Black Voters Matter

Jason Johnson's tweet storm yesterday, led me to The Root, where he's politics editor and where he wrote a piece this week, Mayor Pete Ain’t Got to Lie, Deval Patrick Is Gonna Try and the Harris Campaign Won’t Die: 2020 Presidential Black Power Rankings, Week 18 1/2. His newest Power Rankings are for African-American males. "Why," he asks, "center black men in the Power Rankings? Especially when for decades the few times African Americans were the focus of presidential politics it was always about black men (the whole 'all the women are white, all the blacks are men' trope)? Because Donald Trump is making his play. About 13 percent of black men voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and the Trump campaign believes if they can get 15 percent of black men in 2020, they can secure another Electoral College (certainly not popular vote) victory. All of this Kanye nonsense, the First Step Act, Blexit and promoting ADOS are all right-wing methods of either attracting disaffected black men to Trump or convincing black men to not vote at all (which is a vote for Trump). This kind of black male detachment matters at the ballot box; over 500,000 black male registered voters didn’t turn out in Georgia between 2016 to 2018 and those are the kinds of numbers that flip states, legislatures and presidencies. So this week, we’re focusing on which candidates are looking at a newly overlooked constituency in the Democratic base and whether they truly realize that #AllBlackVotersMatter."

This week’s big riser is Bernie Sanders, who, to the surprise of everyone, snagged the top spot again without having a medical emergency or a major debate performance. This week, a whole lot of candidates dropped, which means there is work to be done across the board. One final note: We pushed back this week’s Power Rankings (thus calling this Week 18½) to capture several new candidate entries, and this will be our last ranking before Thanksgiving. We’ll be back on Friday, Dec. 5, full of turkey and ready for that stretch run. Enjoy the rankings!

How do you rank a campaign’s Black Power? Well, we have our “FLEX” rating, aka:

• Finances: Are you paying black staff, advertisers, consultants?
• Legislation: What legislation are you pushing or have passed for black people?
• External Polling: No matter how good you are for black people, if your poll numbers are terrible we can’t rank you that high!
• X-Factor: What’s your rhetoric like? How do you handle a crisis or the kinds of events and scandals that directly impact black lives?

#1: Sen Bernie Sanders

The committee has had plenty of critical things to say about Bernie Sanders. His out-of-control staffers on Twitter, his lack of transparency...but a broken analog clock is right at least twice a day if you really look at it from the right angle. Word on the street is that Bernie is about to launch an all-out assault to attract black male voters led by one of the biggest cultural organizers out there, Phillip Agnew. Yeah, Dream Defenders Phillip Agnew-- act like you know. Say what you want about Killer Mike and Cornel West (not in front of Marcus; you might catch hands), but for this week, at least, Bernie is putting the MOST attention on the most overlooked part of the Democratic coalition for 2020. Add to that his improving national numbers this week and Bernie secures the No. 1 spot for the second time in the rankings.

#2: Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Warren started off her week a little rough. When asked by moderator Angela Rye to name three black people she would place in her cabinet, Warren referred to the law firm of What, Had Happen and Was. It was embarrassing; even Trump could’ve come up with Diamond, Silk and Kanye. When asked about the lack of diversity in early primary states, Warren electric slid out of that answer, too. The committee was not pleased. So how did Warren recover? The senator brought her endorsers from Black Womxn to her headquarters and gave them some parting gifts in the form of talking points on everything from social media to school debt to black lives and how her campaign is dedicated to addressing those issues. There are no greater amplifiers on social media than black women, and Warren just nabbed herself the equivalent of 500,000 selfies. She also pointed out how school debt disproportionately harms black students and called out private equity firms for screwing over musicians who don’t own all of their music; while she did it in defense of Taylor Swift, that’s actually been a major issue for black artists for decades.

