There’s this myth out there that Bernie Sanders hasn’t taken Institutional Racism seriously enough. The attack goes that his fight for Racial Justice is lesser-than and separate from the shared struggle for Economic Justice, ignoring the key lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King’s final fight before his asassination. We need Senator Sanders to dedicate a speech to sharing his powerful story of how Dr. King’s #OneStruggle moves him to continue that fight today.
The movement behind Bernie Sanders‘ 2016 Presidential campaign isn’t new, and isn’t about him. Bernie Sanders is merely a leader in the latest incarnation of a long struggle against Wall Street Oligarchy that has built up through movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the 2009 California tuition hike protests, and most crucially, the Poor People’s Campaign. Each of these movements involved people of various backgrounds coming together for a shared fight, overcoming the barriers designed to keep us fighting each other.
While Sen. Sanders has spoken to these themes before, these dots haven’t been connected in a way that the average voter seems to even know they’re there. This isn’t new: each time a movement unites people in the #OneStruggle across racial and gender lines to fight povery and oppression, the leadership is marginalized and ignored, at best. At worst… well, let’s start with the Poor People’s Campaign.
The Poor People’s Campaign was the last, boldest charge led by Dr. Martin Luther King to unite all people in the fight against oppressive poverty. Most critically, it was a movement to demolish the racial and cultural barriers that had been used to keep the poor divided to be conquered. Dr. King was assassinated three weeks before leading a peace rally against the Vietnam War, and before he was able to lead the Poor People’s Campaign for economic equality in powerful Solidarity across race, age and gender lines.
From the flyers for that campaign:
At the start, several thousand poor people will go to Washington. We will be young and old, jobless fathers, welfare mothers, famers and laborers. We are Negroes, American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, poor white people.
When February rolled around and it was time to talk about Black History, I remember learning of Dr. King’s struggles to overcome the violence and racism faced by African Americans. We would fill in pictures of Dr. King, memorize I Have a Dream, talk about how nice it would be if people stopped hating each other based on the color of our skin, and then move on to the next lesson.
Never in school were we taught about the Poor People’s Campaign, nor about the last book by Dr. King, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? In it, he shared his final words of advice that there will be no security without economic security, and that this struggle affects Americans of all races. Let me share a few excerpts that I wish had been shared with me:
In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.
[…]
We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.
Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life and in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he know that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.
[…]This proposal is not a “civil rights” program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. I hope that both Negro and white will act in coalition to effect this change, because their combined strength will be necessary to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.
[…]The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967)
In all the lessons on Dr. King as an icon of the struggle against racism, never once was I taught about his end-of-life work toward the struggle to build a cross-racial solidarity against poverty. Perhaps by design, I was denied the invitation to heed Dr. King’s call to throw off these false barriers of racism, sexism and classism to work toward together in #OneStruggle for equality for all.
If you remember hearing this sort of call recently, it’s only because you’ve been paying close attention to what major news outlets aren’t covering. While such outlets have loudly accused Senator Bernie Sanders of failing to address structural and institutional racism, he has continued to speak to this time and time again. For example, please read his remarks to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference all the way back in July 2015. After recounting Dr. King’s work for this #OneStruggle, he spoke to the interconnection of structural racism and grotesque inequality:
And that is the theme that I wish to pursue this evening. The need to simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else – especially the African-American community and working-class whites – are becoming poorer.
– Senator Bernie Sanders, in Remarks to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference July 25, 2015
Some independent news outlets have covered Sen. Sanders’ dedication to this cause, such as Terrence Heath’s piece on OurFuture.org:
His speech to the SCLC showed that Sanders not only heard the message of Black Lives Matter, but took it to heart, and is making it central to his campaign. Indeed Sanders could have been speaking directly to the Black Lives Matter movement when he praised SCLC for understanding, “that real change takes place when millions of people stand up and say ‘enough is enough,’ and when we create a political revolution from the ground up.” Saying, “enough is enough,” and “creating a political revolution from the ground up” is what Black Lives Matter activists are doing.
