Bernie Sanders Will Die A Stubborn Old White Man

He's no better than the Democrats he criticizes!

When I wrote my first article about Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2015, my white editors at a so-called progressive website tried to shut it down.

It was an exhaustive reported piece about why he struggled to gain traction with Black voters he needed to win the Democratic primary in 2016, during his first presidential run. My editors said the piece needed more reporting, used faulty polling and needed more editing, which I obviously disagreed with. I was thoroughly convinced that the editors were biased in favor of Sanders. (They ran non-stop pop-up ads raising money for his campaign!) Non-Black writers on the site were writing glowing pieces about Sanders that almost never explored race, which I felt was a huge hole in our coverage and a larger issue with white progressives as a whole that dog the movement to this very day. 

Simone Sanders, Bernie’s Black press secretary at the time, not only supported my reporting but emailed my editors asking why the piece was held up. The editors still refused to publish, so I went to Twitter to express my frustration. Public pressure led to my article seeing the light of day. 

My editors fired me a few weeks later. 

I knew publicly embarrassing them would lead to a pink slip, but they did me a favor. I went on to become a national political correspondent at FUSION, where I continued my reporting on Sanders campaign, including his issues with Black voters.

My post-election autopsy report was widely shared and read, in large part because some of his own staff acknowledged his refusal to adjust his messaging to be more race-specific to Black voters. I’m not saying Sanders didn't talk about race at all. He just didn't speak about it in a way that resonated with enough Black voters to make him truly competitive. He did not adjust his messaging during his 2020 run, either.

And we all know how that ended.

So when I saw Sanders’ statement blasting Democrats over why Harris lost, I saw the pot calling the kettle black. 

He said that the Democratic Party (of which is not an official member; he’s a career Independent), abandoned the working class and chastised the well-paid consulting class and questioned if they will learn anything from this “disastrous campaign.”

This is coming from a man who ran twice for the democratic nomination for president—and lost. Most of the power brokers in Sanders’ inner circle were white men from the very well-paid consulting class that he’s critiquing. A 2019 article from The New York Times reported that his campaign was too male and white and that senior advisors struggled to address sexual harassment issues during his first campaign. Sanders took responsibility for the sexual harassment allegations and firmly believed he wasn’t aware of the behavior, so I do acknowledge his character. I also give him credit for staffing his campaign with some senior people of color in 2020. But it was clear a handful of white men who are as insular as he is had the real decision-making power. 

I’m not relitigating his previous failures as a candidate so much as I am his lack of self-reflection. The facts are clear: outside of a few outliers, the Black working class voted overwhelmingly for VP Harris; his statement suggesting there was a shift of black working class voters going to Trump is unsubstantiated in overall figures. 

If most white working class men and women voted for Harris, she would have won.

They voted against her because of their perceptions of the economy, not what was actually real. Of course, I welcome the retorts arguing that none of Biden’s economic successes with the economy matter to many people if the price of milk and eggs are unaffordable and that wages are at historic lows. These factors do not tell the full story, though. Black people have had higher unemployment rates than white people since the Department of Labor began gathering such data, so if anyone is economically anxious it’s us. We didn’t vote for a white supremacist.

At some point, Bernie and his devoted backers must accept that Trump provided no economic plans and won in large part because white working class voters had no issues with his racism, sexism and criminality and embraced his message of hate, anger and resentment. 

Frankly, any person who can ignore Trump’s hateful rhetoric is not a reliable voter, but that’s just me.

Sanders' statement isn’t completely wrong. He’s right about the consulting class that refuses to adjust its tactics, Democrats’ immoral support of a genocide in Gaza and the growing power of the oligarchy. I’m troubled by his statement because he ran on an anti-oligarchy, pro-working class message.

Twice—and lost.

[And know many of you want to blame the Democratic machine for undermining his candidacy, but I’ll remind you that a Black man with a funny man with none of Sanders’ white privilege was able to over come it and beat the Hillary machine. So spare me your excuses!]

For all of his criticisms that Democrats refuse to change, Sanders never took his own advice and adjusted his economic messaging to appeal to Black people who would’ve possibly backed his campaign. 