#3: Sen. Kamala Harris

To quote the old Richard Pryor documentary: “I ain’t dead yet, muthaf$%!” Literally this week, everybody is proclaiming the Harris campaign dead. Yes, Harris falls in the rankings this week as she’s dropped behind Amy Klobuchar in some Iowa polls, but a lot of the push to throw dirt on her campaign and even her political future is, as much as this term is overused, misogynoir. Harris has more cash on hand than Biden, can actually name three black people she’d want in her administration and is campaigning with Uncle Luke to earn the black male vote while other candidates think black male interests start and end in a barber’s chair. Plus, after Joy Reid told the senator she was No. 1 on The Root’s Power Rankings last week, she gave us our props. We are easily bribed and flattered, senator, so that works for this week.

#4: Former HUD Secretary Julian Castro

In a perfect world, the Democratic primaries would actually feature more than five black voters before South Carolina, Colin Kaepernick would be playing for the Chicago Bears, Disney+ would come free with a triple-stack at IHOP, Lauryn Hill would start a concert on time and Julian Castro would be in the November Democratic debate. But it isn’t a perfect world and I’m still not paying for Disney+ (and the committee is too ethical and or cheap for password sharing). Castro drops this week because, unlike alt-right-abetted candidates Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard or millionaire vanity candidates with shady staffers like Tom Steyer, he couldn’t reach the poll threshold to make the November debate. However, Castro continues to campaign, rolling out a new disability bill (over 14 percent of African Americans have some disability) and holding an interview with Angela Rye at Paschal’s in Atlanta the day before the debates (she’s everywhere this week!) in addition to going to Iowa to make his case that early majority-white primary states suppresses the black vote. We’ll miss Castro on the debate stage, but he’s still pushing for black folks even when he’s not on camera.

#5: Mayor Pete Buttigieg

Is it possible to cancel, uncancel and then cancel somebody again, all within a few weeks? Is Mayor Pete the candidate equivalent of Dollar Shave Club, which seems like a good idea in theory, but every time you reorder, you realize it’s a gimmick and a waste of time? First, #SneakyPete’s campaign forged the names of black people who support his Douglass Plan and got caught for it. You ain’t got to lie, Pete; the plan is actually pretty good on its own merits. Then, in a hold-my-beer moment of campaign racial incompetence, his team was caught using a stock photo of a woman in Kenya to supposedly represent black voters in America.

Mayor Pete has literally become a laughing stock among black women in politics. Do you realize that Kamala Harris literally clutched her pearls before laughing at this man?

The only reason Buttigieg hasn’t dropped further is because he’s now leading in Iowa, although Pete’s about as popular with black people as Stephen A. Smith is at a Black Lives Matter rally (although I think, at this point, Mayor Pete might be more credible). To Buttigieg’s credit, his campaign has been camped out at South Carolina HBCUs for weeks now but the committee thinks his chances with black voters might be about finished.

#6: Sen. Cory Booker

ISO: Tall, bald or balding light-skinned black guy from the Northeast with a stellar educational background, a penchant for Wall Street, with political ambitions and strong dad vibes. No this is not the OkCupid ad that Rosario Dawson put out to meet Cory Booker, but it’s close. This is the description of Deval Patrick, who, by entering the race, potentially makes Booker as redundant as a backup flip phone. Booker has branded himself as the happy campaigner but he’s never been on solid polling ground and if Patrick is going to snatch anyone’s corner it’s Booker’s. This week, Booker shouted out Founder’s Day for Omega Psi Phi, implored Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to delay the execution of Rodney Reed and he, along with Kamala Harris, spoke out against the Comcast Supreme Court discrimination case. Booker continues to campaign, but at this point he’s running on vegan fumes.

#7: Spiritual Guru Marianne Williamson

What’s that I smell, the faint whiff of patchouli and hemp hair oil in the wind? Could it be Marianne Williamson is back? According to Marcus, any presidential candidate who puts out ads specifically calling for reparations in South Carolina for two weeks deserves to get back on the Power Rankings. It’s worth noting, most committee members say that out in the real world, most black folks, especially black men, are more excited about Andrew Yang’s universal basic income plan than they are about reparations. Probably because while both plans are unlikely, if black folks got reparations it’d only be a matter of time before we’d all be wearing masks and having shootouts with the Seventh Kalvary. Although, to be honest, given the rise of white nationalism and gun violence under Trump, we aren’t too far from that now.





