BLM protests at Sanders rally

general topics
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It’s either one of two things, I’d wager. First, the first one you mention, that he will be responsive. Second, it’s the ongoing issue with white liberals, that there is a tendency is dismiss racism in and of itself as merely a correlative of class/economic issues. Given his strong focus on economic issues, at times to the exclusion of all other social problems, I can understand the need to challenge him to more effectively underscore how these are distinct (even if related at times) issues. It doesn’t help that white liberal responses have often been deeply condescending, such as:

http://gawker.com/dont-piss-on-your-best-friend-1723074461

There seems to be a fundamental assumption that everyone aspires to the bourgeois ideal, when it’s not necessarily so. Some people just don’t want to get shot by the cops and that is their core issue.

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“Is he?” is a good question, that I haven’t really seen anyone talk about yet, and was nagging on me before you brought it up. In order to figure it out if he’s been targeted more than Clinton, you’d need to do stuff like compare how many speeches each has given, if the crowds for each of those were comparable, if the security for each of those were comparable, and so on. It seems to me that Sanders has been having more big, public speeches with huge crowds - has he not? Hasn’t that been what his supporters are constantly going on about, while Clinton is mostly appealing to smaller, private donors (who I imagine have more secluded events) ? That he’s even being specifically targeted over the exclusion of others, to me, is an unproven hypothesis.

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Probably worth noting that Vermont is 94% white, and Sanders seems to be very popular in white liberal cities like Seattle and Portland.

I do like his message, but it is (still) too heavily focussed on economic issues.

Still, remaining hopeful, and not seeing anyone else out there any better.

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Agreed. None of this means I won’t necessarily vote for or support him, as long as he’s responsive to these issues. If he’s truly populist, he needs to not only appeal to our concerns about economic inequality, but he should also be willing to go into white communities, that claim progressive identity, and push back on this issue. Just like he would go into a room full of men, hopefully, and push gender equality. And go into a room of straight, cisgendered people and push for equality there.

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Japhroaig, can you keep your big mouth shut? Oh, you can’t, well can you at least choose to say something not to inflammatory? Oh, you can’t do that either? Can you be polite? Did I hear a ‘maybe’?

Racism has been an integral part of the human condition since… let’s just say 40,000 years. One candidate in one country with 5% of the population of the world is going to make a statistically insignificant change in the way race and race inequality is handled.

Bernie is on the correct side of history in regards to race equality. But it is going to literally, not figuratively, take another 100 MLKs, 100 Malcolm Xs, 100 Ghandis, and 100 Bernies before there is equality. And each one is going to take lumps from all sides (or worse than lumps).

My view is to treat the political process like compound interest. Yes, we all want the perfect Plato-ish benevolent all knowing dictator. But that is a very naive point of view. In the messy meat world we live in take the leader who is 51% better, and work to iterate and grow those ideals.

Bernie doesn’t have a plank that addresses law enforcement reform with the language you specifically want? He uses words like Ally during campaign speeches? There are racist pieces of shit in a political party, and they haven’t been shamed enough for your standards!? I apologize to @anon61221983 and other rational people here–indiscriminate language which lumps disparate groups together ahead–but if those are your sticking points to protest at a Bernie speech, then pull your head our of your liberal arts degree ass (heh, i almost got an arts degree before i dropped out :D)

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Except this is not quite true. while discrimination is as old as civilization (meaning with farming and cities, I’d argue and it tended to be class based, however each society defined it), racism is a historically specific thing. It emerges with the building of British colonies in the mid-17th century, and continues today. While racism exists elsewhere, and has been called a global problem (see Lake and Reynolds Drawing the Global Color Line), it’s good old fashioned American racism we’re discussing.

Well, except that he wants to assume that fixing the economic issues will fix the race issues, which it won’t necessarily. Will it help, sure thing, but upper class black people still encounter racism - do you think no one has ever racially profiled the Queen Bey or JayZ? This really isn’t about making him perfect, but about pushing him on this particular issue to a view point that better acknowledges the reality of racism… I don’t think that’s asking too much, considering the situation.

And I always love to hear your viewpoint, even if I disagree!

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I haven’t explicitly banned it’s usage in the preamble but I’m leaning towards an interpretation which disallows it. :wink:

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Guys! Guys!!!

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was that intentional? Because that might be the best pun I’ve ever heard. All joking aside (well, as much as possible when dealing with word-play).

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high fives

you are a historian by trade, i am a historian in a comfy armchair surrounded by books i have never read :smiley:

here are a few axioms i work from:

  • Queen Bey and JayZ have been profiled, with almost six sigma certainty, because of the way they look

  • 80%+ of American style racism is still tied to economics *

  • Pushing a candidate to be clear on the stance they have is good, shutting them down because they were misunderstood is bad

    • I have a friend that is a humanities teacher, and the only thing that has caused us to virtually come to fisticuffs is when i argue that systemic racism is an emergent behavior of economics and nepotism, and she argues that economics and nepotism are emergent behaviors of racism. so in the realm of fairness, why not fix all three?
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This whole thread is predicated on that question…

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It really is the endless marxist discussion on what is the base and what is the superstructure. I’m arguing, that maybe that’s irrelevant whether or not racism is base or superstructure, if either way it’s a life and death situation. I’m not arguing either/or here, I’m arguing for both. Acknowledging that race stands on its own doesn’t’ mean that economics don’t matter, just that it has specifics to deal with outside of economics. No one is asking Sanders to ONLY address race, but to more forcefully incorporate it into his overall platform outside of the economic argument. I’m actually kind of flummoxed why that’s so controversial?

