Bernie Sanders Campaign Should Stop The White Women's Privilege Lectures

Last February Jennifer Wright addressed Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders’ problem with women, writing Bernie Sanders’ Sexism Problem for Harper’s Bazaar.

“We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age. I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.” Vermont Public Radio, Feb. 2019

Many women and people of color view that statement as a reaffirmation of the “let white men rule, we’re better at it” theory of political governance. Wright perfects her roast of Sanders, and I encourage to read her piece, while I pull out a few highlights that still simmer in my conscious as a super active person in the Hillary Clinton campaign.

There was a bit of poetic justice when women who worked for Bernie in his 2016 primary campaign came forward to discuss how they were paid less and experienced sexual harassment. You see, with rare exceptions — finally hiring Symone Sanders who served as his national press secretary until late June 2016 — Bernie couldn’t really find many good women of any skin color to hire at a high level. His campaign was run by white men — a feature that he has fixed in his current 2020 run for the Democratic nomination.

Still, when women working in the field and as organizers complained about both wages and fending off sexual advances from male staffers, Bernie grabbed his mop of white hair and defended his inaction saying initially “I was a little bit busy running around the country”. After all, Bernie Sanders said that “women’s issues were a distraction” and Planned Parenthood — who is getting the crap kicked out of them by the Trump administration — is “the establishment”.

Those same Sanders campaign women going to New New York Times to share their experiences aggravated the hell out of Sanders who doesn’t hesitate to public address controversy most often with a “poor me” song akin to Donald Trump’s.

Sanders Is Old Dog Not Interested In New Tricks

Writing for The Daily Beast, Emily Shugerman’s article ‘Ex-Staffers: Bernie ‘Struggles’ with Women’s issues affirmed the gender gap in Sanders’ socialist brain when the topic is women.

“You can put lipstick on the pig, but in the end the senator is someone who is actually very proud of not changing his ideas,” Sarah Slamen, a Texas organizer and Sanders’ 2016 state campaign coordinator in Louisiana, told The Daily Beast.

“I want to believe that old dogs can learn new tricks, but I don’t see it with this dog,” she added.

If Bernie was female, he would be called a real crybaby. More importantly, Bernie has a serious problem with women supporters and raising money from women as donors. So it shocked me to read his campaign’s complaints about MSNBC and specifically legal analyst Mimi Rocah, a former assistant U.S attorney for the Southern District of New York.

To be clear, Rocah’s comments shocked me in their honesty, but the Sanders’ campaign response went all down hill for a campaign that needs the support of women of every color. This growing Democratic narrative from the black women pundit class that any campaign can fly without white women seems absurd, but politics does strange things to people’s minds.

Bernie Sanders Female Donors July 2019 Second Quarter

Think Elizabeth Warren And Bernie Sanders Are The Same? She Doesn’t. via Buzzfeed

First — stats about Bernie’s women donors. OpenSecrets has analyzed the candidates’ fundraising through July. Don’t be confused by Open Secrets publishing a picture of women holding Bernie signs. Senator Sanders is at the bottom of the Democratic pileup, with only 39% of his donors being women in second quarter. Bernie is at the bottom with candidates like Michael Bennett and Pete Buttigieg .

For all the fanfare around Bernie, coupled with his name recognition, the Sanders campaign performs pitifully with women and it will probably cost him the nomination. Actually, Biden’s women donors are only marginally better but his total dollar haul from women is more than double Bernie’s.

Like it not, the Sanders campaign has a woman problem, and the Bernie team accuses MSNBC and other media — not Bernie himself — of cultivating it. Since I remember well Senator Sanders being the darling of MSNBC in 2016, far more than HIllary, I find this story pretty intriguing from the Bernie camp. Perhaps the MSNBC team has sobered up a bit now that Trump is president.

I have observed Bernie being very confrontational with MSNBC reporters and anchors, and nothing prepared me for Mimi Rocha’s personal critique of Sanders during a segment with 8-10 am weekends host David Gura, saying that Bernie makes her “skin crawl” and that he’s not a “pro-woman candidate.”

Clearly Rocha is a legal analyst and not a political pundit. Hearing Rocha’s words, I was like "Holy mother of the goddess!!!" To be clear, I think Bernie would sell out women's reproductive health in a minute for new union rights, let's say. I don't trust him further than I can throw a high heel. Still, Rocah's candor took my breath away.

“Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl,” Rocah started when discussing the lineup for the upcoming Democratic debate in Detroit, where Sanders will share a stage with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “I can’t even identify for you what exactly it is. But I see him as sort of a not pro-woman candidate,” she continued. "So, having the two of them there—like, I don’t understand young women who support him. And I’m hoping having him next to her will help highlight that.”