#8: Former Vice President Joe Biden

Michael “Stop and Frisk” Bloomberg literally came into the race last week apologizing for one of his most racist criminal justice policies (at a black church, of course), but Joe Biden still can’t take any responsibility for damage caused by the 1994 crime bill. Now this week, Biden says he won’t push to decriminalize marijuana, which has resulted in the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of black men and women for non-violent crimes, because he still thinks weed is a “gateway drug”?

#OKBoomer.

It’s time to face facts about the Biden campaign; he’s up to 44 percent of black support in South Carolina but his policies and his positions (outside of his HBCU plan, which is actually fire) are mostly the same centrist garbage that has not helped black people in the face of a white nationalist presidency.

Biden may not have a black man problem the way that Warren, Harris or Mayor Pete obviously have, but his polls are tumbling harder than Simone Biles and there are but so many barbershops he can dap it up in before he’s going to have to convince Dre, Ray-Ray and Malik that voting for a 70-plus-year-old-white man is worth their time. Biden is the heir to Obama’s legacy in the same way that La Toya is the heir to the Jackson legacy, in name and proximity only, because the skills and the thrills just aren’t there.

#9: Former Gov. Deval Patrick

You know what black people have been waiting for? Eddie Murphy’s new standup special on Netflix. Black Panther 2. The annual trending #ThanksGivingClapback. WorldStar footage of Diamond and Silk getting into a wig-snatching chicken sandwich melee at a North Carolina Popeyes. You know what black people haven’t been waiting for? Deval Patrick. Patrick makes the ranking because 1) we are focusing on black men this week and 2) he has the potential to challenge Joe Biden and eliminate Cory Booker as the centrist but black heir apparent to respectability politics wing of the Obama legacy. Mind you, I also have the “potential” to beat Floyd Mayweather in a street fight. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Patrick has no money, no infrastructure and he pulled a Nicki Minaj for his now ex-brother-in-law after he was accused of rape. On the other hand, his South Side, Chicago-by-way-of-Bain Capital resume is the worst remix since the polka version of “Old Town Road.” Good luck, Deval; you’ll need it

#10: Former Attorney General Eric Holder

You know Eric Holder is looking at Deval Patrick, Joe Biden and Julian Castro and thinking that he can do this too, right? There have been rumblings that Holder really wants to get into the presidential race as well; the committee has no idea what his constituency is, but we do know one thing: Holder has a better criminal justice record than Trump, Biden and Harris that might drive black men and women to give him a look. Also, the committee really just wants to see a debate with Holder, Patrick, Harris, Booker and Castro. At some point, the cameras will catch them all huddled in the corner during a commercial break, laughing loudly at some joke only for Warren to walk up and ask what’s so funny, and everybody stops laughing and gets quiet, and Castro breaks the silence by saying “Oh…Uh, you wouldn’t get it Liz” and she walks away to that sad Charlie Brown music, and then they all start laughing again. We need to see that happen.

Presidential Town Hall With Marianne Williamson, The Candidate Maddow Seems To Have Never Heard Of

I was happy to see that Emerson has started including Marianne Williamson in their polling. People with casual interest in the 2020 presidential primaries probably don't know she's running, thanks to a virtual blackout by most sources of election information. But even better than the polling inclusion was CNN's big Marianne Williamson prime time town hall on Sunday.

The damn assholes at CNN keep taking down the videos of the town hall so the clip above clip above is the only one they've allowed YouTube to keep online. Dicks! What's so weird about the mass media, particularly MSDNC MSNBC, ignoring Marianne's campaign, is that she's sold millions of books and has a built-in audience eager for news of her campaign. Yes, she's not "part of the club," but that's one of the most important thrusts of her campaign.

Dana Bash was a good host and she gave Williamson all the space she needed to get her message out. Marianne on a rising American oligarchy:

During my 35-year career working with individuals and groups going through traumatic experiences, I have helped people navigate the consequences of an irresponsible political establishment. As a result, I have strong ideas about some of the things that have gone wrong in America and how to help us heal.

