand from a vision of racism as violence done solely to people of color to include a conception of racism as a political weapon wielded by elites against the 99 percent, nonwhite and white alike. It’s time for Sanders and other white economic populists to take up the race conversation with white voters, by directly addressing racial anxiety and its role in fueling popular support for policies that hand over the country to plutocrats.
Beginning in the 1970s, conservatives deployed a highly racialized strategy that relentlessly linked public institutions to undeserving minorities in order to undo the country’s social contract—one grounded in good government, strong unions, and regulated capitalism. In the New Deal and Great Society years, white majorities broadly supported activist government because they perceived it as helping people like themselves—hardworking, deserving, decent. But as government programs became available to people of color, conservatives saw that they could gain ground by dog whistling about welfare and criminals, using racially coded terms to invoke the specter of liberal government coddling people of color—the very groups whose fortunes seemed to be rising just as life was getting harder for the white working class in the 1970s. As GOP campaign strategist Lee Atwater put it: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things.… [but] anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”
Today’s right-wing, anti-tax, anti-spending agenda succeeds by stoking a deep distrust of the purported beneficiaries of government in thinly veiled dog-whistle language that is almost always about race, whether the conversation is about people who just want “free stuff,” the need to drug-test welfare recipients, “illegal aliens” as rapists and criminals, “runaway spending” under our “Food Stamp president,” or simply that our country is divided between makers and takers. On the basis of such narratives, Republicans routinely win 3 of 5 white votes nationally (and far more in the South), and draw roughly 90 percent of their support from white voters.
Democrats have struggled to respond. Initially, they simply opted to stop talking about race. Eventually, they adopted the GOP’s tactics. Bill Clinton in particular sounded the dog whistle by crusading for welfare reform, a crackdown on crime, and the end of the era of big government. White populists remember Clinton’s betrayals as inviting Wall Street into the Democratic Party, passing NAFTA and repealing Glass-Steagall. But the two trends were connected: Democrats simultaneously gave up on racial liberalism and on pro–working class policies. Progressives have been frustrated ever since as they watched white working-class voters embrace self-defeating promises to cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulate big business, and undermine workers’ rights, sometimes at the urging of Democrats themselves.
This is the race story that Sanders and every progressive leader ought to be telling every time they step to a microphone. The reactionary economic agenda made possible by dog-whistle politics is responsible not just for the devaluing of black lives but for the declining fortunes of the majority of white families. College costs have soared because anti-government dog whistling has mainstreamed extreme cuts to state budgets. Union busting, which drives down wages and benefits for all workers, has become popular because the image of the union worker has been tarred: now not a white man in a hardhat but a black woman behind a bureaucrat’s counter. When conservatives vilify every modest public benefit, from healthcare subsidies to unemployment insurance, as handouts to the undeserving, the social contract is shredded for everyone. By exposing how the political manipulation of racial anxiety has hollowed out of the middle class, Sanders can elevate a simple message: When racism wins, everyone loses.
This insight can also help connect resurgent economic populism with the newly energized racial-justice movements. If white progressive leaders persist in perceiving racism as exclusively damaging nonwhites, they’ll never convince communities of color that racial justice is more than a distraction from their main message. Take Sanders: If he were to truly get that plutocrats use racism against all of us, and if he made this central to his stump speech to audiences of all races, it could convince voters that he is fighting racism because of, not in spite of, his core commitment to economic equality. When a white politician like Sanders—or Clinton or Martin O’Malley, for that matter—starts telling white audiences that combating racism is important to them, people of color will believe that battling racism is important to him.
We don’t look like Denmark in terms of our social policies because we don’t look like Denmark demographically.
Make no mistake, this is not an argument that anyone should equate the harms to whites and to people of color done by racism. Obviously, the damage inflicted on communities of color over the life of this country, as over the last half-century, has been much more concentrated, brutal, dehumanizing, and devastating than the harms visited generally on white communities. Progressives of all colors must acknowledge this, just as we should all endorse specially targeted reparative efforts. But explaining how political or strategic racism works doesn’t mean ignoring structural racism. In fact, it explains the latter’s durability.
