Bernie Sanders’ big test: Can he learn from his Netroots Nation conflict with Black Lives Matter activists?

[This is another in series on  electoral politics.  In the US, every four years, presidential elections are theatrically staged, designed to confuse and disrupt popular movements against class exploitation and racial oppression, and other democratic movements.  The elections claim to be the way democracy works, and people must vote for politicians to represent their interests.  Whoever wins, the people’s interests have been lost in the shuffle, and their independence and political initiative and action has been suffocated or destroyed.  As the 2016 election candidacies begin to control the political imaginations of millions, a fight-back begins to grow.  —  Frontlines ed.]

Monday, Jul 20, 2015

The 73-year-old socialist got where he is by sticking to his guns. But his righteousness stunts his political reach

Joan Walsh, Salon.com

Desiree Griffiths demonstrates at a Miami protest, Dec. 5, 2014; Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Lynne Sladky/Carolyn Kaster)

Sen. Bernie Sanders is who he is: a 73-year-old socialist inured to being told he’s wrong, politically, who’s developed an ironclad hold on the conviction that he’s right. So it’s not surprising that he’s resisting learning lessons from his early campaign stumbles at winning support from African Americans and Latinos.

If you’re a Sanders fan, part of what you like about him is that he sticks to his guns. In fact, Sanders fans are a lot like him: used to being on the political margins, they’ve learned to take refuge in the knowledge of their righteousness, which eases the sting of being perpetually in the political minority.

Unfortunately, the mutually reinforcing self-righteousness of Sanders and his supporters is a liability for his promising presidential campaign. Sanders has a genuine problem with the Democratic Party’s African American and Latino base, and no amount of insisting that class supersedes race will change that. I wrote about it last month, and got a ton of pushback from Sanders backers. Then came the conflict at Netroots Nation on Saturday, where Sanders was heckled by Black Lives Matter protesters.

Jim Crow lynchings more widespread than first thought, report concludes

 

 

Equal Justice Initiative report reveals history of racial violence and finds at least 700 more lynchings than previously recorded in southern states

In 1931, the Alabama governor called the National Guard to the Scottsboro jail to protect a group of young black men who he believed might be lynched after being accused of raping two white girls. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Lauren Gambino, The Guardian, in New York, 

Tuesday 10 February 2015

In 1919, a black soldier returned home to Blakely, Georgia, having survived the horrors of the first world war only to face the terrors of a white mob that awaited him in the Jim Crow-era south. When the soldier, William Little, refused to remove his army uniform, the savage mob exacted their punishment.

Another Black LA cop speaks out

Ex-LA Cop Brian Bentley on Dorner Manifesto: ‘Not Only do I Believe it, but I Lived it’

Ex-LAPD officer speaks out about the LAPD, racism, and Christopher Dorner   

by Jasmyne A. Cannick, EURweb

[Ex-LAPD Officer Brian Bentley today in Los Angeles, Calif.]

*Brian Bentley, 49, doesn’t agree with what Christopher Dorner — the ex-cop at center of a massive manhunt for the killings of three people—has done, but he certainly understands it.

As a former LAPD officer, Bentley, who is now an author, says that a Dorner-like situation was just a matter of time.

“It took longer than I thought it would for something like this to happen.”

In fact, Bentley says that when he was a police officer, there were frequent postings of “look out” bulletins on the walls at police stations featuring officers who’d been terminated and who were believed to have vendettas.

“When the Department terminated you, they intentionally tried to ruin your life,” Bentley explains.  “That’s how they discredited you.  Dorner isn’t the first ex-police officer to have a manifesto or some sort of hit list.”

And he should know.

[Ex-LAPD officer Brian Bentley]

Brian Bentley left the LAPD in 1999 after serving ten years with the Department. He was a police officer in 1992 during the uprising and was assigned to guard O.J. Simpson’s house in Brentwood during the infamous trial.  He served under police chiefs Daryl Gates, Bayan Lewis, Willie Williams, and Bernard Parks.  However, he was fired for writing the book One Time: The Story of a South Central Los Angeles Police Officer that detailed the massive misconduct and racism he witnessed during his time at the LAPD’s Southwest and West L.A. divisions.

He says that when he left the Department he had a manifesto of his own.  Not one that involved killing anyone, but a list of people who had wronged him during his time at the Department.

How to Avoid “Stop and Frisk”

The Rhetoric of “Colorblindness” and the Reality of Racial Profiling and Mass Incarceration

WBAI’s Radio Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report
Monday, May 28, 7- 9 pm EST, over 99.5 FM
or streaming live at http://www.wbai.org
Produced & Hosted by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash
********************************
A Two-Hour Special!
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
With Michelle Alexander, human rights activist, litigator, best-selling author and NY activists working to stop Stop & Frisk

Racism is rampant, as evidenced by the more than 685,000 stops and frisks within a 12 month period, of overwhelmingly African-American and Latino residents of this city.  African-Americans and Latinos are subject to profiling, harassment and criminalization by the NYPD’s practices. The Mayor’s and NYPD’s policing policies resulted in the killing of an unarmed Rahmarley Graham, 18 years old in his own home.The Stop and Frisk policies, the concentration on marijuana arrests, oftentimes the result of illegal searches fuel the frightening and unwarranted explosion in incarceration rates that are occurring throughout the country. And, mass incarceration, a major manifestation of institutionalized racism has permanent consequences. For, even after release those who have been behind the walls are stigmatized.  They are subject to exclusion from essential economic, and political opportunity – they become subject to a new “Jim Crow”.

Recently, Michelle Alexander spoke to an overflow, cheering audience at Harlem’s historic Abyssinian Baptist Church to announce the launch of the new paperback edition of “The New Jim Crow” which is now # 6 on the”N.Y. Times Bestseller List”.  She offered a bold and innovative argument that mass incarceration amounts to a devastating system of deliberate,racial control.  In her incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America, we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting blackmen and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary mechanism of racial control, even as it proclaims the principle of color blindness.  Just as it took a mass movement to destroy the Jim Crow system, Alexander argues that it will take a new mass movement to destroy the new caste system which she has labeled “The New Jim Crow”.  And this new movement is growing and being nurtured by Michelle Alexander.  And, her analysis of “The New JimCrow” is helping to build this movement.

*************************
Listen on your Smartphone — WBAI live streams are available on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and other smartphones.
For more information, go to http://stream.wbai.orgListen When You Want — Building Bridges and most WBAI Programs are now being archived for 90 Days.

These links will be live ca. 15 minutes after the program ends.To listen, or download archived shows go to

http://archive.wbai.org/show1.php?showid=bbridges

Visit the web site — http://www.buildingbridgesradio.org