While I have spent my career empowering people and turning them into leaders, Washington has been disempowering people and turning them into followers. The stress and anxiety that has become so endemic in American society, due to chronic economic and social despair, has fostered a population disconnected from civic engagement. Today, this chronic disempowerment represents a threat to our democracy.

Relatively few Americans have abused their rights at the expense of the many, turning the US government into their own personal playground. From tax cuts that benefit only the wealthiest among us, to corporate subsidies that aid industries (oil, big pharma, agribusiness, etc.) already profiting to the tune of billions, money has been sliding for decades away from expenditures that support the public good to expenditures that support the lucky few.

Though American politicians continues to say we are a democracy, we are sliding ever more dangerously into a veiled aristocratic system. The mindset of the new aristocracy has not only imbued our politics-- it has hijacked America's value system, leading us to swerve from our democratic and deep human values. We have forgotten that public morality even matters.

We need to remind ourselves that economic injustice is a moral transgression. Neglecting the medical, educational and social needs of millions of people so that a few can swell their bank accounts is a moral transgression. And until we bring our political policies back into alignment with our moral core, then nothing will fundamentally heal this country.

The political establishment has had 40 years to correct itself. And so, it is time for the American people to step in, to stage an intervention and to disrupt the status quo.

When millions of American children live in chronic trauma, trapped in schools that do not even have adequate school supplies to teach a child to read (a child who cannot read by the age of eight has not only a drastically decreased chance of high school graduation but also a drastically increased chance of incarceration) and our government does little more than normalize their despair, that is a moral outrage. That is why I propose creating a Cabinet-level US Department of Children and Youth.

When mass incarceration, racial disparity in criminal sentencing and rampant layers of systemic racism are responded to with incremental changes-- as opposed to the fundamental recognition of a racial debt that is yet to be paid-- that is a moral outrage. That is why I propose that the United States pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved Americans.

When the US spends billions more on preparing for war than promoting peace, that is a moral outrage. It is why I have proposed a more robust and equal relationship between humanitarian efforts by the State Department, and legitimate needs for war preparedness by the Defense Department. I would also create a US Department of Peace to address violence here in the United States.

People have been trained in this country to ask for far too little, and it is time to not only ask, but to demand, that the powers of the US government be returned to advocacy for the health and wellbeing of the American people over advocacy for short-term corporate profits. While some politicians might know a bit more about how Washington works, I know enough to know that how Washington works is contributing to what is wrong with the world. Americans are waking up to the deep corruption that has taken hold of our government, and we need a president who is not afraid to name it.

Those who see the world through the limitations of the corrupt system that got us into this ditch are not necessarily those best qualified to get us out of it. In the words of Franklin Roosevelt, the primary role of the president is "moral leadership." We need a political visionary as much as we need a political mechanic.

A massive uprising of consciousness among the American people, backed by the personal motivation to take their passion to the polls, is the only force strong enough to override the threats to our democracy. Someone with a well-established and well-developed knowledge of the American people, and deep faith in our abilities, is the best qualified candidate to lead us into the next chapter of America's history. It's not enough to just water the leaves of our democracy; we must water the roots-- and those roots are within us.

The skill of the moral awakener is the skill most needed in an American president today. It is a skill that I have, with which I have helped move the lives of millions of people from trauma to transformation. I am prepared to do that for this country.

Marianne also spoke eloquently about a topic that's come into public purview as "reparations" (for slavery). "This is not a debt we can afford to delay any longer. The economic restitution for two and a half centuries of slavery followed by 100 years of domestic terrorism. Germany has paid $89 billion to Jewish organizations since World War II... It's simply a debt we owe. This country will not heal until we take a serious moral inventory. A nation must undergo the same level of deep moral inventory [and] admission of our character defects. Racism is a character defect. Let's end this. Let's fix this. Let's solve this. Reparations won't end everything but it will be a profound gift. It implies a mea culpa. It implies a recognition of a debt owed and therefore, it carries not only economic power but spiritual force-- whatever it costs, it's time to do this."

Marianne Williamson-- Reparations!

