Some have lamented about the increasingly bitter and acrimonious fight going on right now about #BlackLivesMatter and the Bernie Sanders campaign. It’s true that this is a classic left-wing circular firing squad. And it has certainly brought out the worst in performative white anti-racism, the kind where people care more about being perceived as one of the good white people than they do about actually ending systemic racism. (Half of my Facebook feed now is Sanders-related posts that would be more honest if they just said “I’m the white guy who’s really down with black people!”) At the same time, working through these issues is important. I concede that there are healthier ways to have this conversation, but that’s life and politics ain’t beanbag. I don’t have to agree with how everyone is doing the work to still recognize that they’re doing the work.
Either way, I hope people understand: a year from now, everyone on the genuine left will be looking back on this time fondly as a moment when the national Democratic party, in a primary season with a left-wing challenger, deigned for awhile to care about black people and the left. Because in a year, when Hillary Clinton is fighting desperately to keep Pennsylvania and Ohio from Scott Walker, I promise you, she won’t be shouting “black lives matter” from the stage. The Democrats did not suddenly stop being the party of triangulation and moderate centrism. This is an important battle with big philosophical and political ramifications for the American left; it’s also an activist squabble within what are numerically very small groups. Influential yes, and for good reason, given all of the amazing organizing and publicizing that BLM has done, and how the Sanders campaign has reinvigorated Democratic politics. But 72% of the 2012 electorate was white, and they broke for the GOP by 20%. A politician and party as ruthless as Hillary and the Dems are won’t let past promises get in the way of clawing out those electoral votes.
As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in a Facebook post,
A preliminary thought on the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2016 election: I wonder what the end game is when the objective seems to be getting the leading candidates running of the Democratic Party to produce robust plans detailing how they will address the issues of the Black Lives Matter movement? What does it mean for either Sanders or Clinton to produce more campaign platforms concerning “racial justice” when they remain in a political party that is complicit and invested in the destruction of Black neighborhoods through the instruments of privatization. The Democratic Party on a mayoral and local representation level has driven the process of mass school closures in Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit and Philadelphia. In Detroit, the Democratic Party leads the assault on Black people’s access to water as a basic human right. The examples are endless and yet there is a great deal of focus being narrowed down to what the Democratic presidential candidates are putting in their platforms as the basis of ultimately endorsing or passively supporting them.
The hashtag and slogan “earn our vote” implies, if not forthrightly declares, that there is a particular combination of planks the Democratic Party can put together to win the vote of the movement. Malcolm X once said that when we put the Democrats first, they put us dead last. Nothing has changed in the fifty years since he said this. This Party that has never in its entire history done anything for Black people that mass movements and violent rebellions did not make it do. It has not all of sudden seen the light and is ready to join the fight for Black liberation. They will say and do anything to get elected and abandon this movement the second they are in office. The Democratic Party does not deserve the support of the Black movement under any circumstances.
So yes, pressure Bernie Sanders. If you allow that effort to amount to support for Hillary Clinton or Martin O’Malley, I think that’s misguided, given their terrible records on race. But definitely, pressure away. But let’s remember: the president is going to have very little impact on the lived experience of anti-black racism; Clinton is more likely to be the nominee; and what consumes our attention in August of 2015 will look like a footnote in September of 2016. The Democratic nominee breaking rightward for the general is about as predictable as it gets in politics. The next stage of action will be reminding the Democrats of their commitments when they’re in the general election, making their appeals to the vast white throngs that are underrepresented on lefty Twitter but overrepresented in our political process. Maybe then, we can finally come together as a movement.