– Terrance Heath, Bernie Sanders: Strong Words on Structural Racism and Inequality for OurFuture.org, July 27, 2015
While talking heads still repeat the attack that Senator Bernie Sanders sidelines racial justice as a secondary off-shoot of Economic Justice, the truth is that he has made Racial Justice a central plank in his platform:
We must pursue policies to transform this country into a nation that affirms the value of its people of color. That starts with addressing the five central types of violence waged against black, brown and indigenous Americans: physical, political, legal, economic and environmental.
In this heavily detailed point-by-point takedown of the key issues facing Racial Justice and how to confront them, Bernie Sanders does what no other candidate has done: said their names:
Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Jessica Hernandez, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Ferrell, Oscar Grant, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, Samuel DuBose and Anastacio Hernandez-Rojas. We know their names. Each of them died unarmed at the hands of police officers or in police custody. The chants are growing louder. People are angry and they have a right to be angry. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that this violence only affects those whose names have appeared on TV or in the newspaper. African-Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. African-American and Latinos comprise well over half of all prisoners, even though African-Americans and Latinos make up approximately one quarter of the total US population.
Sadly though, the idea of Sen. Sanders as a champion of Racial Justice disrupts the narrative that only a Clinton can champion the needs of non-white voters, and that’s a narrative that she and her well-paid pundits desperately need to keep up the “firewall” voter bloc. This narrative is especially offensive, given how the Clintons are the very foundation of the New Democrat austerity that has devastated the New Deal and ravaged the poor; people of color have suffered worse, but the ranks of all poor have grown.
Unfortunately, the Clinton war on the poor and disenfranchised was fought heavily along racial lines, playing on and profiting from racist dog whistles. For a truly superb summary of this betrayal of the black voters who had helped put them in power, you must read The Nation article Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
The full piece is a fact-heavy exposition on how the Clinton legacy furthers exactly the kind of race-divided war against the poor that Dr. King had struggled against. Let me just refer to a couple of key points leading into that exposition:
[As President, Bill] Clinton mastered the art of sending mixed cultural messages, appealing to African Americans by belting out “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in black churches, while at the same time signaling to poor and working-class whites that he was willing to be tougher on black communities than Republicans had been.
[…]
Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary wasn’t picking out china while she was first lady. She bravely broke the mold and redefined that job in ways no woman ever had before. She not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures. That record, and her statements from that era, should be scrutinized. In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
Both Clintons now express regret over the crime bill, and Hillary says she supports criminal-justice reforms to undo some of the damage that was done by her husband’s administration. But on the campaign trail, she continues to invoke the economy and country that Bill Clinton left behind as a legacy she would continue. So what exactly did the Clinton economy look like for black Americans? Taking a hard look at this recent past is about more than just a choice between two candidates. It’s about whether the Democratic Party can finally reckon with what its policies have done to African-American communities, and whether it can redeem itself and rightly earn the loyalty of black voters.
[…]
An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for black unemployment rates. The truth is more troubling. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn’t have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate.
Make no mistake, the legacy of President Bill Clinton has heavily influenced the struggles we now face to restore the safety net promised by the New Deal. He conducted cosmetic tours of the “pockets of poverty”, ignoring the devastation wrought by the policies he and his wife fought to achieve. For further example, we can credit the Clinton legacy with the now-established practice of stealing the Social Security surplus to pay toward the National Debt:
Tarred by scandal and struggling to fend off Republican tax cuts when the surpluses first began to show up in 1998, Clinton came up with a dramatic political ploy in his State of the Union address. “Save Social Security first,” he said, calling on Congress to devote the Social Security surplus to paying off the national debt until Social Security was reformed. This quickly turned into a bipartisan commitment to “lock” the trust fund surpluses into a “box” and devote the funds to paying off the national debt. Of course, Social Security didn’t actually need to be “saved.” Even under the most conservative assumptions, the trust fund can meet its obligations for 35 years or so–and pay retirees more than they now receive thereafter even if no changes are made. The trust fund is in better shape than it was in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
– Robert Borosage, The Austerity Trap for The American Prospect, December 19, 2001
The tragedy of the Clinton legacy goes beyond the obscene levels of income inequality where the only acceptable welfare is Corporate Welfare. The strengthening of the Private Prison industry as a result of those policies empowered those companies to feed some of their profits into intensive lobbying efforts to create and maintain more ways to lock people up.