What do candidates do after they lose their race? Many disappear, at least for a while. Or if not disappear, they lower their profile significantly. I remember, though, on the night that election fraud cost Donna Edwards her first race, I spoke with her about how she needed to start running the next day. She did and she two years later she became the first African-American woman to represent Maryland in Congress. Her own party had written her off for a subservient corporate shill and Hoyer and Pelosi had both campaigned against her but if that upset her-- and how could it not-- it didn't slow her down for one second. The second time around wasn't even close. She kicked his corrupt butt 59-37%, even beating him in his home base, Prince George's County, 55-41%.

More often than not-- other than in a wave election-- it takes more than one cycle to win a congressional seat. And not just Donna Edwards. For example, it also took Grayson two tries; same with Jerry McNerney and Joe Garcia. Juan Vargas ran 3 primaries against Bob Filner before Filner finally left the seat too run for mayor and handed it to Vargas.

One of my favorite candidates this cycle was Marianne Williamson who I doubt will run for Congress again-- at least not any time soon. In fact, she just wrote a beautiful endorsement of Ted Lieu, the state Senator who beat her and the two of them are co-hosting an event in Los Angeles for Alan Grayson in a couple of weeks. Much like values-driven progressives Marcy Winograd and Norman Solomon their candidacies were incidental to their work and their vision. Marcy and Norman are working away, not in congress nor in electoral politics, but still organizing around the same issues and principles that drove them to run for office. This week, Marianne took on the thorny blistering hot racial issues around Ferguson that most Democrats are too scared to talk about.

What is happening today in Ferguson, Missouri, had it roots hundreds of years ago, and nothing less than pulling out those roots will heal the situation today. America needs to reconcile with our racial history-- seeking genuine atonement and making meaningful amends. Until such time, tortured race relations will continue to plague us with more and more tragic results.

It's interesting that we even use the phrase "race relations," given how little we register that this is even about a relationship. The relationship between blacks and whites as groups in America is psychologically and emotionally dysfunctional, to say the least, and until this is dealt with on the level of the cause and not just effects, we will continue to play out over and over again the cycle of violence at its core.

It's difficult to deal emotionally with the history of slavery in America, which is why many whites have chosen not to. Yet it's imperative that we do, because until we see clearly the line of development leading from slavery to the Civil War to the Ku Klux Klan to the civil rights movement to "benign neglect" to the "prison-industrial complex," America will continue to misunderstand the real problem. This is not just about how many bullets were shot into Michael Brown. The shots that matter most here are way, way too many to count.

…Slavery ended but the racism that gave rise to it did not, only burrowing more deeply into the fabric of Southern society after the Civil War… Many in the South, not surprisingly, then turned their rage at having lost the war against the people whom they saw as its cause. The last thing certain Southerners were ready to do was concede true equality of social status to blacks. And thus began an era of white supremacy in the American South, which was almost as ugly as slavery itself.

If slavery marked Phase 1 of America's black-white relationship, then the reign of white supremacy after the Civil War marked Phase 2…. "Benign neglect" [Phase 3] is a phrase first articulated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he was Urban Affairs Advisor to President Richard Nixon, arguing that the drama of the Civil Rights movement should be followed by a period of more or less quiet in the relationship between blacks and whites. It was not necessarily a proactively racist sentiment on Moynihan's part, or even on Nixon's. But it was an abandonment of a healing process nevertheless, and in that sense at least a passive betrayal of the relationship. To say to a formerly enslaved population, "Be glad! You're not slaves anymore, and you're not going to be routinely lynched or kept from voting!"-- while good, indeed very good -- was still not restitution. And nothing short of restitution will constitute a real amends and redeem the soul of America. It wasn't enough that slaves in America were freed. The question remains: What were they freed to?

Civil rights legislation, with its signature Voting Rights Act, was extremely important in integrating African-Americans into the voting pool. But of itself it did little to integrate African-Americans into America's economy. And people who are left out economically are left out, period. The era of race relations post-civil rights movement has paralleled the advancement of American society in general, in which a relatively small part of our population-- blacks, as well as whites-- has done very well, while the majority has hardly moved forward at all. "Blacks go to Harvard; blacks get rich; see, a black man became president!" is now the mantra used to justify a continuation of a policy of benign neglect. The fact that geniuses can make it in America doesn't of itself mean that social justice exists in America. Not everyone is a genius, but everyone should matter.

