A Liberation Response to the Manufactured Warren-Sanders Sexism Controversy
By Alan Nathan
Did Bernie really say to Elizabeth Warren that a woman can’t win the presidency? Is this a false accusation coming from her side? Who’s lying? That is how the corporate media and the corporate funded Democratic establishment would like us supporters of these two candidates to frame what has happened here. Anything to divide and conquer the progressive, social democratic movement.
Let us voters keep in the forefront of our minds that the corporate media are engaged in the only strategies they know to hold onto power — distract, distort, and divide and conquer. Of course, the other driving force is that controversy sells, which is why media personalities feel job well done when they can instigate trouble. Observe in this CNN clip what passes for investigative journalism. The gleeful smiles that keep popping up on the face of this correspondent as he describes how audio was recovered on the exchange between Warren and Sanders after the debate.
If there is going to be progressive change in this nation, it must be political and cultural. How we win is every bit as important as winning. Truth seeking and truth telling must replace the weaponization of narratives and labels. We won’t resolve systemic racism and sexism by dividing our political leaders into categories according to who is and who isn’t racist and sexist. Change requires honest self-reflection and constructive criticism of our leaders including our favorite candidates. If we can’t acknowledge our problematic behavior, we can’t liberate ourselves from oppressive forces.
We all operate from within our worldview and bring our respective insights and biases to political discourse. Truth seeking means being up front about where we’re coming from. It also means openness to the perspectives of others, because it is often the other side that can see the biases that we don’t see in ourselves.
I am a Bernie Sanders supporter. The evidence looks to me like a false narrative that “Bernie Sanders is a sexist” has been dropped into the political discourse. According to the New York Times and CNN articles where Sanders is accused of saying to Warren that a woman can’t win the presidency, it is acknowledged that their 2018 conversation was private. Only Warren and Sanders know what was said. It was members of Warren’s staff that brought the issue to the press. She talked with them about it. If Sanders really said a woman can’t win why wait until now to raise the issue? It looks like the Warren campaign decided to use this story as a campaign strategy to make Sanders appear bias against women.
Warren has been vague about what Sanders actually said to her in that private meeting. When the issue came up at the Democratic debate in Iowa last Tuesday, she didn’t say “Bernie, you said a woman couldn’t win”. Instead, she said that the question of whether a woman could win the presidency has been raised. She then discussed systemic bias against women, and did so powerfully and poignantly. Her statement to the NYT prior to the debate was more direct, “I thought a woman could win; he disagreed”, but still vague enough to allow the media to spin their own interpretation. In fact, in the same NYT article, it is acknowledged that the question of whether a woman could defeat Trump has been expressed by voters including those that support Warren and Klobuchar.
Sanders has responded to the accusation not with the “I can’t recall” strategy or flat out denial that is so familiar from our political leaders, but by articulating what he really believes and has stated consistently:
“It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn’t win,” Sanders said. “It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.”
Kevin Gosztola’s Medium article covers a broad range of Sanders’ public discourse and behavior dating back to the 1980s that should call into question the idea that he’d make such a direct and blatant sexist comment that a woman can’t win the presidency. My conclusion is that the real issue of systemic bias against women was distorted and spun into a personal attack against Bernie Sanders with the implication that he is a sexist. What is also clouded in this attack on Sanders is the fact that sexism, like racism, is deeply personal as well as systemic. I want to see a liberating space where all white men could do the work of owning internalized sexism and working to overcome it; and a space where all white people could own internalized racism and work to overcome it. The personal and political overlap.
Bernie Sanders is not perfect. In 2015 at a rally in Seattle, Washington, Black Lives Matter activists interrupted Bernie Sanders’ rally, demanding that attention be called to the police murder of Michael Brown and countless other unarmed black people. Many in the crowd turned on the BLM activists. It was a moment of great tension in the progressive movement. That kind of tension should not portend the demise of our movement as the corporate media would like to portray. Instead, it points to a painful truth that white economically secure progressives can fight for dismantling forces of racism, sexism, and oppression while struggling to acknowledge our role in maintaining the status quo. What we say politically inevitably conflicts with what we do personally, as the events at the Seattle rally portray.
In addition, there were complaints of sexual harassment and bias charged against Sanders’ campaign staff in his 2016 presidential run. Let’s not pretend that these issues are unique to Bernie Sanders or to his campaign. In both cases Sanders responded with acknowledgment that there were problems and attempts at ameliorative action were taken. For instance, he hired black activist Symone Sanders to be his national press secretary, and he included messages important to the BLM movement in his political discourse. These actions are initial steps. Much more needs to be done.
Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and all forms of oppression are toxic and corrosive forces within our culture. Let’s admit it. We live in a patriarchal, white supremacist culture. While there is great variance in how these destructive forces show up across individuals and organizations, none of us are pure or completely free from its influence. The most progressive minded people and political organizations and candidates struggle with white and male privilege in all its forms. Inevitably these unresolved cultural and historical traumas will emerge including within the progressive movement. We should not turn away from such moments nor allow the political and media establishment to define the discourse at such moments.
Activist and author Chris Crass in his book Toward Collective Liberation articulates how to be the change we are seeking. He is not alone. The idea is that activist organizations operate most effectively when they create a self-reflective environment where the issues of oppression and discrimination can be honestly explored and the work of transformation and liberation can thrive. The organization works to operate in the way it hopes to influence society to operate. It is a deeply personal process that supports the political process. It is time for our political organizations to take a lesson from the activists. In fact, we’ve heard Sanders and Warren say it repeatedly. The power is with the people.
This most recent controversy between Warren and Sanders and their supporters can be transformed into a moment of opportunity. It is especially incumbent upon white progressives to face the tremors of implicit racism and sexism within ourselves and our organizations. The emotional pain and real hardship for the people most impacted by systemic and personal racism and sexism remains often in white and male silence, beneath our progressive rhetoric, seeping into the ways we treat women and people of color, and determining whose voice is heard and who gets to lead the way forward.
If these establishment media platforms were truly interested in addressing the problems of sexism and racism there would be call for dialogue not instigating fights. Open admission on the part of our progressive candidates that facing white and male privilege in themselves and their campaigns is a worthy and imperfect struggle would be applauded, not used to defame and debunk our candidates and our work.
Whether you are a Sanders or Warren supporter, let’s put our voices together to call out the media. They are gas lighting us because they support the status quo of white male supremacy and corporate hegemony. Not to mention controversy and scandal sells. They are not interested in working to overcome systemic sexism, racism, or any other form of oppression. And they are not interested in the lives of working class and impoverished people struggling to survive.
Let’s call out the hypocrisy when Sanders is called a sexist and Joe Biden is held up as the candidate for whom such things will never be a problem. Let’s make sure there is room to own our imperfections, while working together to breakdown implied false equivalencies between struggling with white male privilege and the violent racism and sexism openly embraced by Donald Trump and his political comrades.
It is inevitable that differences will emerge between the two progressive candidates. They are competing for the presidential nomination. Don’t let the corporate media spin that healthy competition of ideas as evidence that a movement is falling apart. At the same time, both campaigns need to work to make sure that what transpires between them is a healthy exchange of competing ideas.
