February 13, 2016

Can cynicism, despair and optimism exist all at once?

Bernie Sanders came to Minneapolis on February 12, for an event billed as a “community forum on Black America.” The event was hosted by north Minneapolis’s Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, and was held at nearby Patrick Henry High School, home of the Patriots. 

The significance of the location was not lost on me. In popular American mythology, Patrick Henry stands as a hero worth naming a school after. As a skilled orator, who was able to appeal to the lower classes, Henry is remembered for bravely declaring he would rather die than live without “liberty.”

Although our history textbooks don’t often dwell on this, early Americans were a rebellious bunch, and their penchant for rebellion–against greedy landowners, for example, who would not pay the militia they depended on–was a threat to the emerging, slave trade-fueled wealth and control of an elite class of men, you know–the ones who were created equal, and were in need of liberty?

People like Patrick Henry helped direct early American unrest towards the British, and away from the enemy within. Henry’s words of fire inspired an assurance that it was the British King, and not the growing American elite, that was the enemy to be defeated. 

Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty? 
― Patrick Henry

Bernie Sanders is also a good speaker. Unlike Patrick Henry, Sanders seems bent on naming the problems in front of us: the greed and lawlessness of Wall Street, the control of the corporate class, the ballooning prison industrial complex, the racist oppression built into voter suppression efforts, and so on. 

In Minneapolis, Sanders spoke to the importance of investing in communities of “need,” and to stop punishing people–through exorbitant college tuition rates–for trying to get an education. He touched on environmental racism, at the prompting of an audience member, but would not directly answer a repeatedly called out question:

Will you support reparations for Black Americans?

This question hung awkwardly in the air at the end of the forum, when American Indian Movement co-founder Clyde Bellecourt insisted on being heard. Forum host Anthony Newby, of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, tried to push Bellecourt to ask a specific question, since Sanders was about to exit the stage and hustle over to a local Democratic party event (where Hillary Clinton also appeared). But Bellecourt did not want to be rushed.

“This is a forum for people of color, and I am one of those colors,” he insisted. Some people in the crowd seemed irritated by Bellecourt’s disruption, and felt the event had been organized to specifically address the state of Black Americans.

And in this tension, we can hear echoes of Patrick Henry’s artful dodging, away from our own demons–runaway capitalism, greed, exploitation, the slave labor that built the wealth of this country, the Native lands grabbed for our “Manifest Destiny,” the continuous assault on immigrants and refugees, and so on–and towards a faraway master.

Whose painful legacy can or should be dealt with first? And will a potential Sanders administration be able to deliver on the reparations and reconciliation–through the kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Canada has put in place–that might really power a people-led movement?

For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and to provide for it. 
― Patrick Henry

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