Yes, it is true-- and very much to be celebrated-- that blacks have opportunities in America today unheard of 50 years ago, but that of itself does not constitute full economic justice. The poor in America are all benignly neglected now. As long as 1 percent of our people control 40 percent of our wealth and 60 percent of our people live on 2.3 percent of our wealth, economic justice for the majority of Americans of any color isn't even on the short list of our national priorities.

One in five American children live in poverty today, making us the second highest child poverty rate in the advanced world. Among black children, however, the poverty rate hovers at 40 percent. A black male has a one in three lifetime probability of incarceration in the United States, lending credence to Michelle Alexander's description of America's "cradle to prison pipeline." These problems are not discreet and newly formed; they are the continuation, the legacies, of a situation that began in the 1600s and still plagues us today. It's not as though the situation finally erupted into violence on the streets of Ferguson. The situation erupts into violence in the hearts of black mothers and fathers all over America every day, as they teach their children-- particularly their sons-- how to behave in order to avoid the unequal application of criminal justice in America. For America has fallen into a terrible pattern in the area of race, as in so many others: don't heal the disease, just suppress or seek to eradicate the systems. The message communicated by most governmental action is this: "Don't keep blacks down, necessarily-- just don't lift them up. The geniuses among them will make their way. If and when they complain or act out, we have police and prisons to show 'em who's boss."

Yet heal the disease we must. And the most significant healing of any societal woe emerges from justice done. Blacks in America have been trained to ask for so little, as though God knows, we've done enough. We've done enough, white America..? What, in the name of God, have we done? We spend millions on anti-poverty programs and billions on prisons. In fact, we haven't even apologized. It's much easier for someone to forgive you when you've had the courtesy to apologize, and much easier for them to get over it if you've had the decency to fix the problem.

We need to apologize, and we need to make genuine amends. America needs to pay long overdue war reparations, and until we do, we will not move forward in any meaningful way. America needs more than forgiveness; we need genuine repentance, and restitution for our national sins.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton suggested we have a "national conversation about race," suggesting perhaps that if we talk about it enough then maybe the problem will go away. But it's difficult to have an authentic conversation when half of the people involved in the dialogue have over two hundred years of understandable rage to express. There are situations in life-- and race in America is one of them-- where talk without action does not heal a wound, but only exacerbates it. Whites and blacks have a relationship in America, but it is an unequal one. One side owes something to the other, and until the debt is paid, the relationship will remain unhealed. The very mention of actually paying something back to people we enslaved for two hundred fifty years is still not on the table, not really. And until it is, then America will not be free.

America spends over $600 billion a year on defense. Over $1 trillion has been spent on the Iraq War, seen now to have been the biggest foreign policy blunder in America's history. Yet no one ever asked if we "could afford it." So it should not be considered unreasonable to suggest that America put $500 billion toward a Reparations Plan For African Americans. Not piecemeal things, like Affirmative Action. But the real deal-- in a big way-- with the emotional, economic and social magnitude it deserves. Incremental changes often add up to no fundamental change at all.

Reparations are not a radical idea; they're considered a basic tenet of social and political policy throughout the world. Why should America not pay reparations to the descendants of slaves who were brought to America against their will, used as slaves to build the Southern economy into a huge economic force, and then freed into a culture of further violence perpetrated against them? It's not as though all that's over now; if anything, the problem has grown within the cells and psyches of every generation since. America will continue to waste money on relatively limited fixes, until we buck up and pay this debt in a real way once and for all. Millions are indeed wasted if the billions we owe here are not paid. A Reparations Plan would provide a massive investment in educational and economic opportunities for African Americans-- rendered as payment for a long overdue debt. Until that debt is paid, the cycle of violence that began in the 1600s and continues to this day will continue to haunt our psyche and disrupt our social good. It is time for America to atone for our past in both word and deed, and to heal our weary soul.