Exactly. Thinking that racism isn’t a problem, the real problem is that you’re poor is simply “not getting it” as far as many black voters feel. Pretty reasonable and maybe holding higher information levels than some people in this thread are.
In Vermont.
His heart’s in the right place, but he’s simply never had to deal with nonwhite POV’s. The Clintons have worked the black community, respectfully, for decades, and the investment is paying off. There is little *any *candidate new to the subject and to the constituency could do any better than Sanders did.
And I will say something that bugs me a little: saying Sanders’ ideas about income equality is “good for blacks” is kiiinda racist. While black people do have a higher percentage of poverty level, they aren’t all poor and there is more pure numbers of poverty level whites. So it’s wrongheaded to expect them to all jump on board an eat the rich scheme more than white voters.
How is Hillary going to make people more likely to hire people with traditionally black names? Is she going to start a Manhattan project into mind control?
Here’s Bernie’s page on black issues. It’s not strictly an economic inequality issue - it talks extensively about systematic bias in the criminal justice system against blacks, which is a priority to solve.
Clinton is the essence of a slick politician. People in this thread are crediting her for better political skills - being able to get people to think you give a shit - but what is she actually going to do for blacks in office? Nothing more than what Obama has done, certainly. She’s not going to rock the boat or push for anything significant. Clinton will be the essence of the status quo.
Sanders would actually fully intend to rock the boat in such a way that blacks would probably improve their lot quite a bit. I don’t think anyone can doubt his sincerity and his commitment to actually create real change.
This is just for political show. What are the odds that her policy intentions actually changed with some town meetings? What, specifically, are you suggesting that she’s going to differently after having listened? What, specifically, would Sanders intend to do differently had he listened?
Ah, yes. Let’s praise Hillary for changing her mind on gay marriage in 2012, when her focus groups told her that it’s okay, after public opinion had changed. How brave and noble and honest of her.
That makes her way better than the guy who’s been supporting gay rights for 40 years, decades before it was a popular cause, and during a time at which it would’ve been significant stigmatized.
Can we be more specific? What do you see that Hillary is proposing that Bernie is not?
I made no such claim. I didn’t say all Sanders voters were high information, nor that all Clinton voters are low information. However, with low information voters, name recognition is huge, so you would expect low income voters to disproportionately support Hillary, right?
That’s what Clintonism is. It’s an oligarchy-friendly packaging of neoliberal ideas as being progressive. She’s the establishment, and she always has been. Her donor list is basically a roster of the oligarchy. The Clintons were instrumental in relaxing the banking regulations that lead to the great recession, creating free trade agreements without any corresponding help for those who were harmed by it, and generally empowering the powerful. Is there a rich and powerful person in the country who would feel threatened at all the day Clinton took office? I don’t see how.
Federally funded college tuition is the one that immediately comes to mind. It would be a huge help to the poorest of people to improve their lot in life, and Hillary would never support something so radical. Is that a specifically race based issue? No, but blacks have disproportionately poorer educational opportunities, and so they would disproportionately benefit from such a thing.
Oh, sure. I didn’t say all blacks were low information voters. I’m sure there are some who made a rational, informed decision to favor Clinton. I have not called all Clinton voters low information.
But whereas we have a reasonably split for white voters, we have overwhelming Clinton support amongst blacks. Is it because she’s somehow disproportionately favorable in her intentions for black-related issues as president? I don’t think that’s the case. So then is it because the Clintons are a fixture in black culture with extreme name recognition? Combined with the fact that they don’t know enough about Bernie to know that he’s much more likely to radically change the system in a way that benefits them? That seems much more likely to me.
I generally agree with your sentiment. I was more criticizing Dangerosa’s dismissal of Sanders based on his race and gender, and the fact that it made her feel like he thinks he knows best. No shit, that’s the nature of even well-intentioned politics - you wouldn’t seek a leadership position if you didn’t feel like you’d be capable of leading.
That’s actually a very good point. The black vote tends to be very socially regressive. I was going to make the point earlier that his support for gay rights for 40 years bolsters his civil rights cred, but ironically that would probably cause him to lose black support rather than gain it, because black people as a group tend to be way behind the times on gay rights.
