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Meet the Group of African-American Organizers Building Black Support for Bernie Sanders

A woman cheers during a Bernie Sanders campaign event on August 21 in Greenville, S.C. (Photo vis Bernie 2016)

Will grassroots organizing within the black electorate be able to challenge Clinton’s hegemony?

By Salim Muwakkil
In These Times

Will Crosby, 63, a veteran political organizer in Chicago’s bruising electoral battles, is worried that the black community will be caught flat-footed in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The way he sees things, too much of the black electorate is sleepwalking in lockstep support of Hillary Clinton. She is by far the black electorate’s favored candidate, with an 80 percent approval rate.

But Crosby thinks Bernie Sanders is the best presidential candidate for African Americans. “Bernie Sanders is talking about issues that directly affect our community and he’s doing it in a fearless way,” Crosby says. Unfortunately, he adds, Sanders’ message has yet to penetrate into the black community.

Crosby and other Chicago-based black activists have formed a group called the Bernie Brigade that attempts to showcase Sanders’ progressive platform and long history of support for the black struggle. The group canvasses for Sanders in majority-black neighborhoods and holds pro-Sanders events. “We’re still very much engaged in an educational process,” he notes. “Many in our community are unfamiliar with Bernie. They just see an elderly white man from remote, white Vermont. And, quite frankly, that’s a hard sell.”

Crosby says attitudes are easily changed when they hear Sanders’ political spiel and his policy prescriptions, especially on reforming the criminal justice system and curbing wealth inequality. But a black electorate that feels warmly toward Clinton may not take the time to listen. According to a CNN poll from June, Sanders had the support of just 2 percent of black Democrats.

The Bernie Brigade is struggling to get political traction in a city still raw from recent hard-fought battles for both Illinois governor and Chicago mayor. The group includes many members who were bitter antagonists in those elections. “If Bernie can bring us together for one cause, I know he can grow his appeal to the larger black community,” Crosby says.

That’s essential for Sanders. As his campaign understands, unless he can ignite the so-called Obama coalition that includes youth, people of color and single women, his likelihood of victory goes from remote to infinitesimal. (Continued)

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Know Your Battlefield: Taking Stock of the Terrain

What Donald Trump Understands About Republicans

By Thomas B. Edsall
New York Times Op-Ed

Sept 2, 2015 – Donald Trump’s success is no surprise. The public and the press have focused on his defiant rejection of mannerly rhetoric, his putting into words of what others think privately. But the more important truth is that a half-century of Republican policies on race and immigration have made the party the home of an often angry and resentful white constituency — a constituency that is now politically mobilized in the face of demographic upheaval.

Demographic upheaval may be understating it. From 1970 to 2010, the Hispanic population of the United States grew fivefold, from 9.6 million to 50.5 million. From 2000 to 2010, the number of white children under 18 declined by 4.3 million while the number of Hispanic children grew by 4.8 million. In 2013, white children became a minority, 47.7 percent of students ages 3 to 6.

We have become familiar with Trump’s selling point — that he, more than any other Republican candidate, voices nativist and protectionist views in aggressive and abrasive terms, without qualm: “I Love the Mexican people. I do business with the Mexican people, but you have people coming through the border that are from all over. And they’re bad. They’re really bad.” He has vilified Latin American immigrants as “bringing drugs, bringing crime” and as “rapists.”

Not very subtly, Trump conflates American blacks with Mexican immigrants. “I know cities where police are afraid to even talk to people because they want to be able to retire and have their pension,” he declared in Nashville on Aug. 29. “That first night in Baltimore,” when rioting broke out in protest over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, “they allowed that city to be destroyed. They set it back 35 years in one night because the police weren’t allowed to protect people. We need law and order!”

Urban gangs, in turn, provide Trump with an opportunity to link immigration and crime. “You know a lot of the gangs that you see in Baltimore and in St. Louis and Ferguson and Chicago, do you know they’re illegal immigrants?” Trump vows that after the election, “they’re going to be gone so fast, if I win, that your head will spin.”

Percent of white respondents in 2014 who agreed or disagreed with this statement: Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

The ease with which Trump has grasped top-dog status has provoked apprehension in the Republican establishment –perhaps most vividly in George Will’s comment on the renegade billionaire:

Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency.

George Will and other traditional conservatives reject the bombastic language Trump favors, preferring a more elliptical approach in order to avoid alienating moderate voters Republicans need to win in 2016. (Continued)

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Our Attitude on the Question of Chicago Violence

By Frank Chapman
Field Organizer, Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Over the July 4th weekend 10 people were killed and 55 wounded. As usual this opened a one-dimensional discussion on “Chicago violence” that focused exclusively on violence in the African American community and “Black on Black Crime”. If a Black person kills a Black person, and particularly if it involves gang rivalry, then that always provides an opportunity for the Mayor, the Anti-Violence Movement and Police Superintendent McCarthy to come out and hold our community in moral contempt for allowing this state of affairs to exist. In fact the Opinion section of the Chicago Sun-Times (July 13, 2015) has an op-ed by Laura Washington that says, “My people are committing genocide”. Raphael Lemkin, an authority on the subject, defined genocide as “a coordinated strategy to destroy a group of people, a process that could be accomplished through total annihilation as well as strategies that eliminate key elements of the group’s basic existence, including language, culture, and economic infrastructure.” So clearly Laura Washington does not understand the gravity of her statement or is unaware of the genocidal policies perpetrated against Black people in America from slavery to the present.

As organizers who are fighting against police crimes and for community control of the police we are constantly challenged by defenders of the status quo to focus on Black on Black crime. How do we respond to that challenge?

First, we start with the objective conditions of oppression in our communities that exist independently of anyone’s opinion. These conditions include high unemployment rates and below poverty wages, massive evictions and foreclosures, inadequate delivery of health services combined with an epidemic of alcohol and drug addiction and high infant mortality rates, miles of dilapidated housing, school closings, and scarce or non-existent recreational facilities. Add to these a phony war on drugs combined with a massive influx of drugs and deadly weapons, mass incarceration, 70% or more of gang related homicides unsolved and the active role of police in some of these murders (never censured, much less prosecuted) , hundreds of innocent victims of police torture and families whose children have been murdered by the police. All of these above-stated conditions are the result of existing government policies (such as austerity programs and institutionalized racist practices) and are the breeding ground for the violence in Chicago focused on by the media. The conditions that breed violence are never honestly discussed by the Mayor and his official and unofficial supporters. In fact, the status quo power relationships in the city are maintained and perpetuated by not addressing the root problems.

The reason why we are agitating, educating and organizing in our communities is because we know that this system of racist injustice that habitually blames the victim is incapable of solving this problem of Chicago violence. We are constantly delivering the message that we must enact an all elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) that will hold the police accountable for the crimes they commit and the way they police our communities.

Police crimes and corruption are related to all crimes. That is why when we are petitioning/recruiting in the neighborhoods for CPAC and the response is overwhelmingly “Yes, I’ll sign”! “Yes, I’ll volunteer!”(To date we have about 500 volunteers). We see what the police do every day, and we experience the racist contempt they have for us first hand. The news media, the Mayor, Police Superintendent McCarthy and all their concocted schemes of community policing cannot and have not changed the harsh realities we face on a daily basis.

Finally let me say that the best response to those who would make us responsible for the breeding ground of violence that they created is to continue to build for a Mass March on City Hall this August 29, 2015. On that historic day we must make our voices heard like they have never heard before.

[For more information on the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, see http://naarpr.org .]

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