I was working as Bernie Sanders‘ 2016 national Black outreach director. One morning while doing early outreach in South Carolina my Facebook page blew up. I was pinged in messages that said, “Bernie Sanders does not support reparations ... I sent an email to the campaign leadership asking exactly what are we thinking? This lacks tactical savvy! There was zero response from any of them. Right after we got past Black Lives Matter protests, this was the message from the campaign? I was in for a long road and, somehow, I needed to get through to Bernie on this issue. That never happened. (He has since acknowledged that if Congress passes a study of reparations bill he would sign it.)
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The hot take on Bernie is that he was too risky for Black voters. Meanwhile the patriarchal progressive Bernie zealot types believe that Black folks are uninformed voters that already have blind loyalty to any neoliberal candidate associated with the Democratic Party.

Blaming Black folks is never a good look, and they feed into moderate talking points every single time they say it. Both arguments about why Bernie struggles with Black voters are way off.
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Black and indigenous people are the original progressive people of America. How do you call yourself a progressive without consistently acknowledging us? The problem is, as is the problem with most of the white progressive spaces, he took everything from the Black movement and forgot about the Black part.

Bernie simply didn’t do what was needed to take his energy, popularity, and email list to boost his Black support during the 2016 election and leading up to 2020. This is not an indictment against what he stands for, but rather the political will to implement necessary tactics to earn Black trust ... Bernie had 4 years to set up in Black communities and engage them with his message, organization, but he instead chose to do the same thing — only to get the same result. It’s political insanity.
https://thegrio.com/2020/03/31/i-worked-for-bernie-2020/