Thank You Bernie. Now Good-Bye.
In 2015, I was all in for Bernie Sanders. I gave him money, bought tee shirts with his bespectacled visage on them, I went to New Hampshire multiple times to convince primary voters to give him a chance. I supported Sanders for a lot of reasons. I’m from Burlington Vermont and he’s been a pretty darn good Senator. I also supported him because many of us already understood that if the Democratic Party didn’t move to the left, it would lose. Ever since Bill Clinton, too many Dem leaders seemed like Republican Light, more interested in the welfare of corporations than workers.
Bernie represented the Democratic Party of labor, the one that tried to level the playing field by helping us get healthcare and education and a livable wage. While Dem leaders like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden supported NAFTA and Workfare and Three Strikes laws, Bernie worked for Medicare for All and forgiving student loan debt.
That’s why I was so grateful when Sanders’ candidacy, with no corporate money, moved the Democrats to the left, an effect felt today in 2019, when the majority of primary candidatessupport healthcare and several free higher education. But as is clear to everyone but the Brocialists, the time for Bernie to step out of the race is NOW. There’s already at least one candidate who is just as good as Bernie on economic equity and is a woman and there are several candidates who understand the intersection of economics with race and gender a whole lot better than Bernie does.
In order to understand how flat-footed Bernie can seem when discussing issues of race, it’s important to understand a little something about Vermont. Vermont is “nice”- which is to say it’s mostly white and mostly not poor. It’s this very niceness that makes it an incredibly difficult place to live if you’re non-white. Take the case of South Burlington High School. South Burlington High School used Confederate symbols for their sports teams for nearly five decades and no one really seemed to notice much. This in a district that voted 88% for Hillary Clintonin 2016 compared to 48% for the country. In other words, like Senator Sanders, South Burlington is fairly far left of center.
The residents kept the Rebel name (and even some Confederate flags well into the 1990s) not because they were explicitly racist, but because they were mostly, like Sanders, clueless. They just hadn’t thought about structural racism much because, like Sanders, they didn’t have to. This is the same reason Sanders has often stumbles on gender issues, like abortion.
I’m not suggesting that white people can’t do the work of understanding racism better and men can’t do the work of understanding gender politics better, but Sanders, like many leaders of the economic left he represents, decided not to do that. If Sanders had done the work, he would never think that he is more qualified than the two most popular women in the race, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Sanders would never have said “We have got to look at candidates… not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age.”
It’s that kind of thinking- that sexuality and gender and race don’t matter or somehow are unrelated to economic issues- that sums up the “niceness” of Vermont. People who really aren’t racist, sexist, or homophobic in how they see the world can also actively recreate a world that is racist, sexist and homophobic by refusing to confront their own actions.
Every minute Sanders stays in a race with qualified women and qualified people of color is another step in reproducing a world of white, male privilege. He either gets out now and shows he is ready to walk the walk and help create a different world or he stays in and shows how the hubris of white men, even “nice” and “progressive” white men with good intentions, is creating a future that looks a lot like the past.
