“Bernie Sanders Can’t Save Black People”
“The protest was perhaps clumsy and perhaps in theory the sort of thing that could set your eyes to rolling if you’ve been on a college campus in the last 20 years — blatantly silencing? — but it forced Sanders to release a statement on police reform the very next day. Still, as news got out and swept across the nation, shit thereupon hit the fan, sparking a disjointed debate online and in real life about whether the good Mr. Sanders should’ve been interrupted, and how he should’ve been interrupted, and what This All Means…
He is a throwback, as ornery as he is righteous, and his words and deeds over the years have positioned him, more than anyone else running for president, as a champion for the poor. Because our economic classes are so stratified by race, this — as the logic goes — positions him as a champion for minorities. Endearingly, he also doesn’t appear to ever brush his hair…
In fact, Sanders and his plan to save blacks through redistributing wealth to narrow the wealth gap are deeply flawed, because the principle which serves as the scaffolding for his plan is deeply flawed. Sanders — like many other liberals of his race and age — believes that capitalism is inherently evil, and so that all evils can be ascribed to those of capitalism, and so in the idea that economic injustice is the root of all injustice. Racial injustice, in this reading, is treated as a side effect or function of economic injustice; concomitantly, racial inequality is treated as having the same causes and therefore the same solutions as economic inequality. If wealth is redistributed, the idea goes, then poor people of all races will have more money; then something else will happen; then racism will not matter or be healed altogether. I, and many in Black Lives Matter, and other people, too, believe that this line of theorizing has things backward.”
Very worth reading — it fully justifies the title, in my opinion. Bernie might be great for economic justice, but let’s not pretend that he’s going to end racism somehow. Leave that out of it, stop being patronizing.
