Guardian: Black thinkers like Bernie Sanders. They've studied the Clintons' true cost

[EdwardBernays]

Spike Lee is the latest black public intellectual to endorse Bernie Sanders and to question the sanity of black voters and politicians pledging their allegiance to the Clintons, who have done as much harm to black America as any living political couple. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am mystified by robust black support for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

...

Bill Clinton governed through playing to white fears by hurting, locking up or even executing black Americans. He left the campaign trail in 1992 to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man so mentally incapacitated, he reportedly did not eat the dessert from his final meal because he was “saving it for later”. When in office, Bill Clinton ended welfare for poor children and destroyed countless black families through a crime bill even he now admits made mass incarceration worse, while Hillary Clinton would go out and whip up support for this accelerated disenfranchisement and marginalization of black America, even when it meant referring to children as “superpredators”.

The case against Clintonian neoliberalism is compelling. I am glad to see black thinkers making a case for Sanders’ democratic socialism and its potential to address structural racism as an alternative. If anyone is smart enough to effectively make Sanders’ case to black America, it would be the intellectual leaders who have endorsed him thus far.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/24/black-thinkers-bernie-sanders-studied-clintons-true-cost

[thereismore]

1. I am mystified too, but they tell me it's because I am white and I don't get it.

Glad to hear that people who have the experience of living while black can also be mystified by this.

[Faux pas]

2. Kickin'

[LanternWaste]

3. I dig the obvious implication that should one be black and disagree with the premise

I dig the obvious implication that should one be black and disagree with the premise, then one is simply not a thinking black person.

Dig as in dig it, bury it, and walk away from it.

[emulatorloo]

4. Yeah! Version #3032 of DU's seminal "Stockholm Syndrome" thread.

[Number23]

5. You nailed it. It never gets old to some here.

And I love that Spike Lee is now a black intellectual. I'm sure he's been called a lot of things in his career -- great director, provocative, pain in the ass etc. -- but isn't it precious that the MILLISECOND he endorses Sanders, he suddenly becomes an "intellectual?"

[emulatorloo]

6. Well there are certainly a lot of 'educational' threads today.

[AzDar]

7. K & R

[awoke_in_2003]

8. So does this mean that African Americans

who support HRC aren't thinkers? Because it sure seems like that is what it is implying.