2016 Postmortem

"His efforts at minority outreach can also sound vague and halfhearted. Take his attempt to shoehorn himself into Clinton’s message of the day about criminal-justice reform: “We are assembled here today because we are fighting Establishment politics and we are fighting Establishment politics. We know that this great country can be much more,” he said. “Change only comes when millions of people look around them and say this is wrong. Racism is wrong. Sexism is wrong. Phobia is wrong.”

In Harlem, the former Secretary of State showed that she’s just better at talking about race than Sanders.

“We still need to face the painful reality that African Americans are three times as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage,” she said. “Just imagine if white kids were 500% more likely to die of asthma than black kids. Imagine if a white baby in South Carolina were twice as likely to die before her first birthday than an African-American baby. These inequities are wrong but they’re also immoral.”

But Sanders seldom trained that same impassioned rhetoric on the problems that so many black voters wanted addressed: police brutality, white supremacy, and the ways in which economic inequality is inextricable from race.

It may have been white privilege, or simple cultural ignorance of black people and our plights. The Vermont senator, who built a movement on lofty promises like universal health care and free college, dismissed reparations for black people as “very divisive.”

He appeared not to realize that you can’t simply deliver the same speech on economic inequality to a room full of black people in Atlanta that you would to a room full of white people in Iowa.