The New Yorker: Clinton, Sanders, and the Myth of a Monolithic “Black Vote”

[LiberalElite]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/clinton-sanders-and-the-myth-of-a-monolithic-black-vote

any believe that Bernie Sanders will lose the Democratic primary to Hillary Clinton in part because he cannot galvanize “the black vote.” Writing for The Nation on February 28th, Joan Walsh declared, “When the history of the 2016 presidential primary is written, if Hillary Clinton is the party’s nominee, it will show that Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign effectively ended in South Carolina.” Why? Because Clinton learned, from 2008, to treat the state “as a proxy for the black Democratic primary vote.” That year, after she lost the state badly to Barack Obama, “her campaign hemorrhaged African-American support” and never recovered. This year, Walsh posits, that is more or less Sanders’s problem.

Sanders’s struggle with black voters in the state came into clear focus at a meet-and-greet, on February 13th, with the Sanders supporter Erica Garner—the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Eric Garner, who died after being choked by a police officer—at Jackie’s, a soul-food restaurant in one of North Charleston’s black neighborhoods. I arrived before Garner and found fifteen Sanders supporters, nearly all of whom were white, chatting animatedly among themselves and picking at Jackie’s famous macaroni and cheese. Black customers who walked past the table on their way to the ordering counter cocked their heads and furrowed their brows in confusion—what were all these white people doing here? The intention of the gathering, surely, was to drum up support in the black community for Sanders, but the scene turned out to be a bleak harbinger of primary day—a giant win for Clinton that confirmed her long-established black support.

When black men were enfranchised, in 1870, with the Fifteenth Amendment, the group became a voting bloc known as “the negro vote,” Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, told me. Almost a century later, the term morphed into “the black vote” as the word “negro” became gauche in the country’s liberal corners. The idea of the black vote persists among pundits, journalists, pollsters, and politically engaged dinner-party attendees to describe the electoral preferences of millions of voters. Once loyal to the party of Lincoln, blacks shifted their support almost completely to the Democratic Party with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in 1964. But if you look at state-by-state numbers for this year’s Democratic contest, “the black vote” appears more complicated. So far, Sanders has not won a majority of black voters in any contest with a large African-American population. But he has done much better with black voters in Midwestern states and with younger black voters across the country. These variances are one reason to start to unravel the myth of a monolithic black vote.

xposted in GDP

[eridani]

1. State Sen. Nina Turner on Why Black Voters Should Support Bernie—But Not Stop There

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19021/nina-turner-drops-clinton-for-bernie-sanders

Where does the progressive movement go from here?

All the people who are engaged, even if Bernie is not the nominee, must continue to collectively push this system to answer to the majority of the people. I’ll sum it up with a quote by Congresswoman Barbara Jordan: “What the people want is very simple—they want an America as good as its promise.” One great president cannot do it alone. Change happens in this country from the grassroots and not the grass-tops.

What do you say to those people who have no confidence in this political system? What can Bernie Sanders say, what can you say, to them to get them up to go vote?

Speaking out against the 1996 welfare reform bill, the one that had a dog whistle in it—the notion of the welfare queen—Bernie took to the floor of the House and said that this is wrong. Likewise, when I hear him talk about free university education, as a first-generation college graduate, that means so much to me. I want all children—black, brown, Native American and white—to have that opportunity, and not to be saddled with debt—debt in one hand and a degree in the other.

Education helped me become a cycle-breaker. My mother died at 42 years old with her dreams deferred. She died on the system of welfare. My mom worked hard. She tried hard. But everybody doesn’t run a race at the same pace. We need a leader who understands that everybody’s journey is not the same and that our government is designed for us to do collectively what we cannot do as individuals.

Bernie Sanders’ moral compass does not change based on political expediency. We have to do this for the next generation of young folks in this country. They deserve better. That is what we are living for.