Consider, for example, mass incarceration and police killings of unarmed people of color. When Richard Nixon threw himself into dog whistling, the number of people in state and federal prisons stood at around 200,000. Republicans then started the drum beat about blacks as marauding criminals and whites as innocent victims. Democrats soon picked up the same themes, and then both parties were boosting aggressive policing, building steel cages—and filling them. Politicians, not the police, created a climate in which massive violence against people of color became the norm. As a result, the prison population now stands at 2.3 million people. This same story can be told in many areas, from disinvestment in urban areas and schools to mass deportation campaigns.
Sanders, like most economic liberals, often laments that the United States does not have the generous social programs of a country like Denmark, without acknowledging the rather obvious reason. We don’t look like Denmark in terms of our social policies because we don’t look like Denmark demographically. In our diverse society, racism has been the plutocrats’ scythe, cutting down social solidarity to harvest obscene wealth and power.
This summer, confronted by the movement for black lives, Sanders adopted the cry that black lives matter. He did so in the spirit of recognizing the human worth of African Americans, and as a fundamental acknowledgment of our shared humanity across colorlines. Now there is an opportunity to explain to white audiences that black lives matter also because, when white people doubt this, they are easily lured into fearing people of color and handing over power to billionaires. Fostering solidarity across racial divisions is the single greatest challenge America faces in uniting the 99 percent, and until progressives speak to it, our politics and our public policies will serve the 1 percent. Fearful of one another, working people will continue to lose, but for each other, we can rebuild the American Dream. We will not get our country back from the very rich until we commit to a vision of “we the people” in which “we” means everyone, not divided by racial fear but convinced of our linked fate.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Ian Haney-López Twitter Ian Haney-López is a UC Berkeley law professor, senior fellow at Demos, and the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.
Heather McGhee Twitter Heather McGhee is the president of Demos as well as Demos Action, policy research and advocacy organizations working for an America where we all have an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy.
All,
Though I find it particularly painful to have to say so in this specific instance I agree 100% with every damn thing the always relentlessly brilliant and ruthlessly honest Elie Mystal says in this article. There has always been absolutely no doubt in my mind that what Mystal says here about the absolutely depressing and yet massive black vote in South Carolina last saturday for a man as utterly phony, weak, hollow, empty, shallow, dishonest, reactionary, lazy, and opportunist as Joe Biden was what was motivating far too many especially older African American citizens to act as they did and justify it in the terms that they did and I can't say at all that I don't understand what they're doing or why (at least their fundamental "logic" for doing so ) given the lethal, notorious and overwhelmingly white supremacist history of American politics and especially the abysmal historical record of white American voters (very important factoid: In the last 17 presidential elections going back an astonishing and deeply disturing 68 years to 1952 white Americans have voted overwhelmingly for the Republican party candidate in every single election except ONCE in 1964!). So I would be a brazen liar and clueless fool to pretend otherwise on any level whatsoever. So it ain't as though what many black people are saying "doesn't make sense" or is "unimaginable" or "incomprehensible". No.
HOWEVER THIS DOESN'T MEAN that the clearly cynical, transactional, and rather fatalistic stances of far too many black Biden voters are justifiable or defensible from the standpoint of a truly independent and progressive position that seeks to actually and fundamentally transform the direction of this country. As always it takes real courage to do that and a bedrock determination and dedication to not only aspiring but resolutely fighting to fulfill these visionary tasks no matter what the smug, corrupt and absurdly entitled elites and manipulative gatekeepers of the rancid status quo say or do.
The extraordinary historical greatness of the African American people in not only politics, philosophy, and culture but life itself has ALWAYS been rooted in the deeply spiritual desire and intense secular committment to openly and ferociously challenge and oppose --and yes!-- DEFEAT and prevail over the reigning status quo not only because we desired to but we absolutely needed to. That has been the case for the entire time we have been residents of this dangerous continent (over four centuries now and counting!) and guess what?-- it is still very much the case now.
