Vox - Trump's racism is part of his larger con (vs Bernie's Trickle Down Social Justice)

[TomCADem]

Bernie Sanders has tried to avoid a focus on social justice issues like discrimination based on race or gender arguing that the focus should just be on economic equality. Remember how he criticized Democrats for "identity politics" post-2016?

In other words, improve the economy, and ills of racism will be eliminated. Most recently, he penned an article pushing this idea of trickle down social justice, which is not dissimilar from the RW talking points that problems of racism should be ignored in favor of a focus on the economy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanders-the-straightest-path-to-racial-equality-is-through-the-one-percent/2019/07/10/730a7206-9f6b-11e9-b27f-ed2942f73d70_story.html?utm_term=.86e0c2add055

Bernie Sanders: The straightest path to racial equality is through the one percent

Americans owe many of our freedoms to those who put their lives on the line for racial equality: people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and Daisy Bates. But a racial wealth gap of 10 to 1 exists between white and black Americans, and that gap, along with the effects of racism, fuels disparities in areas ranging from health care to housing and from college debt to criminal sentencing.

Many black Americans are disillusioned about politicians who champion the organizing power of black women when it’s time to turn out the vote but neglect their needs between election cycles. They are tired of politicians offering meaningful yet inadequate reforms — kicking the can of progress down the road instead of using their political capital to fight for reforms that current generations desperately need.

However, Vox has a great piece that explains how racism and sexism are actually tools of economic oppression. You cannot have economic justice without social justice. Trump illustrates how racism and sexism are used to blind white working class voters to the truth that Trump's policies hurt them. Rather than call this out, Bernie Sanders reiterates this idea that the key racial equality is just through economic equality. In fact, Bernie attacks on his Democratic opponents as supporting "open borders" and his attacks on Mexico and Chinese trade deals sound Trump like:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/18/20699176/donald-trump-ilhan-omar-white-collar-crime

Under Trump, decades of steady progress on non-climate air pollution have finally been reversed, and his administration is hard at work writing new rules that would increase water pollution levels as well. Beyond acts of formal deregulation, he’s scaled back on enforcement of existing laws so much that law firms seem to be panicking about the possibility that some clients won’t bother hiring them anymore.

This agenda, no less than Trump’s racism, is an absolute disaster for America’s immigrants and communities of color who are generally lower-income and more vulnerable to corporate abuses and pollution than more privileged people.

But critically, it is also an absolute disaster for the vast majority of white people. There are simply very few people who benefit from a combination of more pollution and less economic competition, and there’s no way for the tax cutting to balance that out unless you’re part of the tiny minority of the public that derives the majority of its income from stock ownership.

Trump’s politics of racial division are not particularly popular — his approval ratings are worse than those of any prior president at this point in his term except Jimmy Carter — but it’s still true that framing Trump as a symbol of white privilege is almost certainly more favorable to him than framing him as a person whose governance has concrete material implications for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds.

In other words, like most Republicans, Bernie minimizes the role of sexism and racism in oppressing working class Americans of all colors. Racial divisions are strongest in many Southern states like Alabama, where working class whites have some of the lowest household incomes. In other words, racism does not only hurt minorities. It hurts working class whites. You can't rely on trickle down social justice to eradicate racism as suggest by Bernie.

[Cha]

1. KR

[comradebillyboy]

2. Yes.