CCA, in a 2011 SEC filing, warned investors that “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”
Last year, disclosures with the Senate show that the company tapped one of its lobbying firms to begin monitoring immigration policy issues.
“Immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal, state and local level also could materially adversely impact us,” notes the Geo Group’s 2011 annual report, which specifically cited the “relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts.”
– Lee Fang, How Private Prisons Game the Immigration System for The Nation, February 27, 2013
Much of the money made by these Racism, Immigration and Drug War profiteers made their way into the campaign coffers of people such as Secretary Hillary Clinton. In fact, two separate private prison companies are two of the biggest contributors to her campaign. She has since sworn to stop accepting such money. Tellingly, she has neither returned the cash to those companies, nor changed her stance on policies that enrich them at the expense of disproportionately black and brown liberty.
Hillary Clinton’s stance on the prison industrial complex has been a complex one, and has seen her transition from a progressive young lawyer to a spokeswoman for corporate America and Wall Street. In her early days, she vowed to devote herself to criminal justice and even helped to repeal a mentally handicapped black man’s execution. Now, she lends her “unenthusiastic support” to the death penalty and takes campaign funds from private prisons that have overseen a doubling in prison populations between the years of 2000 and 2010.
[…]
Perhaps these candidates truly don’t see their role in the cycle, but that’s hard to believe. What’s far more likely is that the prison industrial complex has become such an entrenched element of economic disparity and social injustice in this country that politicians can’t even differentiate it from normal corporatism. What needs to be understood is that private prisons perpetuate a generational cycle of incarceration fueled by the Drug War, systemic racism, and unjust legislation. Any political candidate accepting money from lobbyists who represent private prisons is on the wrong side of history and can’t possibly purport to represent the people.
– Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org, Darling of the Drug War: Hillary Clinton Campaign Funded by Private Prison Lobby, July 27, 2015
What is even further frustrating is that even where Secretary Clinton claims to agree that certain reforms may be nice, she calls for a slower, more gradual, baby-step approach that doesn’t rock the boat too much. Doesn’t raise too much tension in a difficult situation. This is exactly the kind of “Keep Calm and Wait” cajoling that Dr. King railed against in his letter from the Birmingham Jail:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
Despite Hillary Clinton’s claims to value black voices and champion their cause, when given the opportunity to walk that talk, she silenced that black voice and went “back to the issues”:
It was a poor showing of Clinton’s comprehension of the severity of the issues facing black Americans. Despite the institutional racism and mass incarceration drowning black Americans today, Clinton acted as though Williams’ emotionally charged protest was completely out of line.
Then, when a white, male security guard put his hands on the young, black, female protester, and forcibly coaxed her away from Clinton, Clinton’s response was, “OK, back to the issues,” not only allowing a young activist to be physically removed from Clinton’s presence, but problematically implying that Clinton’s trustworthiness on black rights and black lives to black voters is not, somehow, one of “the issues.”
Let’s be real: Clinton helped create the mass incarceration state, period.If she cannot swiftly and straightforwardly apologize to a young black woman for what she did in the ‘90s, Clinton reveals herself to have never thought about her actions, to have never unpacked her white privilege, and to be largely incapable of “practic[ing] [the] humility” she is now calling upon her fellow white Americans to employ.
Williams’ concerns before her protest were in no way dispelled by Clinton’s actions, but rather intensified:
“Hillary Clinton has a pattern of throwing the Black community under the bus when it serves her politically. She called our boys ‘super-predators’ in ’96, then she race-baited when running against Obama in ‘08, now she’s a lifelong civil rights activist. I just want to know which Hillary is running for President, the one from ’96, ’08, or the new Hillary?”
