The national Black Lives Matter network has asked the Democratic National Committee to hold a presidential debate devoted exclusively to the topic of racial justice in America.
In a petition posted at Color of Change on Tuesday, the group told DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) that black voters “deserve substantive responses and policy recommendations” from the Democratic field.
“It is not enough to poll the Presidential candidates on whether or not they think “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter,” the petition reads.
This question came up during the first of six DNC-approved Democratic debates, held in Las Vegas, Nevada on Oct. 13. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley affirmed that “black lives matter” to the only question during the over two-hour debate that specifically addressed the movement’s concerns.
Black Lives Matter activists argue that the limited number of debates allows candidates to pay scant attention to issues like poverty in the black community, mass incarceration, and racist policing. Other candidates, including Sanders and O’Malley, have asked the DNC to hold more debates in order to give Democrats more opportunities to air their views, as have two top members of the DNC staff.
The Republican National Convention will host 12 presidential debates during the 2016 election cycle.
“Limiting the number of debates unfairly privileges some candidates over others, and cheats voters out of the opportunity to fully engage candidates on issues we care about,” BLM activists wrote in the petition.
Several prominent candidates have developed a rocky relationship with Black Lives Matter on the campaign trail. In June, Sanders was forced offstage at his own rally by the co-founders of the Seattle chapter, who decried his “white supremacist liberalism.” O’Malley has been criticized for upholding “broken windows” policing during his tenure as Baltimore mayor—a policy that activists say resulted in the disproportionate imprisonment of minorities. And Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has faced attacks for the crime control policies enforced by her husband Bill during his presidency.
As the activists put it in their petition, “This last year alone has demonstrated clearly that Black lives are under attack—from police violence to the murders of black trans women to economic disenfranchisement and neoliberal polices. It’s time to extend the public conversation beyond the status quo.”
As of 1:30 PM ET, the petition had garnered over 540 signatures.
I completely support the movements goals, but this is too much. We don’t need a Democratic debate dedicated to each Democratic demographic.We don’t need separate debates dedicated to immigrants and Latinos, one for LGBTs, and so on. All it would serve to do to have a BLM debate would be to scare the shit out of some white people whose confirmation bias would tell them that Democrats only care about helping black people. We don’t need that. The candidates addressed the issues most important to BLM and Sanders, Clinton, and O’Malley did so quite eloquently. BLM should continue to keep these issues at the forefront as they’ve been doing so successfully, and they should continue to make our issues part of the Democratic debate/discussion, but the Democratic candidates need to also focus on issues that effect all of us, white, black, brown, etc.
That individual media venues now control what are laughingly referred to as ‘debates’ is, as we’ve all witnessed, a large part of the dark-money-soaked, cliché-riddled ‘problem’, a ‘problem’ only very recently and not completely drained of a large dog whistle abscess. Pols will do what pols do, activists should start by making demands of the more powerful old media…
What about a “summit” or conference or something like that? I know the Christian fundies like to have the presidential candidates over to that BareBack MegaChurch in CA at some point in the cycle to ask them how much they love god and all that BS. Why can’t BLM do something similar? Create a venue and make it uncomfortable for candidates to ignore them? Maybe they tried that already?
Wow, 540 whole signatures…
Seems only fair, given the GOP debates focus exclusively on BLM (i.e. “Billionaire Lives Matter”).