In that case, if they’re rejecting him because he’s not religious enough (or that he’s a Jew), they wouldn’t rightly be called “low information” - that’s another sort of lacking.
This
and this.
I’m a Bernie supporter but this is making me think.
If Hillary can actually address this, and not just pay it lip service, then she becomes a much more palatable candidate to me.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
Bernie Sanders was born in Brooklyn. He was educated at a New York public high school, Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, he lead the first civil rights demonstration in that city. He was a lecturer at Harvard before being elected mayor of Burlington for four terms. He then served four terms in the House of Representatives. He is currently serving his second term as a Senator.
And he’s managed to do all that without ever having to think about a non-white point of view. Truly, he is a man in a million!
Remind me - what was Hillary doing in 1963 when Bernie was participating in MLK’s March on Washington?
I’m sure “worked” is correct, although it’s probably not the word you wish you had chosen.
But you’re right - the investment is certainly paying off for Hillary!
Remind me - what exactly did Hillary do for black people during her terms in the Senate? What legislation has Hillary passed that is so “respectful” to black people? What about during Bill’s term? What sort of things was Hillary working on - respectfully! - that payed off for today’s black communities?
Pure horseshit.
I’ll note everything SenorBeef has said just boils down to “Bernie says he’s better than Hillary, so he must be.” The idea that Clinton is in the pocket of big corporations is a slur, there is no evidence to support this claim. Sanders has never had to make hard decisions as a politician because he’s represented an extremely homogeneous state, with little poverty, and where he largely could get away mostly doing things he cares about. Clinton has had to come up in the crucible of real, big boy politics, and that’s why she’s not wearing a white dress to this election. Ideological purity is no more a virtue than sexual purity, instead it largely shows a lack of experience (in both cases.)
Hillary was front and center on issues like healthcare as First Lady, in an extremely prominent position fraught with political peril (see: they impeached her husband.) Bernie has been lobbing grenades from a Cadillac-style, ultra protected, mega safe bunker. Hillary has had to fight a concerted, vile, right wing attack for over 20 years almost without abatement. It’s been so effective that a politician that has no meaningful scandal attached to her name is considered untrustworthy, and Bernie’s uncritical legions largely spew out that she’s some sort of corrupt bitch.
The Presidency requires fortitude–we already tried electing a wide eyed idealist, he was torn up in a couple years and became a pragmatist. I see no reason to try round two on that.
I don’t dismiss Sanders based on his race and gender, I feel he is dismissive of me based on mine.
Going to high school.
Fuck it. I’m not done with this. If you think that Bernie Sanders, a New York Jew born in 1941, a son of immigrants whose European family members perished in the Holocaust, doesn’t know what it’s like to be an outsider to the dominant white culture, then you should stop congratulating yourself for winning the Personal Identity Politics Olympics.
Well, she was 16–because she’s not 75 and too old to be President like Bernie. But even then she was doing things (in the Deep South where she is from and where people actually died over this civil rights stuff precious little Bernie was briefly detained over) like working to integrate her church.
In the early 1970s she worked on school desegregation, again in the deep south. As First Lady she was big on advocating for a cabinet that adequately represented women and minorities.
Bernie was a typical college kid of the 60s, liberal and pro-Civil Rights, a couple years later he had largely moved on to his pet cause–socialism, and visiting monstrously racist regimes like that of Fidel Castro’s Cuba and places that traffick in human misery and absence of all civil liberties like the Soviet Union (during a time when the Soviets were perpetuating the greatest humanitarian crisis of the 1980s in Afghanistan, including mass murders of civilians, use of “toy boys” to maim and cripple children and etc.)
Yeah if you think a Jew in Brooklyn is an outsider you’re ignorant of Brooklyn, Jews, and the word outsider.
