There’s a very important new movement out there with a very important message. It’s called “Black Lives Matter.” It started a little over a year ago in Ferguson, Missouri, with the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer. It’s grown since with the deaths of Walter Scott in North Charleston, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, Christian Taylor in Arlington, Texas, and others whose names we’ve never heard of.
Indeed, on the anniversary of Brown’s death, the Washington Post reported that, according to its database of fatal police shootings, 24 unarmed black men had been shot and killed by white police officers so far in 2015: one every nine days.
The “Black Lives Matter” movement says: We can’t accept that record as the new normal. We have to acknowledge that we still have a long way to go in dealing with racial inequality. We need to talk about it. And we need to make a top priority of changing our sentencing laws, racial bias in police departments, police-community relations, schools, higher education, jobs and many other ways of making sure young African-Americans in particular have every opportunity to succeed.
Their name says it all: Black lives do matter. That’s the message they want to drill into every politician, especially those running for the highest office in the land, so that those issues become front and center in the 2016 campaign. How? By staging protests and interrupting or shutting down campaign events.
So far, so good. It’s not their tactics that are wrong. It’s their target. Why, out of all the candidates running, did they start out by attacking Bernie Sanders?
Organizers first disrupted appearances by both Sanders and Martin O’Malley at the Netroots Nation event in Phoenix on July 18 – accusing them of only talking about economic issues like jobs, minimum wage and income inequality (all of which also benefit African-Americans), while ignoring strictly racial issues. On Aug. 1 in Seattle, “Black Lives Matter” protesters struck again by taking over a Social Security rally, which event sponsors then shut down before Sen. Sanders had a chance to speak.
Granted, everybody’s fair game in politics, including Bernie Sanders, but, seriously, look at the rest of the field. How many times do you hear Jeb Bush, or Ted Cruz, or Donald Trump, or even Ben Carson talk about racial equality? They think it’s divisive just to raise the topic. In last week’s first GOP debate, there was only one question on racial profiling by police. To Scott Walker. Who gave some rambling, non-pertinent response. Whereupon, unlike every other topic, nobody else was asked to comment. And “Black Lives Matter” gives all the Republicans a pass while targeting Bernie Sanders? This is nuts.
The truth is, more than any of the other 21 candidates running for president, Sanders not only agrees with “Black Lives Matter” that economic justice and social justice are equally important – and, indeed, can’t be separated – ut that’s what he’s preached and practiced all his life.
Sanders actually got involved in politics through the civil rights movement, as a community organizer with CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) in Chicago. He organized a sit-in against segregated housing in 1962. Later, reports John Nichols in The Nation, as an organizer for SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), Sanders joined the March on Washington in 1963 and was in the crowd for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He endorsed Jesse Jackson for president – twice.
He’s the only candidate to say: “The goals of the Black Lives movement are absolutely right.” To further those goals he’s put forth a platform to address racial justice, which includes new federal standards for police training and investing more than $5 billion in a federal minority youth jobs program. And he hired criminal justice activist Symone Sanders as his new press secretary.
As a white man of Bernie’s generation, I’d never pretend to lecture African-Americans on how to raise awareness of racial inequality. But I do know something about protests. I’ve done a lot of protesting in my life. I’ve marched with Eugene McCarthy, Cesar Chavez, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. And Rule No. 1 about protesting is: You protest people who don’t agree with you. You don’t waste time protesting people who already do.
“Black Lives Matter” leaders are making a mistake. They should make Bernie Sanders their champion, not their target.
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