{"id":69034,"date":"2016-03-07T10:15:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T15:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/breaking911.com\/?p=69034"},"modified":"2016-03-07T10:15:49","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T15:15:49","slug":"bernie-sanders-says-white-people-dont-know-what-its-like-to-be-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/breaking911.com\/bernie-sanders-says-white-people-dont-know-what-its-like-to-be-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernie Sanders Says White People Don’t Know What It’s Like To Be Poor"},"content":{"rendered":"
It was a question inspired by Avenue Q, the Broadway musical.<\/p>\n
More than an hour into Sunday night’s debate in Flint, Mich., CNN’s Don Lemon, apparent in-house CNN expert on race and politics, asked the two candidates onstage a question. It was a question that, due to its contents, by definition cannot be answered honestly.<\/p>\n
LEMON: “In a speech about policing, the FBI director borrowed a phrase from Avenue Q saying, ‘everybody is a little racist.’ So on a personal front, what racial blind spots do you have?”<\/p>\n
A true personal blind spot is typically not known to the holder, thus making it a blind spot. And the odds that anyone on any debate stage ever will manage, in just a few seconds, to dive deep into their psyche and experiences to recognize and then tactfully admit to their own racism? Well that’s just about never going to happen. Still, that’s what Lemon asked.<\/p>\n
Again, in all truth, it was not a good question. But it was a wise attempt to get at something scarcely, if ever, mentioned during one of the many Republican debates. And it seemed to have been aimed at provoking candidate and viewer thought about something far more substantive than the often-referenced, exceedingly nebulous term “race relations.”<\/p>\n
How Americans feel about one another matters little in comparison to how honest Americans are about the persistence of laws and practices that pool and then transmit opportunity and disadvantage along racial and ethnic lines across generations. The ways in which Americans personally benefit or struggle and suffer because of who they are is, indeed, a far bigger deal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n To put that in more concrete terms, whether white and black Americans sometimes engage in cross-racial conversations over the water cooler pales in importance to whether black and Latino home-buyers with incomes and credit scores similar to white home-buyers can reliably access the same mortgage interest rates. Paying a higher interest rate for a home, a car, or on a business loan doesn’t just take more money out of one’s pocket in the short-term. It curtails one’s ability to save, to borrow, to even decide where one lives and works. It certainly means that one is less likely to have the substantial savings needed to prevent one’s college-age children leaving school strapped with massive amounts of debt.<\/p>\n Contemplate the patterns that you see in almost any measure of social or economic welfare in the United States. White Americans up and down the income ladder, have access to better housing, schools, health care and more. And the results are clear: Structural inequality matters far more than our feelings because it extends to almost every area of all American’s lives.<\/p>\n However, given the rather large, shall we say, blind spot, in Lemon’s question, it’s not at all surprising that what those watching got from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. They offered just a little insight into each candidate’s mind and not much about each candidate’s policy ideas to address racial inequality.<\/p>\n Clinton offered up a less-than-specific example of her own “blind spot.” But she did say that she takes seriously the struggles that non-white Americans continue to face, as well as the burdens and worry this injects into their lives. She alluded to the pain and fear suffered by the parents of Trayvon Martin and too many others like them and said that she’s tried to encourage other white Americans to also give that some thought. And she said this ranks among the reasons that she realizes that racism continues to “stalk” the country and systemic barriers to equality will have to be torn down.<\/p>\n Depending on how individual voters feel about Clinton, that answer merits either a B or a C(plus) on a letter grading scale. She said something, and what she said is true. It came across as reasonably sincere and is supported by the content of her campaign speeches. But she also revealed either her actual racial blind spot or something that she knows many white Americans do not like to acknowledge. That something is this white privilege.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n