Also:

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and that is precisely what didn’t happen in seattle, which is what precipitated this thread. and honestly, i think your whynotboth.gif is perfectly appropriate for this kind of discussion.

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The only incidents I’ve heard of are the one this weekend in Seattle, and Sanders and O’Malley at Netroots Nation.

I can understand BLM writing off all of the clown-car candidates as a lost cause, and Chafee as a waste of effort, but Clinton (as still the overwhelmingly likely Dem candidate) should be being pushed as much as possible.

Is it also getting blown out of hand? This was a smaller meeting that wasn’t even a Sanders rally, just a Medicare/Social Security event he was speaking at, his actual rally wasn’t disrupted.

Also, this (I’ve seen lots of Daily Kos links here, was this one?)

But I’ve got to call out one particular thing that’s both tremendously unhelpful and something I see way too much of here: the rise of conspiracy theories saying that someone else, either Hillary Clinton or a GOP/Koch Brothers operation, is coordinating/organizing/funding the BLM actions as a way
of attacking Bernie Sanders.
First off, it’s CT. There’s absolutely no evidence for it at the moment. Other candidates (O’Malley) have been targeted. And to the extent that Bernie’s been targeted multiple times, well, he’s been drawing big crowds and doesn’t do much if any pre-screening. Both of these are very positive things about his campaign, but they also make his rallies an easy target for disruption. (Aside: he should get Secret Service protection at this point, without question.)

But this theory isn’t just a conspiracy theory (they’re dime-a-dozen here), it’s a uniquely inflammatory one. When you claim that HRC/GOP are behind BLM’s actions, you are saying that the protesters are either lying about their motives or are being used against their knowledge in service of a different agenda. The former interpretation denies them honesty. The latter interpretation denies them agency.
It says that the protest really isn’t about them, it’s about Hillary. Or about the GOP. It says that the thoughts and the opinions of the activists are not their own - that they really belong to someone else. Is it any wonder that black activists who read this sort of thing get angry?

The saddest thing about all of this is that Bernie Sanders himself seems (at least to this white diarist) to get it, and to be working hard on being an ally. This time, he gave them the microphone and let them speak. Didn’t work out well in practice, but he clearly cares and he’s clearly trying. He deserves a ton of credit for his response and his attempts at outreach. All of us could learn from his example.

ETA:

Probably also worth noting that at the Westlake Park event, BLM were represented, and race was explicitly mentioned (by an NAACP rep):

https://twitter.com/publicolanews/status/630114984190611456

Also, Sawant has criticised Sanders in the past for not helping to build enough of a movement:
(similar to what @FoolishOwl said higher up)

“It is your obligation to use that position to help build organized movements,” she said. “The real measure of how successful we would’ve been through an electoral position is how effective we’ve been in building that larger layer that has to go beyond that one person.”

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Yar, I linked that article above and it’s probably for the best that left-leaning outlets keep their composure on this fringe idea of the issue at hand but like I responded to @kimmo, there’s a part of me that absolutely expects exactly those kind of dirty tricks to be employed.

I’m for sure biased about this idea though since the Scottish referendum and subsequent stories concerning criticism from the Russian press about the conditions in the vote counting process and then the leaks about the subterfuge-tactics employed by the UK security services to… what was it? Deny, Distort, Disparage, Destroy, Defame, De-whatever using manipulation focused on media attention and social interactivity.

The fact that we can’t just rule it out because it sounds outlandish says a lot about how far the envelope has already been pushed in this regard.

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In reference to the way that Bernie is handling the impetus to integrate the rhetoric of the BLM movement into his campaign, I can’t help but wonder if his inertia to action is in some way deliberate.

It seems like he’s just reacting slowly (well, relatively slowly for the digital media age) but what if he’s used to allowing issues like this to play out and integrate at their own pace in a world where traction takes longer to engage because of the nature of the print and TV news-cycle?

His natural, habituated response to the kind of integration of intent that we are hoping to see might just seem slow to us because we expect everything to move at the speed of light. Bernie hired Ms. Sanders at his very first meeting with her, and whilst his rhetoric probably didn’t get ironed out with as much speed and aplomb as you would expect from a lifetime politician, he does appear to be making the right kinds of moves.

I’m not saying that there is a strategy by his camp to deliberately slow-walk the BLM movement into the fold so as to engage social media and the like in the absorbtion process but if I was a super-duper, ultra-canny games-theoretician who wanted to squeeze this subject for all of it’s focus-juice, I might be doing exactly what he is.

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I did.

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You may need to work on your persuasiveness.

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Well, yeah, but that’s because you just like to watch shit burn… I got video (in a gif), you watching shit burn:

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