An attempt to explain the riff between PoC and Bernie Sanders

[Yavin4]

Bernie Sanders paints Wall Street as the root of everything that's wrong with this country. Now, I can't speak for all POCs, but to say that the primary evil in America is Wall Street and/or the 1% is insulting. To not address systemic racism with the same vigor as his attacks on the 1% shows his tone deafness on race.

For example, if Bernie became president and got EVERYTHING that he wanted passed into law, systemic racism would still exist.

[Bonobo]

1. And I have no doubt that Bernie would agree with that statement.

If anyone actually believes that Bernie does not understand that racism exists separate from economics, they are willful morons.

[Yavin4]

3. His rhetoric doesn't reflect that n/t

[Bonobo]

6. You need to be willfully ignoring his political philosophy in order to miss where he stands.

It is clear to anyone that takes any effort at all to understand who he is philosophically that he understands VERY WELL the plight of people of color.

[madfloridian]

11. .....

[bettyellen]

17. does Bernie share your opinion that "you can't fix racism" - forgive me if I am paraphrasing your OP

but that was the gist of it, gleefully asserting Hillary can do nothing about racism.

Do you need me to add a link?

[Thinkingabout]

2. Have to agree with you, fixing Wall Street does not change the racism in the US.

[OrwellwasRight]

9. You can't cure "racism"

There are always going to be asshats.

You can cure institutional biases like subprime mortgages for POC regardless of their good credit, legacy admits, rigged tests, and an economic system that lets excessive wealth perpetuate excessive wealth and promotes ripoffs like payday lenders and "proprietary schools" as if they were legitimate business models.

I think if we can address the way the rich make their own rules in this country, start allowing unions to form again (do not forget that Dr. King was killed while supporting a STRIKE for fair wages), allow people to earn a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, provide decent healthcare and housing and education for ALL (meaning ALL), then we will have gone a long way toward addressing all of the issues that are of interest to communities of color.

[jfern]

4. I don't think Bernie is saying that all racism will magically be cured

[KeepItReal]

5. Did you know Sen. Bernie Sanders has an entire Racial Justice platform?

If you did, you'd take back that statement: "if Bernie became president and got EVERYTHING that he wanted passed into law, systemic racism would still exist."

Sen. Sanders has an entire racial justice platform that ANYONE can see.

https://berniesanders.com/issues/racial-justice/

Here's some for you:

ISSUES

Racial Justice

We must pursue policies to transform this country into a nation that affirms the value of its people of color. That starts with addressing the five central types of violence waged against black, brown and indigenous Americans: physical, political, legal, economic and environmental.

PHYSICAL VIOLENCE
PERPETRATED BY THE STATE
Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Jessica Hernandez, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Ferrell, Oscar Grant, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, Samuel DuBose and Anastacio Hernandez-Rojas. We know their names. Each of them died unarmed at the hands of police officers or in police custody. The chants are growing louder. People are angry and they have a right to be angry. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that this violence only affects those whose names have appeared on TV or in the newspaper. African-Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. African-American and Latinos comprise well over half of all prisoners, even though African-Americans and Latinos make up approximately one quarter of the total US population.

PERPETRATED BY EXTREMISTS
We are far from eradicating racism in this country. Today in America, if you are black, you can be killed for getting a pack of Skittles during a basketball game. Or murdered in your church while you are praying. This violence fills us with outrage, disgust and a deep, deep sadness. These hateful acts of violence amount to acts of terror. They are perpetrated by extremists who want to intimidate and terrorize black, brown and indigenous people in this country.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE
DISENFRANCHISEMENT
In the shameful days of open segregation, literacy laws and poll taxes were used to suppress minority voting. Today, through other laws and actions — such as requiring voters to show photo ID, discriminatory drawing of Congressional districts, restricting same-day registration and early voting and aggressively purging voter rolls — states are taking steps which have a similar effect.

The patterns are unmistakable. 11 percent of eligible voters do not have a photo ID—and they are disproportionately black and Latino. In 2012, African-Americans waited twice as long to vote as whites. Some voters in minority precincts waited upwards of six or seven hours to cast a ballot. Meanwhile, thirteen percent of African-American men have lost the right to vote due to felony convictions.

Yet in 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the seminal Voting Rights Act, even while saying “voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that.”

This should offend the conscience of every American.

The fight for minority voting rights is a fight for justice. It is inseparable from the struggle for democracy itself.

LEGAL VIOLENCE
Millions of lives have been destroyed because people are in jail for nonviolent crimes. For decades, we have been engaged in a failed

“War on Drugs” with racially-biased mandatory minimums that punish people of color unfairly.
It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. This must change.

ECONOMIC VIOLENCE
Weeks before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a union group in New York about what he called “the other America.”

“One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality,” King said. “That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits …?But as we assemble here tonight, I’m sure that each of us is painfully aware of the fact that there is another America and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.”

The problem was structural, King said: “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

But what King saw in 1968 — and what we all should recognize today — is that it is necessary to try to address the rampant economic inequality while also taking on the issue of societal racism. We must simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else — especially those in our minority communities – are becoming poorer.

Hope this helps you.

There's no rift for this Black man and Bernie Sanders.

[John Poet]

10. This needs to be an opening post, obviously,

since some still don't seem to have seen it

or refuse to see it

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

7. YAY!! You get it. That's the problem that many of us are having! Thank you so much!

[AOR]

15. Fred Hampton -- excerpts from Power Anywhere Where There's People

"It was one class - the oppressed, and that other class - the oppressor. And it's got to be a universal fact. Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a revolution."

"We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that."

"We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist."

"We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism. Socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself."

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

16. O.K., thanks.

[ReallyIAmAnOptimist]

8. Recent racial justice forum...

... Which I think Clinton skipped.

[kath]

12. RIFT, not riff. And I think you might want to educate yourself on other things as well, such as

Bernie's racial justice platform, posted in this thread.

[johnnyrocket]

13. Ah, what? That argument is quite a stretch...

...I sense pro-Hillary desperation.

[TTUBatfan2008]

14. The system is corrupt...

Would you not agree? I don't think we will ever see real justice until the entire system itself is overhauled and it starts at the very top with the campaign donations. You cannot expect politicians who are owned almost entirely by extremely rich white guys to enact real reforms to get rid of institutional racism (or sexism for that matter). It has happened a few times in history but obviously nowhere near enough has been done.

Michelle Alexander nails it with regard to the status quo (aka Hillary Clinton).

http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/