Ah, my socialist friends at the Jacobin and the Intercept. The “class matters and race doesn’t” crowd. I enjoy the sparring with them, the back and forth. Our worldviews are wildly different, as someone who is the direct descendant of slaves in a country with systemic racism, I can’t afford to put class over race. Neither can other Black people, which is why they have voted against Sanders at a near 70 percent clip. But alas, onto your points:

1. You are referencing national polls (or more specifically, you are referencing the Jacobin, and they are referencing national polls) showing an increase in Black support for Sanders. Well, first off, there is no national primary. The country doesn’t vote all at once. We go state by state. When the primary season is half over, national polling is kind of irrelevant. Furthermore, while we can test the veracity of state polling with exits and real results, we cannot test national polling. We don’t know the true accuracy of the polling, because there are no actual national primary results to test it against. We can look at state results, and state demographics, as indicators for future performance. Sanders clearly struggles to win as the Black population % increases. When it gets to 10 percent. Sanders nearly always loses. This is because he hasn’t gotten 30 percent of the Black vote in a single state, absolutely terrible numbers for a Democrat. When Black voters are upwards of half of the Democratic electorate in the South, you can’t consistently lose them by 40 or 50 points and expect to win the nomination. Sanders loses Black voters out of the South consistently as well, 75–25 in both Nevada and Wisconsin. When your numbers with Black voters looks this bad, you aren’t winning the nomination.
2. Name recognition. Oh please. This one is bad either way. If Black people don’t know who Sanders is, then he’s done a terrible job of minority outreach. If Black people do know who Sanders is (and I believe they do, he’s spending $40 million a month) then they are outright rejecting him and his platform.
3. Black voters know their self-interest, and they’ve decided it isn’t Bernie Sanders. Calling them stupid or ignorant won’t get them to vote the way you want. The Clintons have policy results, Sanders has abstractions. Name one single piece of legislation that Sanders has sponsored and passed that has directly, positively, impacted Black people. You can’t do it.
4. I already wrote about the crime bill at length, I don’t really need to cover it again here. Calling Black people shameless hypocrites won’t make them vote for Bernie, or for your next far left candidate.
5. Richard Nixon’s close aide, John Ehrlichman, admitted that the War on Drugs was crafted specifically to hurt Black people. So you are dead wrong here, again.