I really think Bernie is a good guy. I just think he’s stubborn as fuck.

As radio host Karen Hunter said in a recent show, he had a general economic message to Black voters that suggested that we’re all poor, even though a majority of us aren't. Hunter said she spoke with his press secretary, Simone Sanders, prior to his appearance on her show and warned her to prepare the senator not to speak to her audience as if they are all poor and incarcerated.

Bernie did the opposite and came in with the “poor people talking points” instead of a message of how he will make all Black Americans’ lives better.  

I was on the campaign trail as a reporter for FUSION, in 2016, and The Root, in 2020, and got feedback that backs up Hunter’s impressions of Sanders. A Black woman in her 30s, told me that she worked in Silicon Valley and made a “nice six-figure-salary,” but that her paycheck was paying for multiple households because, like many Black folks, her parents didn't have generational wealth to pass down to her. As much as Sanders’ message appealed to her progressive politics, she got the impression that his analysis of income inequality was too general and his policies would swallow her up with white-tax brackets of similar take home salaries without considering their wallets aren’t spending money equally.

I got the same response from other high-earning Black people who wanted to back Sanders, but felt he didn’t understand how race impacts their high-income pocketbooks.

Sanders’ analysis of economics has always been binary and that is why his base did not grow to reach the numbers of Black folks needed to win the 2016 and 2020 primaries.

My biggest beef with Bernie’s statement is that, like the Democratic Party overlords he critiques, he refuses to interrogate white people for their electoral choices. At some point, we have to ask ourselves why so many white people refuse to read, listen to lies, don’t care about facts and vote Republican at all levels of government and Black voters consistently do the opposite. Southern states have the highest poverty rates in the U.S., yet most white people in those states vote for Republicans that don’t improve their economic well-being. We need to stop making excuses for white people.

But Sanders has no issue challenging Black people for their political choices.

Using a Black man as a cover, Sanders asked Cornel West why Black people are not supporting his candidacy during a 2020 campaign stop in Flint, Mich., that drew a mostly white crowd in a majority Black city. 

“Dr. West, do you think, given the conditions of the African American community right now, that supporting a status quo, ol’ same, ol’ type politician is going to address these issues?,” he asked at the March 10 event.

I was in the audience reporting for The Root and wrote how patronizing his tone was. West, who was trotted around as the white progressive messenger to Black people, reinforced Sanders’ insulting question. You can read my article to see what West said, but the Race Matters book author had a harsh, condescending critique of Black people neither he nor Sanders had for white voters who didn’t back his campaign.

There are many things Democrats need to do as a party to improve, but Bernie is hardly the one to offer suggestions. Black women, who backed Harris with 90-plus percent of their vote, have better critiques of the party worthy our attention. 

LaTosha Brown, of Black Voters Matter, posted a brutal takedown of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who said Democrats would have fared better if Biden dropped out in time to have a real open primary. Brown, in part, said that Pelosi should “use her influence as a white woman to organize other white women and better understand how to end racism. I suggest that she starts with her own internalized thinking and actions first.”

Sanders would be wise to do the same. But he won’t. 

He and Pelosi are different sides of the same coin that refuse to self-reflect and critique white people for their racism, leaving Black people to save a democracy that most white folk freely salvage. He had two presidential runs to adjust his politics, but shows no signs of adjusting his philosophy even for a new generation of progressives who look up to him. I worry that his stubbornness will rub off on progressive political candidates color and they will campaign on this arrogant, whitewashed outlook and have Black voters hand them their asses in primaries they could win.

I honestly think Sanders doesn’t adjust his messaging to speak to Black voters because he doesn’t need us to keep his seat in the Senate. He lives in Vermont, so he really doesn’t. But when he left his lily-white state for higher office in 2016 and 2020, he literally fucked around and found out. Twice.

As his statement revealed, he has learned absolutely nothing about why that was.

Sanders needs to stop preaching to us as if his politics are free from the same problematic thinking of the Democratic machine he feels he is so much better than—because, truth be told, he isn’t.