The Sanders campaign was furious, and The Daily Beast details their response to Rocha’s comments in an article saying tensions between Sanders and MSNBC are boiling over.

“It takes a certain kind of woman to ignore that education, healthcare, and the economy are women’s issues too. #privilegedmuch? This is not what intersectional feminism looks like. It’s corporate feminism at its finest. Full stop,” Sanders’ national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray wrote on Twitter.

“Here we go again.. It is so belittling to constantly tell young women that they HAVE TO vote for someone JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE A WOMAN. Mam, we have brains, we're voting on policy and a candidates vision + work, not their sex. This is #WhiteFeminism at its finest,” Belén Sisa, Sanders’ Latino press secretary, tweeted.

The article is interesting but Bernie's problems are not because of MSNBC.

Bernie's problems are 1) we don't believe that he can achieve significant goals, based on his pitiful decades long lack of legislation in Congress and lack of a strong network among colleagues. His record pales next to Elizabeth Warren's who runs circles around him intellectually and as a policy whip who literally invented the Consumer Protection Bureau and then dealt with Republicans refusing to give her the permanent job.

Did Elizabeth Warren cry boo hoo like Bernie? Nope, she persisted on behalf of American consumers.

And 2) we prefer a younger, calmer, candidate than Bernie Sanders. Beyond that, some of have long memories and with so many great Democratic candidates, there's no need to work through my issues with Bernie and his ruthless supporters, which are totally of Bernie's making.

Given the success of Elizabeth Warren with women generally and much more successfully with women of color than Bernie, the white women are corporate feminists, not intersectional feminists, actually falls on deaf ears. In the age of Trump white women Democrats are tired of being yelled at by Sanders camp women of every color.

Women's Suffrage Leaders Left Out Black Women via Teen Vogue

To be honest, the wounds are so deep among women post 2016 election and then the fighting with the Women’s March founders (who have been unusually quiet this summer — thankfully), we’ve learned to just let the Bernie women’s condemnations of us evaporate.

If Bernie gets the nomination, we will vote for him. But we’re 95% certain that won’t happen, although the anti-white women arguments certainly won’t cease in the ultra progressive wing of the party. Bernie has a terrible time making alliances and solid relationships with other politicos, so the way his representatives speak to possible supporters and donors should not surprise us.

Turner and Bernie's other women could have properly called Rocah out, as she stunned even me with her candor. But when you drag white feminism into the conversation, I remind you not to get your gander up, Berner ladies.

We white lades you detest so much have other candidates who are happy to have our support and money. I'm just tone deaf to the white women bs from Berners and refuse to relive the utter hell of 2016 first with Bernie and then with Trump. My conscience is clear, and that’s the final word. Kiss, kiss, Nina. ~ Anne

Many Americans Viewed New York Harbor's Lady Liberty as a False Idol of Broken Promises

A message tacked to the Statue of Liberty after the September 11, 2019 terrorist attack. via

By Angela Serratore. First published on Smithsonian.com as ‘The Americans Who Saw Lady Liberty as a False Idol of Broken Promises’.

It was a crisp, clear fall day in New York City, and like many others, Lillie Devereaux Blake was eager to see the great French statue, donated by that country’s government to the United States as a token of friendship and a monument to liberty, finally unveiled. President Grover Cleveland was on Bedloe’s Island (since renamed Liberty Island), standing at the base of the statue, ready to give a speech. Designed in France, the statue had been shipped to New York in the spring of 1885, and now, in October 1886, it was finally assembled atop its pedestal.

“Presently the veil was withdrawn from her beautiful calm face,” wrote Blake of the day’s events, “and the air was rent with salvos of artillery fired to hail the new goddess; the earth and the sea trembled with the mighty concussions, and steam-whistles mingled their shrill shrieks with the shouts of the multitude—all this done by men in honor of a woman.”

Blake wasn’t watching from the island itself, though—in fact, only two women had been invited to the statue that day. Blake and other members of the New York State Women’s Suffrage Association, at that point New York’s leading women’s suffrage organization, had chartered their own boat in protest of the exclusion of women not just from the statue’s unveiling, but from the idea of liberty itself.

Blake’s protest is one of several highlighted at the new Statue of Liberty Museum, which opened earlier this month on Liberty Island. While the statue’s pedestal did at one point hold a small museum, the new space’s increased square footage allowed historians and exhibit designers to expand the story of Lady Liberty, her champions and her dissenters.

