The Black vote in America has been key to the successful election of any Democratic president in recent history and of a countless number of local officials. The lack of the Black vote, or better yet, Black turnout, has often been the downfall of Democratic office seekers. Yet, there is a lack of communication to and for people of color on the campaign trail, now as in the past.
Election after election, the needs of people of color, especially Blacks, are marginalized. With only six months remaining until the Democratic presidential primary in New York, there needs to be a greater focus on our communities. And with primaries coming up in other states that have significant Black populations, such South Carolina in February and Alabama in March, the candidates need to give us a reason to vote for them. Because if there is no reason to vote for them, we just won’t show up at the polls.
On stage Tuesday night, we had candidates who were milquetoast. Besides Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who else was there? A bunch of men trying to run for vice president? But none of the candidates in his or her remarks really tried to get to the hearts and the minds of communities of color. Clinton did mention racial divides in her opening statement as part of a longer explanation of what she wanted to lay out in the debate.
There were only two questions that were directly related to Blacks, one of which came from an audience member. It was a question from Arthur, who asked, “Do Black lives matter, or do all lives matter?” Sen. Sanders took the first crack at the question: “Black lives matter. And the reason—the reason those words matter is the African-American community knows that on any given day, some innocent person like Sandra Bland can get into a car, and then three days later she’s going to end up dead in jail, or their kids … are going to get shot. We need to combat institutional racism from top to bottom, and we need major, major reforms in a broken criminal justice system.” (We provide more of this response in our story.)
Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley answered the question by saying, “The point that the Black Lives Matter movement is making is a very, very legitimate and serious point, and that is that as a nation we have undervalued the lives of Black lives, people of color. When I ran for mayor of Baltimore—and we were burying over 350 young men ever single year, mostly young, and poor, and Black—and I said to our Legislature, at the time when I appeared in front of them as a mayor, that if we were burying white, young, poor men in these numbers, we would be marching in the streets and there would be a different reaction. Black lives matter, and we have a lot of work to do to reform our criminal justice system, and to address race relations in our country.”
Former Senator and former Secretary of State Clinton did not get the opportunity to answer that question. Instead she was asked what she was going to do for African-Americans that President Barack Obama couldn’t. Clinton answered the question tactfully and made sure to highlight that the agenda that the president has laid out “has been obstructed by the Republicans at every turn. So what we need to be doing is not only reforming criminal justice—I have talked about that at some length, including things like body cameras—but we also need to be following the recommendations of the commissioner that President Obama empaneled on policing. There is an agenda there that we need to be following up on.”
She continued to stress the need to combat mass incarceration and that we need to do more for the children.
She said, “We need to be committed to making it possible for every child to live up to his or her God-given potential. That is really hard to do if you don’t have early childhood education, if you don’t have schools that are able to meet the needs of the people or good housing. There’s a long list. We need a new New Deal for communities of color.”
And in that last statement alone, Clinton has set the stage for a reason to vote for her. Now she must show us what that “new New Deal” looks like.
Black Americans are sick and tired of voting politicians into office who only pay lip service to our needs. Although the idea of socialism could be interesting, it is not realistic. Although changing the whole country in one stroke of a pen would be great, it’s not going to happen. What we need to focus on is change that can be consistent, measured and effective. And that is what the Democrats need to convey to communities of color. If there is a plan such as a “new New Deal,” that would be something to vote for. We need a reason and it is the responsibility of these candidates to give us a reason. All the candidates agree that “Black Lives Matter.” Now, they just need to prove it!
And if they don’t prove it, we have no other option but to find another party to support or create an independent one of our own.