We’re in an ugly and openly racist moment in American politics. And that makes it an unusual time, then, for some racial politics to be optimistic about: the Bernie Sanders campaign.
In the past, I have been blunt on how his campaign has failed to win over voters of color, missing opportunities to speak directly to how Sanders’ main issue – economic exploitation – specifically harms black people and other people of color. The campaign ceded too much ground to the Clintons it could have won, especially as it headed to California.
But in watching Sanders move across the city and state where I was born, I have been impressed with how he has spoken to a population where Latinos now outnumber white people. It may be too little, too late – and his campaign may be winding down, but Sanders’ appearances and media have been a welcome foil to the Republicans’ racism.
It was beautiful to see Sanders appear at Friendship Park – a liminal space between San Diego and Tijuana where families can see but not touch relatives on the other side of the US/Mexico border. It was a nice counter symbolism not just to Trump’s disgusting refrain that he and the Republicans are going to build a wall, but to Obama’s and the Democrats’ legacy of record deportations.
It was also touching to see this campaign ad about Chris Wilson, a formerly incarcerated black man who turned his life around through prison education.
It’s never a good idea to seek truth or validation in an advertisement, but this is a very unusual ad in the history of racial politics of presidential campaigns. In it, Wilson admits that after a childhood filled with guns and abuse, he took someone’s life when he was 17-years-old. He was sentenced to natural life in prison just as “my mustache had just grown in”.
The ad is almost four minutes long, as Wilson talks about what he’s done to turn his life around. Some of it dispenses obvious truths – such as that prison education works wonders, even though Bill Clinton’s crime bill obliterated that pathway to rehabilitation.
But the ad is more unusual in that a presidential candidate would align themselves with a black man who has been convicted of a crime in the first place.
Williams’ story is proof that the Black Lives Matter movement has had an effect on Sanders, so challenging respectability politics that a major politician will declare that all black lives matter – even that of a once child convicted of murder.
Williams’ story is the opposite of the Willie Horton ad, as it tries to inspire voters with the life story of a black man caught in the criminal justice system rather than to play fears about such a person.
Williams’ story is also the opposite of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 story about “gangs of kids” who make up “superpredators”. In the ad, Sanders is not trying to bring Williams to “heel” but is giving context to who Williams was before the crime and who he became after it, such that his entire life needn’t be reduced to one act.
In releasing this ad, and in visiting the border, Sanders has opened himself up to attacks that he’s soft on crime. He certainly isn’t playing to white fears about brown and black people. This doesn’t mean that he’s radically brave, nor does it absolve him for not having thought through a racial lens more often in the past year.
But it does show that there is one politician willing to walk into the complicated ways Mexican Americans are harmed by immigration policies and African American children are hurt by the criminal justice system. Regardless of whether California begins the end of his campaign or his march to a contested convention, it’s beautiful to see him take this risk.