And no one can deny that foundational and glaring reality--and especially not the hopelessly mediocre likes of a Joe Biden.
As usual our biggest enemies are not only those who wilfully oppose, denigrate, oppress and exploit our humanity but our own crippling reliance on fear, cynicism, fatalism, and nihilism of any kind. Stay tuned because this election is all gonna depend on whether we all fight in the end for a real, strong, and viable ALTERNATIVE instead of merely settling for less and the lowest common denominator and weakass surrogate for the status quo who is clearly JOE BIDEN...
We CAN and MUST do far better. I sincerely and deeply hope that the majority of black voters nationwide remember that fact and act accordingly. As always in our extremely complex and storied history IT'S ALL UP TO US...
Kofi
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-black-vote/
Black Voters Didn’t Vote for Biden in South Carolina Because They ‘Lack Information’
Black voters opted for Biden because they have no faith that white voters will do the right thing and vote for a true progressive.
PHOTO: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks to guests during a campaign stop in South Carolina. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Joe Biden smashed the competition in the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary over the weekend. He beat his next closest competitor, Bernie Sanders, by almost 30 points. In the first state where the African American vote has been a consequential force, Biden’s consistent strength among black folks took the day: He beat Sanders 48 percent to 20 percent among African American voters.
Many people, including the Biden campaign, will tell you that Biden’s strong showing is an indication of his “electability” in a general election. Biden has been running as the “safe” choice to take on Trump. African Americans, especially those in the South, who have the most to lose with the reelection of a bigot who courts the favor of white supremacists, would seem to agree. Biden has led in the polling among black people since he set foot in this race.
It’s reasonable to ask why. Biden has spent most of the campaign stepping on rakes and losing himself in foggy memories of times gone by. His debate performances have been listless. His speeches and town halls have been heavy on empathy but horrifying on factual accuracy. The reality of Biden feels considerably less safe than the idea of Biden. In fact, it has been Biden’s apparent weakness that is primarily responsible for making Mike Bloomberg think he can swoop in and buy the nomination.
Biden’s actual history and policy record also makes him a weird choice to be the leader among African American voters. Biden has gone to great lengths to claim credit for the successes of the Obama administration—to the point where I’m starting to wonder what Obama did all day while Biden was busy making things happen. Biden claims to have been “there” for everything that’s been done by Democrats for the past 40 years. But only the good parts! The now reviled 1994 crime bill, which Biden wrote; his shameful treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings; his opposition to busing and friendliness with segregationists—all of that is part of his record too. But none of it has hurt him. If Kamala Harris had benefited from this kind of selective memory when it comes to policy, this entire race might be different.
Biden’s strength among African Americans in South Carolina was not universal. Black people are not a monolith, and the exit polling showed a split that has become familiar during this primary. Bernie Sanders narrowly beat Joe Biden among black voters under 30. And Bernie didn’t even have to “back that azz up” to get it. But Biden won a sweeping 75 percent of black voters over 60.
What explains that? What explains the fact that the oldest black voters, the elders in our community who have a living memory of oppression and violence that I’ve only read about, voted in overwhelming numbers for a rickety white guy who occasionally thinks he’s in a John Wayne movie?
Some people on Twitter, including people who weirdly think of themselves as part of Bernie Sanders’s coalition, chalked up Biden’s win to “low information voters” in South Carolina. The argument would be offensive if it weren’t also so dumb. Older black voters in South Carolina have a lifetime of education and experience dealing with the most persistent threat to their safety and rights in this country: white people.
My read of the South Carolina vote is that black people know exactly what they’re doing, and why. Joe Biden is the indictment older black folks have issued against white America. His support is buttressed by chunks of the black community who have determined that most white people are selfish and cannot be trusted to do the right thing. They believe if you make white people choose between their money and their morality—between candidates like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren (who somehow finished fifth in South Carolina, behind Pete Buttigieg) and candidates like Biden and Michael Bloomberg—they will choose their money every time and twice on Election Day.