“In certain people's retelling of the statue and certain ways it gets told, it often seems like there's a singular notion, whether it's the statue as a symbol of America or the statue as the New York icon or the statue as the beacon of immigration,” says Nick Hubbard, an exhibition designer with ESI Designs, the firm responsible for the staging of the new museum. But as the newspaper clippings, broadsheets, and images in the space themselves explain, the statue—and what it symbolized—wasn’t universally beloved, and to many, it was less a beacon of hope than an outright slap in the face.

This map appeared in the magazine Puck during the Empire State Campaign, a hard-fought referendum on a suffrage amendment to the New York State constitution—the referendum failed in 1915.

The French bequeathed the statue itself as a gift, but it was up to the people of America to supply it with a pedestal. After both the state of New York and the federal government declined to fund the project, New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer announced he would use his paper to raise $100,000 (more than $2 million in today’s currency) for the pedestal. The proposition was straightforward: Mail in a donation, get your name printed in the paper. Stories abounded of small children and elderly women sending in their allowances and their spare change, and the heartwarming tales of common folk supporting the grand project captured the front pages of Pulitzer’s paper and the imagination of the country, largely cementing the idea that the Statue of Liberty was, from the beginning, universally beloved by Americans.

Immediately, though, cracks emerged in this façade. Blake and the nearly 200 other women who sailed to Bedloe’s Island issued a proclamation: “In erecting a Statue of Liberty embodied as a woman in a land where no woman has political liberty, men have shown a delightful inconsistency which excites the wonder and admiration of the opposite sex,” they pointed out. President Cleveland, during his speech, took no notice of the women floating directly below him, Blake brandishing a placard bearing the statement “American women have no liberty.” Suffragists around the country, however, noticed, and the statue for them became both a symbol of all they didn’t yet have and a rallying point for demanding it. In later decades, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton visited the statue, and after a 1915 measure to give women the right to vote in New York failed at the ballot box, a group of suffragists used a 1916 visit by Woodrow Wilson to drop thousands of ‘Votes For Women!’ leaflets at the statue via biplane.

The statue’s unveiling dominated headlines for weeks before and after the official date, and the ‘Cleveland Gazette’, an African-American-run newspaper with a circulation of 5,000, was no exception. On November 27, 1886, a month after the statue opened to the public, their front page ran an editorial titled “Postponing Bartholdi's statue until there is liberty for colored as well.”

“Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean,” the Gazette argued, “until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country ‘enlightening the world,’ or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.”

Hubbard says including a section of the Gazette editorial in the exhibit was crucial to communicating that the Statue of Liberty posed—and still poses—an ongoing series of questions about American values. “We really had to set up the idea that the statue is sort of a promise, it represents and is a symbol of basic American and foundational American ideas,” he says. “It sets up that promise but then even from the beginning there are people who say, ‘But wait, that promise is not necessarily fulfilled.’”

A Liberty bond (or liberty loan) was a war bond that was sold in the United States to support the allied cause in World War I. Subscribing to the bonds became a symbol of patriotic duty in the United States and introduced the idea of financial securities to many citizens for the first time. The Act of Congress which authorized the Liberty Bonds is still used today as the authority under which all U.S. Treasury bonds are issued. via Wiki Reader

While the Statue of Liberty has, for most of its time in New York’s harbor, been framed as a symbol of immigration in America, at the time of its assembly, the country was just beginning to formally limit the number of people who could immigrate each year. In 1882, the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first large-scale immigration law and one that explicitly made the case for prioritizing—and restricting—immigrants based on race. Chinese-American writer Saum Song Bo responded to the Pulitzer solicitations of funds for the statue’s pedestal by sending a letter to the New York Sun:

“I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward building in this land a pedestal for a statue of Liberty,” Bo wrote. “That statue represents Liberty holding a torch which lights the passage of those of all nations who come into this country. But are the Chinese allowed to come? As for the Chinese who are here, are they allowed to enjoy liberty as men of all other nationalities enjoy it? Are they allowed to go about everywhere free from the insults, abuse, assaults, wrongs and injuries form which men of other nationalities are free?”

It’s this idea that “liberty” is far from a fixed word with a fixed meaning that lies at the heart of the Statue of Liberty Museum’s experience. “When the designers were thinking of the statue, of course how people interpreted liberty and what it meant was already very complicated and contested,” says Hubbard. Incorporating those perspectives in the exhibit allows the space to make the point that now, more than 100 years after the Statue of Liberty’s torch first alighted, Lady Liberty still stands over New York harbor as a symbol of where the nation has come and how far it still has to go.