How Bernie has helped black lives to matter

Sam Smith - One of the curious and debilitating things about the political times we live in is how atomized liberal and progressive action groups have become. We no longer seem to understand that movements and change are created by alliances of people and groups that are not all the same and don't all have the same priorities. The smart activists find things these people and groups have in common and, not surprisingly, economic issues are at the top of the list.

That's been the secret of Bernie Sanders campaign, although sadly - and ironically - he has been targeted by Black Lives Matter for emphasizing issues that actually build the progressive base rather than leaving everyone trapped and weak in their particular niche.

Liberals have been awful on economic issues over the past few decades and, as a result, they have surrendered a large pack of voters to a right wing that successfully lies to them because so few on the left are out there telling them the truth. From Reconstruction populism to the New Deal to the Great Society part of the secret has been to build alliances across ethnic and other cultural lines based on common economic and social interests. And when did civil rights improve? Precisely during these same periods.

For example, although the New Deal is not generally seen as a period of black progress there were significant changes as outlined by David Woolner of the Roosevelt Institute:

As Mary McLeod Bethune once noted, the Roosevelt era represented “the first time in their history” that African Americans felt that they could communicate their grievances to their government with the “expectancy of sympathetic understanding and interpretation.” Indeed, it was during the New Deal, that the silent, invisible hand of racism was fully exposed as a national issue; as a problem that at the very least needed to be recognized; as something the county could no longer pretend did not exist.

This shift in attitude, as Havard Sitkoff, the noted historian of the African American experience in the New Deal observes, helped propel the issue of race relations onto the national stage and usher in a new political climate in which “Afro-Americans and their allies could begin to struggle with some expectation of success.” ...

It is also important to recognize that this hope was not merely based on empty promises of change, but on the actual words and deeds spoken by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and taken by the federal government at a time when racism was deeply seared into the American psyche. With respect to the critical issue of employment, for example, we know that by 1935, the Works Progress Administrationwas employing approximately 350,000 African Americans annually, about 15% of its total workforce. In the Civilian Conservation Corps, the percentage of blacks who took part climbed from roughly 3% at its outset in 1933 to over 11% by the close of 1938 with a total of more than 350,000 having been enrolled in the CCC by the time the program was shut down in 1942. The National Youth Administration, under the direction of Aubrey Williams, hired more black administrators than any other New deal agency; employed African American supervisors to oversee the work the agency was doing on behalf of black youth for each state in the south; and assisted more than 300,000 Africa American youth during the Depression. In 1934, the Public Works Administration inserted a clause in all government construction contracts that established a quota for the hiring of black laborers based on the 1930 labor census and as a consequence a significant number of blacks received skilled employment on PWA projects.

African Americans also benefited from the Federal Music Project, which funded performances of black composers; from the Federal Theatre and Writing Projects, which hired and featured the work of hundreds of African American artists; and from the New Deal’s educational programs, which taught over 1 million illiterate blacks to read and write and which increased the number of African American children attending primary school...

Obvious, there were a lot of failures including the continuation of segregation, but note the high percentage of the items mentioned above that were basically ones of economic improvement.

The only people who really benefit from the sort of squabble that BLM has set off are those on the right. They love to see liberals and progressives fighting with each other. And the megacorporate media thinks it's fun, too.

True, Bernie Sanders, like all politicians, isn't perfect. But he has introduced a new political approach we haven't seen from liberals and progressives in a few decades: a way to actually convert the people you need to get things done.

Besides, on the specific issues of civil rights it is worth noting that Sanders gets these scores from major groups:

• 100% from the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights
• 93% from the ACLU
• 97% from the NAACP on affirmative action. 

So here's a pragmatic, non-ideological tip to Black Lives Matter: If you've got a political problem with Bernie discuss it with him over a beer and not over CNN. The quickest way to ruin a movement is to fragment it. The quickest way to build a movement is to come together on common ground. And history strongly suggest that economic issues are a great place to start.