Additionally, Clinton’s record and response last night do not contrast well with Bernie Sanders’, who had this to say in the ‘90s while Clinton was calling young black children “super-predators”:
“We have the highest percentage of people in jail per capita of any nation on earth — what do we have to do, put half the country behind bars?
Mr. Speaker, instead of talking about punishment and vengeance, let us have the courage to talk about the real issue — how do we get to the root causes of crime?
…And, Mr. Speaker, I’ve got a problem! I’ve got a problem with a president and a Congress that allows five million people to go hungry, two million people to sleep out on the street, cities to become breeding grounds for drugs and violence — and they say we’re getting tough on crime.
If you want to get tough on crime, let’s deal with the causes of crime. Let’s demand that every man, woman, and child in this country have a decent opportunity and a decent standard of living.
Let’s not keep putting more people into jail and disproportionately punishing Blacks.”
– Eliza Webb, Hillary Clinton has a race problem — and it’s resurfacing at a dangerous time for Salon, February 26,
I am under no illusion that the efforts to silence Senator Bernie Sanders’ efforts to continue the Poor People’s Campaign are greatly different from the efforts to silence Dr. Martin Luther King. Namely, there are powerfully entrenched companies, political factions and individuals each relying on each other to maintain a system of personal enrichment at the expense of public welfare. Socialize suffering for private profiteering.
It’s not as though this fight is new for Senator Sanders. Since pictures are worth more words than I have, let’s visit a few that you’ve likely seen:
In his first year of college at the University of Chicago, some white and black students had attempted to find housing, only to be rebuffed by segregation that was counter to the university’s stated policy.
“We feel it is an intolerable situation, when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments,” Sanders told a crowd of about 200 students that afternoon in January 1962. Then he and a few dozen students headed to the fifth floor, where they began a 15-day sit-in outside the university president’s office, passing their time reading and eating dinners of donated cheese and salami sandwiches.
[…]
“As far as whites go, he was in the top 1/1000th of 1 percent of people who acted, took it seriously and were willing to put themselves on the line,” said Mike Parker, a former classmate who was arrested with Sanders and about 150 other protesters that day. Parker was released; Sanders and three others — described by prosecutors as having “engineered” the protests — were later fined $25 each, according to a 1964 Chicago Tribune article.
“It was just the beginning of the civil rights movement, and there were very few whites willing to stand up and take a chance, not only to speak of politics but to get arrested for it,” added Parker, now 75 and an activist in California. “He was one of the few.”
– Sarah Burnett, In Chicago, Sanders found his place in civil rights movement for Associated Press, February 27, 2016
We have these images thanks to Danny Lyons, the first photographer of the SNCC and frequent roommate of Civil Rights Icon John Lewis was there for that historic sit-in in Chicago. His story of these days provides a compelling insight into the struggles those early civil rights activists faced.
I took the photograph of Bernie Sanders speaking to his fellow CORE members at that sit-in. Bob McNamara, a close friend and CORE activist, is in the very corner next to me in the picture. Across the room from me is another campus photographer named Wexler, who taught me how to develop film. I photographed Bernie a second time after he got a haircut, as he appeared next to the noble laureate and chancellor Dr. George Beadle. Time Magazine is now claiming it is not Bernie in the picture but someone else. It is Bernie, and it is proof of his very early dedication to justice for African Americans. The CORE sit-in that Bernie helped lead was the first civil rights sit-in to take place in the North.
– Danny Lyons, Bernie Sanders Leads 1962 Sit-In, January 30, 2016
As for Sanders’ arrest, we have pictures courtesy of the Chicago Tribune archives:
And video thanks to Kartemquin Films, we have video of this arrest protesting school segregation. View Here
This was all just early steps in Bernie Sanders’ lifelong dedication to crossing racial lines to fight the #OneStruggle against the establishment. In 1988, Bernie Sanders worked toward the presidential campaign of Reverend Jesse Jackson, for which he wasn’t just sidelined, but physically slapped.
