Bernie Sanders, the self-identified socialist senator from Vermont and candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, demonstrated as much at the liberal Netroots Nation conference, a showcase for progressive Democrats held in Phoenix in July.
When confronted by Black Lives Matters protesters who wanted the presidential campaigns to begin addressing the issue of racism and police brutality, Sanders kept right on talking--acting as if the activists were hecklers.
This was an opportunity for Sanders--who took part in civil rights protests against segregation in the 1960s, but has yet to say much about racism during his Democratic primary campaign half a century later--to finally address the concerns and questions of African Americans and anti-racists. Instead, Sanders stuck to his script.
After Sanders was confronted in Phoenix, Hillary Clinton's handlers were quick to make sure she didn't make the same mistake she did a month before at an appearance at a Black church near Ferguson when she proclaimed, "All lives matter"--an insult to Black Lives Matter activists who have worked so hard to put the epidemic of racist violence against African Americans in the spotlight.
Clinton sought to cast herself as more engaged on race issues than Sanders, telling aWashington Post reporter, "We need to acknowledge some hard truths about race and justice in this country, and one of those hard truths is that racial inequality is not merely a symptom of economic inequality. Black people across America still experience racism every day."
But no matter what Hillary Clinton says about racism in America today, what she actually represents can be found in the record of Democratic Party and its decades of taking Black supporters for granted while never making good on its promises.
The Democratic Party's problem goes deeper than just being out of touch with the concerns of Black America today. The party has no interest in waging a struggle for racial equality, and it never has.
A look at President Bill Clinton's record on issues that impact Black America reveals just how little the Democrats have done in exchange for the overwhelming support they get from African Americans at every election. In fact, Clinton--hailed as the "first Black president" by novelist Toni Morrison--made everyday life for Blacks significantly worse.
Provisions in the two Clinton-era crime bills--which Hillary Clinton actively campaigned for--put more cops on the street and enforced tougher mandatory sentencing for nonviolent offenses like drug possession, among other things. This kicked the era of mass incarceration, as author Michelle Alexander calls it, into high gear. Larger and larger numbers of poor and working-class people, disproportionately Black and Brown, found themselves under the control of the criminal justice system.
"Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs," Alexander wrote in 2010. "In President Bill Clinton's boastful words, 'I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime.' The facts bear him out. Clinton's 'tough on crime' policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history."
ONE MORE lesson from history: Neither the New Deal nor the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were the product of Democratic politicians in power. They were won through masses of people organizing and struggling--demanding change during unemployed marches and sit-downs strikes, at lunch-counter sit-ins and bus boycotts.
That explains why the current Democrat occupying the White House has accomplished so little on the issue of race.
The election of the first Black president in a country founded on slavery was a real advance. But over the last seven years, Obama's administration has done precious little to improve the lives of working people, and Blacks in particular. The Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress in Obama's first two years in office, and they failed to use the opportunity to enact meaningful change of any kind.
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