The New York Times interviewed a 39-year-old African American voter in South Carolina. I found his analysis instructive. He told the Times: “Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves.… So yeah, we’ll back Biden, because we know who white America will vote for in the general election in a way they may not tell a pollster or the media.”
This debate about what white America is really prepared to do has been the most vital one in the black community since the start of the primary. It transcends policy, “likeability,” or even “electability” at least as the media seems to use the term. It goes to the core of what black people think white people are willing to do, plotted against what we know they are capable of. The Root’s politics editor, Dr. Jason Johnson, put it like this to me in one of our text debates on this crucial matter: “Voting for Bernie Sanders requires that black people believe that white people will do something they’ve never done: willingly and openly share in the economic bounty of the United States.”
He’s not wrong, and what’s more, older black voters in South Carolina know he’s not wrong. Black people are ready for an economically progressive candidate. But they’ve tried that before and been rebuffed.
African American voters in South Carolina have gone with the eventual Democratic nominee in every primary over the past 32 years, except on two occasions. And those two exceptions are notable. In 1988, during a campaign where Joe Biden would have to drop out because of a plagiarism scandal, native South Carolinian Jesse Jackson easily won the state, crushing eventual nominee Michael Dukakis. Jackson would go on to win 92 percent of the black vote over the course of the 1988 primary, which is a higher percentage than Barack Obama won in 2008. So maybe that’s an anomaly.
But the other exception to black South Carolinian foresight was in 2004. That was the year former North Carolina senator John Edwards narrowly defeated eventual nominee John Kerry among black voters, and that was in a primary in which Reverend Al Sharpton was on the ballot and pulled in 17 percent of the black vote.
People forget this now because of his personal failings, but Edwards ran a campaign grounded in an unapologetically anti-poverty message. Moreover, the 2004 Democratic primary transpired in the face of one of the worst presidents black people had encountered in at least a few years, George W. Bush. But in an election that felt every bit as critically important as this one—and if those left to die on the rooftops of New Orleans could speak, they’d tell you that 2004 was as important as this one—black people in South Carolina went with the economic progressive of that time. Nationally, Kerry did end up winning the black vote, but only with 56 percent support, a lower percentage than any other nominee over the past 32 years except Dukakis.
More from Mystal:
So when you ask older black people what the white electorate, Democratic or Republican, are capable of, they remember. They remember that this country has spent the better part of 40 years lauding the racially destructive policies of Ronald Reagan. They remember that actual progressive choices, like Jackson and Edwards, were rejected by white Democrats. They remember that white people failed to turn on George W. Bush, despite his legacy of incompetence and torture, and instead reelected him. They remember that the majority of white people did not vote for the first black president, spent eight years attacking his every move, and then replaced him with the most small-minded bigot they could find, rejecting an immensely qualified white woman in the process.
Learning these lessons about what white people will do is part of growing up black in this country. Many young black people start out assuming that white people are better than they’ve shown, that the stories of past white failures are things white people have learned from. I have small children and I certainly want them to believe that they will encounter better, more reliable white people in their life than I have encountered in my own. I want them to believe in coalitions, and in allies. But I’m also aging. The hope I try to impart to my kids sometimes feels fraudulent, like I’m raising them for a world I no longer believe will exist. Eventually, I’ll be old enough and strong enough to do for my children what so many black parents have to do: rip the innocence from them and teach them how things really are.
Older black people know white people. They’ve suffered because of them more than anybody else. In the first primary of 2020 in which black people had a voice, the message I heard from the elders was “Vote for Biden, because white people gonna white.” I’m, at best, one last election away from fully agreeing with them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elie Mystal is The Nation's Justice Correspondent—covering the courts, the criminal justice system, and politics—and the force behind the magazine's monthly column, "Objection!" He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He can be followed @ElieNYC.