During the 1988 Democratic Presidential Primaries, Rev. Jesse Jackson emerged as a viable contender for the Democratic nomination against establishment-backed Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. An ardent supporter of Mr. Jackson’s presidential bid was Bernie Sanders—then mayor of Burlington, Vermont. During a Democratic caucus, Mr. Sanders gave a speech in support of Mr. Jackson while Democrats in the room turned their backs—and, as he walked off stage, a woman slapped him across the face. Mr. Sanders was one of the few elected officials to cross racial lines and openly endorse Mr. Jackson, ultimately helping Mr. Jackson win Vermont against Mr. Dukakis by one delegate in 1988. Although Mr. Dukakis would win the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Jackson made it closer to the presidency than any black person before him.
– Michael Sainato, Bernie Sanders Was Slapped For Supporting Jesse Jackson in ’88, for the Observer, February 27, 2016
After the disenfranchisement and non-counting of votes in Florida leading to the presidency of George W. Bush, Senator Sanders further stood alone in crossing racial lines to address voter suppression:
At the time of the elections, the black congressional caucus was aware of the voter suppression shenanigans going on in Florida, and they tried to gain support among their colleagues to bring attention to the debacle. The only white congressional member who supported and worked with them was Bernie Sanders.
Thom Hartmann’s interview with Greg Palast tells us what we already knew; that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were illegitimate and stolen. It also shows us the long time commitment that Bernie Sanders has to the issue of minority voter suppression. Bernie is not new to fighting for the issue just because he’s running for president; he’s been fighting for minority voter rights for a long time because it’s the right thing to do.
– VL Baker, Bernie Sanders: The Only White Guy to Show Up, on DailyKos, September 18, 2015
Bernie Sanders has also fought for the protection of immigrant workers, having been among the first to recognize the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and inviting them to the Senate Hearing on abuse in the fields. He voted against earlier Immigration bills because advocacy groups warned it would set up guest workers for exploitation and abuse, something he still fights against in his call for A Fair and Humane Immigration Policy:
Many in the business community argue for a massive expansion of temporary guest worker programs. That is not the answer. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, employers routinely cheat guest workers out of wages, hold employees captive by seizing documents, coerce workers to live in inhumane conditions, and deny medical treatment for on-the-job injuries.
It is time for this injustice to end.
As for the Drug War component of the war to Socialize Suffering for Privatized Profit, Senator Bernie Sanders has a record there, too:
Minorities are disproportionately represented in the prison system, and this is a direct result of the War on Drugs.
Approximately 13 percent of the U.S. population is black, while 40 percent of the male prison population is black. Bernie often cites the fact that a black male baby born today has a one-in-three chance of being incarcerated during his lifetime.
According to the Sentencing Project, Blacks make up 12 percent of the nation’s drug users, yet represent 34 percent of those arrested for drug offenses, and 45 percent of those in state prison for such offense as of 2005.
How has Bernie tried to address this issue?
In 2007, Bernie co-sponsored a bill to reduce recidivism, allowing incarcerated offenders access to pharmacological drug treatment. Bernie later supported The Smarter Sentencing Act of 2014, which unfortunately died in the Senate. Had it passed, it would have adjusted federal mandatory sentencing guidelines for a variety of crimes, reduced the mandatory sentences of drug offenses, expanded the ability of nonviolent drug offenders to reduce sentences, and enabled federal prisoners to seek retroactive sentence adjustment under the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.
Killer Mike put this struggle most eloquently in his introduction of Bernie Sanders at the Birmingham Rally, after which the Senator shared his story being able to join and hear Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech in the March on Washington, and how it moved him for his continued work. [Watch Killer Mike’s Introduction, and Full Rally Here]
So, why don’t more voters of color know that Bernie Sanders’ fight for equality and justice isn’t just a few grainy black-and-white photos, but a lifelong dedication to stand up for the oppressed? Frankly, because most people rely on sources of information that profit from them not knowing.
More importantly though, why does he do it? Why did young Bernie Sanders put himself on the line for Racial Justice, and continue to do so when so few have stood with him?
There’s a whole Reddit devoted to explaining Who is Bernie Sanders and championing his candidacy, but I think the answer lies deeper than facts, records, or other mere words. It’s his spirituality that guides him, drives him to do all he can.
