Bernie and Black Voters

Will Bernie win the Black and Latino primary vote? Don't know yet, but it's probably the key to whether he can win the nomination. Should he be the candidate of choice in those communities? That's something we can talk about. In fact the highly visible commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates (about whom I posted a week ago here) has been using his weekly column in The Atlantic to wage a polemic against Sanders, which could have serious consequences for Sanders's chances. Why is this happening?

Coates, who just won a National Book Award and has become the media's favorite spokesperson on Black issues, burst into prominence in 2014 with a long article in The Atlantic in support of some sort of reparations for African-Americans to compensate for wealth "plundered" from them by enslavement and Jim Crow segregation. Coates is particularly incensed that Sanders avoids taking a position on reparations, since he regards Sanders's claims to the Left or radical wing of the Democratic Party as dubious or incomplete without a specific plan to address racism in America. Coates himself has been rather vague on what such a plan would look like (his principal goal is the HR 40 bill, repeatedly tabled in Congress, to "study" the reparations question). But he is adamant that Sanders take a position, and (along with protestors from the #BlackLivesMatter movement) has tarnished Sanders's image among the more activist elements of the Black community.

Is this fair? Sanders (unlike former Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton) was an active foot soldier in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. He has strongly called for federal intervention in cases of racially tinged police violence. The shockingly high levels of poverty and unemployment in communities of color are at the core of his candidacy, and his proposals--for a $15 minimum wage, for free college education, for more comprehensive health insurance, stronger consumer finance protection, and more--go much further than Clinton's in addressing inequality.

So what is Coates's objection? He believes in principle that the legacy of racial inequality in America is so vast that it must not be subsumed under issues of class, as Sanders tends to do. While the Sanders agenda would address poverty independent of race, Coates had convinced himself that the impoverishment of black people (his preferred term, "plunder," is wholly justified by the outrageous legacy Coates painstakingly documents) constitutes a special case in America, and merits a distinct redress via some form of reparations aimed specifically at African-Americans.

Though I sympathize with Coates's argument, I have two main objections. First, as to reparations themselves, I'm dubious that an equitable remedy can be found. Black Americans experienced very different degrees of deprivation over 400 years, and their descendants have been impoverished differentially, in ways that would be hard to quantify. Other groups--Latinos, other immigrants, exploited factory workers, even white ethnic groups like Boston's Irish--might make analogous claims. Maybe Congress should study the matter, as HR 40 proposes, but I'm not convinced an equitable proposal would emerge--and Coates isn't either.

What is very clear to me is that the systemic solutions Sanders proposes would offer significant support for black people--and everyone else currently excluded from American prosperity. His program is far more activist than anything Clinton would propose, and deserves the label 'Left,' or even 'radical,' that Coates objects to. While it does not acknowledge the specific injuries done to African-Americans--and they are legitimate, and vast--it would do what is possible in the way of remediation.

What is not possible--and this gets to the heart of Coates's argument--is to correct the inherent injustice in wealth accumulation. Yes, Blacks under slavery were cheated out of their wages, and yes, racist practices running through the 20th century and into the present have kept them from accumulating home equity and other typical forms of family wealth. The extraordinary gap in net worth between black and white families in America is the measure of historic injustice--but frankly, most accumulation of wealth is a measure of injustice. To insist, as Coates does, that reparations are essential to any equitable policy for African-Americans is to ask history to go in reverse. We can deplore what was done to African peoples on this continent, over centuries prior to our own, and we can demand that the perpetuation of that legacy be terminated, immediately, in every identifiable way. But can we fix the injustices done to the ancestors of African-Americans? Alas, no. Coates is in that sense holding Sanders hostage to an emotionally compelling but unrealizable standard.

And that's a shame, because I believe with a strong show of support for Sanders in the next few months, African-American voters would make a strong statement against the complacency and gradualism of the centrists. And who knows, they might even help elect the most progressive President since Lincoln.