“It is unacceptable that police officers beat up people or kill people...If they do that, they have got to be held accountable.” Senator Bernie Sanders in Houston, TX 7/19/15
It does appear that Sanders is starting to get it. Economic populism does not alone make for racial justice. One recalls how FDR and his supporters in the American labor movement, itself filled with all manner of white socialists and other radicals, willingly threw African-American sharecropping and domestic labor in the deep south under the bus in order to get the New Deal labor and social reforms passed by Congress in the 1930s. Much has been written about this history. Columbia Professor of Political Science, Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in America, has argued, according to one reviewer, that the problem with the New Deal legislation was that, "...those programs not only discriminated against blacks, but actually contributed to widening the gap between white and black Americans -- judged in terms of educational achievement, quality of jobs and housing, and attainment of higher income." Katznelson retells the history in part to argue for the continuation of affirmative action policies today as a way of remedying past injustices. Also of late, the popular Hollywood film, The Help (2011), explores these issues in a story set in the deep south at the very outset of the Civil Rights era. It has been thus noted that Sanders'"blindspot" on certain racial issues in the US has caused people to note that he is more of a '30s radical than a '60s radical-despite his Civil Rights activism at the time-because of his emphasis on the labor movement, class war and corporate plutocracy. But movement politics on racial justice issues quickly placed these issues front and center for the Vermont Senator and Democratic Party presidential candidate.