Every great religion in the world — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism — essentially comes down to: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ And what I have believed in my whole life — I believed it when I was a 22-year-old kid getting arrested in Chicago fighting segregation — I’ve believed it in my whole life.
That we are in this together — not just, not words. The truth is at some level when you hurt, when your children hurt, I hurt. I hurt. And when my kids hurt, you hurt. And it’s very easy to turn our backs on kids who are hungry, or veterans who are sleeping out on the street, and we can develop a psyche, a psychology which is ‘I don’t have to worry about them; all I’m gonna worry about is myself; I need to make another 5 billion dollars.’
But I believe that what human nature is about is that everybody in this room impacts everybody else in all kinds of ways that we can’t even understand. It’s beyond intellect. It’s a spiritual, emotional thing.
So I believe that when we do the right thing, when we try to treat people with respect and dignity, when we say that that child who is hungry is my child … I think we are more human when we do that, than when we say ‘hey, this whole world , I need more and more, I don’t care about anyone else.’ That’s my religion. That’s what I believe in.
And I think most people around the world, whatever their religion, their color — share that belief. That we are in it together as human beings.
And it becomes more and more practical. If we destroy the planet because we don’t deal with climate change … Trust me, we are all in it together, and … That is my spirituality.
– Senator Bernie Sanders when asked about Spirituality, as shared by Elisabeth Parker in CNN Asked Bernie Sanders About His Religion: Here’s His Breathtaking Response (VIDEO) on ReverbPress.com,
So… what does all this have to do with that #OneStruggle speech on Institutional Racism we need Bernie Sanders to give? Since I’ve easily assembled just a small sampling of all the numerous times and ways Bernie Sanders has shown his dedication to continuing Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, why should he have to do it again?
It’s the same reason Senator Bernie Sanders gives the same speeches that Representative Sanders gave, that are the same speeches Mayor Sanders gave, which are the same that Candidate Sanders gave, which are the same that CORE activist Sanders gave: A message worth sharing is worth sharing again and again. You never know when it’ll be someone’s first chance to hear it.
Yet more to the point, Bernie Sanders hasn’t announced and given a speech for the sole purpose of sharing a personal, point-by-point accounting of his earliest struggles to his current work, emphasizing his own early and current activism. Just as he held a speech specifically to explain his take on Democratic Socialism, he should hold a very personal, very emotional, and very impassioned speech on what all of this history means to him — and should mean to us. Also, on how he is the only candidate out there with this kind of history, outlining how prior positions and actions of others have set us up for the fight we all now face, and the stakes of leaving our future in the hands of those who’ve set us on this course.
Senator Sanders doesn’t like to talk much about himself, and I respect that. His humility is one of his strengths: he champions progress in the key issues facing us, not advancing his own personal position. Yet in his campaign to champion these issues as President of the United States of America, his personal position and history are very key issues.
In this speech, he also must bring together the intersection of race, gender, age and all other classes in the fight against obscene income inequality. Senator Bernie Sanders must bring forward the teaching of Dr. Martin Luther King that fighting for Racial Justice as well as Economic Justice isn’t just about being decent human beings. It’s #OneStruggle we all share, and only by uniting as one people can we win against the class (and actual) warfare waged by the Top 1% against the rest of us.
I know this. I’d wager you know this. It’s our job to share this message with as many we can reach. And as a leader in our #OneStruggle, we must turn to Bernie Sanders to share this message in a new way.
Maybe enough people are ready to receive this message, once it gets through to them. Maybe, just maybe, enough people are ready to continue the mission of the Poor People’s Campaign that we can complete the final work of Dr. King. That’s my dream, and I think it’s about time that dream came true.
PS: You can donate more than your money and your voice to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential campaign. There are numerous ways you can volunteer a little bit of time on your own schedule, from the low-stress, high-Solidarity phonebanking in teams or at home, to a wide range of other volunteer opportunities. Don’t pass up this opportunity to join the #OneStruggle, and fight for Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream!
Nynia in the Now 
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