I'm disgusted! Disgusted with the treatment of the most progressive candidate to run for high office in this country since Eugene Debs polled nearly 920,000 votes from his Atlanta prison cell in 1920. Even after becoming defensive at being suddenly interrupted by protesters at a speech in Phoenix in late July, Bernie Sanders did his homework on the current crisis of urban police brutality against African-Americans and repeatedly spoke out later as the only candidate up to that point to do so. But still he was interrupted by protesters in a disrespectful and rageful manner on Saturday afternoon in Seattle's Westlake Park. Such behavior would never have been visited upon any other candidate Democrat or Republican. And it is egregiously harmful to the only progressive candidate in the race who has a proven record on issues of concern to African Americans and all People of Color.
Sanders has given several speeches concerning Black youth unemployment, the highest of any demographic in the country. In early June he cosponsored the Employ Young Americans Act with House Rep. John Conyers, an African American representative from Michigan which would commit $5.5 billion in federal money to employ and train mostly young minority urban youths.
On a visit with Rep. Conyers to the HOPE project in Washington DC, a training program to educate and employ thousands of young African Americans in the IT field, Sanders declared his support for the effort and once again spoke out against the over incarceration rate of young Black men. Sanders declared;
"So, let me be very clear: in my view it makes a lot more sense to invest in jobs, in job training, and in education than spending incredible amounts of money on jails and law enforcement." He then broached the issue of incarceration;
"According to the NAACP, from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people," he said. "If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. This is an unspeakable tragedy."
Immediately, upon the release of the video taken by the squad car camera that recorded the event in which Sandra Bland, a Black motorist in Texas, was pulled over and subjected to beatings by police, Sanders had this response;
“This video of the arrest of Sandra Bland shows totally outrageous police behavior. No one should be yanked from her car, thrown to the ground, assaulted and arrested for a minor traffic stop. The result is that three days later she is dead in her jail cell. This video highlights once again why we need real police reform. People should not die for a minor traffic infraction. This type of police abuse has become an all-too-common occurrence for people of color and it must stop.”
In several speeches over the past month since this occurrence Sanders used his campaign to talk about police brutality against Black folks and what he would do to stop it. Sanders has hired an African American woman as a campaign press secretary and his campaign has officially released a racial justice platform in which he deals with such issues as;
"...different forms of violence against people of color in the United States: physical violence from law enforcement and extremist vigilantes, the political violence of voter suppression, the legal violence of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, and the economic violence of crushing poverty. Sanders lays out several proposals to address each form of violence, from passing “ban the box” laws to prevent hiring discrimination against people with criminal records, to outlawing for-profit prisons, to restoring the gutted protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act."
The Sanders Campaign was amended to include a detailed and ambitious racial justice platform which has received the approval of many in the Black Lives Matter movement. It does seem that the platform was cobbled together in a hurried fashion after the second major interruption but Sanders had been considering the problems of Black youth for years and was bound to come up with such a platform anyhow.