To SenorBeef’s point, she probably can’t really address a lot of it - its a culture change. But acknowledging it as a problem is a start. Trying to hold the line on things like voters rights and affirmative action is a start. Sanders will do those things like Hillary will - either will work for the purpose. The point is that its a complex issue. Sanders takes complex issues and simplifies them to make them sound solvable. But he won’t solve them either. And for those of us that recognize the complexity of the issue, its patronizing. And he is frankly a lot less patronizing than some of his supporters - who don’t do him a lot of good when describing blacks as “low-information” voters. Or accusing women of voting for Clinton because she has a vagina (I voted for Obama over Clinton, body parts aren’t terribly important, its showing awareness of the privilege you get from having certain parts or skin color)
That’s right - going to high school, attending Young Republican meetings, supporting Barry Goldwater … you know, just normal, everyday teen stuff. The kind of thing you’d expect from someone who’d go on to work for Rockefeller’s 1968 Republican run for president. It was the sort of terrific experience that came in handy when she interned for Gerald Ford, when he was the Republican leader of the House.
It’s experience like that shows Hillary’s long standing commitment to civil rights and working the black community.
Yeah, the thing is it’s the Bernie supporters who say it’s obvious Bernie would be a better President for minorities than Hillary. My point is Hillary has been more up front and center, both in her actual life prior to politics and in this actual campaign (i.e. not 50 years ago when things were happening that frankly have nothing to do with this election) on black issues. I don’t think the actual policies Bernie and Hillary would support are substantially different in regards to affirmative action, civil rights, voter rights or etc–but I’m not the one claiming that you’d have to be a dumb, black, “low information voter” to not “get it.” The people making that claim should probably point to some specific policy positions and things Sanders has actually done since the Internet was invented or at the very least in the lifespan of someone under the age of 50 that sets him apart from Hillary.
To me it’s frankly insane that the best response to my question about what Bernie has done that makes it obvious he’d be a better President for blacks is a reference to the 1960s. When he’s been in Congress for something like 28 years this is shocking to me. That suggests you may not be aware of his votes and his positions on such issues, or may not be aware of his current rhetoric. Or maybe you know that on these matters his record isn’t materially different than Clinton’s (except during the current campaign she has been much more forceful in addressing systemic racism.)
This is increasingly hilarious all you have to talk about is stuff from 50 years ago. This stuff is a diversion, because the best argument Bernie thralls know how to make in favor of his civil rights platform is “he advocated for Civil Rights briefly in the 60s, was detained briefly by police, and then forgot all about it and snuggled up to some of the most repressive and terrible regimes of the 20th century in his quest to gain a deeper understanding of the benefits of socialism.”
You ignored the specifics of my post. I listed a specific proposal: his push for state-paid tuition at state colleges. As blacks disproportionately get the short end of the stick in education, and education is one of the key tools for moving out of poverty, then state-paid college from state school would be disproportionately beneficial to blacks. That’s far beyond anything Clinton would ever go for.
When Hillary was co-president, what great strides were made for black people? Since Bill was “the first black president” for some people, and she was the co-president, what’s their big achievement? Welfare reform? “Tough on crime” laws which helped propel us to the current situation with our criminal justice system?
The “Feel the Bern” kids are now pushing the meme that Hillary swept Super Tuesday in 2008, but Obama still won. This is not true. Actually Obama won 13 of 22 states on Super Tuesday, that year, and rcvd about the same # of delegates as Hillary. Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, and Utah.
Not the Bernies out of this race, not at this point. But it doesn’t look good. 
They disproportionately get the stick long before college. They don’t graduate from high school in nearly the same numbers as whites. Free college education doesn’t do any good to people on the school to jail track because of their race.
Oh sure, I was forgetting that time, right around when Bernie was born, when people were rounding up the dominant white culture and stuffing them in gas chambers. Oh, no - wait. That was Bernie’s family members going into the gas chambers. Not the dominant white cultural members. They were the ones doing the stuffing, I remember now.
Antisemitism was alive and well in this country for decades after the holocaust. Yes, even in Brooklyn. Even in America. There are still people today who will tell you with a straightface that Jews aren’t White. They don’t mean, “white skinned” they mean, White Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. To that sort of thinking, Jews will always be Other.
If you think that being in Brooklyn made up for knowing that his family members were destroyed in concentration camps or knowing that as Jew, he’s an outsider, well, you can take a seat on the bench next to ElvisLives.
Here’s a brief mention of Bernie’s family from a 2007 article in the NYT -
Yeah, Bernie was a Jew, in Brooklyn. But growing up, he was never part of the dominant class.