CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on Tuesday night asked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) why he was still struggling with black voters compared to his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton during a CNN town hall in South Carolina.
“You know when we started in South Carolina, my message wasn’t
resonating with anybody,” Sanders replied. “Nobody knew who I was. I’m running against a candidate who’s one of the best-known people in the world, a candidate who ran here a very strong campaign in 2008, who knows a lot of people.”
Sanders painted his presidential campaign as an underdog that started with “no support.”
“Our support has grown, and it has grown in the African-American community,” he said. “What I believe to the degree we can get our message out, and the message is that we have a criminal justice system, which is broken. That there is something very wrong when African-Americans in South Carolina and around the country get nervous about walking down the street or going into their car and being stopped by a police officers. That should not be happening in America.”
Sanders went on to outline plans to demilitarize local police departments.
“We have very specific ideas about how the federal government–you know, local police departments are run by municipalities–federal government can play a major role in ending the militarization of so many of our local police departments,” he said. “They look like occupying armies, and we’ll make the police departments look like the diversity of the communities they are serving. There’s a lot to be done.”
Oddly, we also have to get the money out of police departments. SWAT teams have their own lobbying group. Great example of how broken our system is.
Because every
white suburb'Murcan community needs surplus military vehicles and munitions. And OH!, those really cool highly trained specialty farces wearing scary looking BLACK uniform duds.Me soooo jealous!
Maybe because Sanders thinks that addressing criminal justice issues is sufficient to address Black voters concerns. Criminal justice reform is very important, but it’s not everything. He has such a sophisticated understanding of how powerful interests have captured the economic system that makes his views on race seem so overly simplistic. His critiques miss how bias and oppression intersect with identities, and that his platform is economics first, which primarily benefit poorer White men, and then has “special interest” issues tacked on for the “other” groups.
He didn’t even reference his economic platform in the response quoted by the article, though. He has taken real measurable steps to address many of those issues and yet continues to be dogged by people who think he’s ignoring it in favor of economics.
No, disagree.
“Maybe because Sanders thinks that addressing criminal justice issues is sufficient to address Black voters concerns.”
Do you really think he’s that narrow minded?
“primarily benefit poorer White men”
Where do you come up with this stuff?
A strong economy lifts ALL BOATS. Then you fight the other battles.