Biden, according to one exit poll, took 60 percent of the black
vote in Texas. The same story is writ large across the South.
It is a story with a moral, and the Sanders people better
quickly get the punchline here. My suggestion to whoever is advising Sanders:
read the section in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man about organizing for the
Brotherhood in Harlem. The Brotherhood has a “scientific plan” (it is Ellison’s
proxy for the Communist Party in the 30s). And the Invisible Man, with his
experience of racism, and his own skin color, is an activist, with a sense of
what the “scientific plan” means. But he comes against the limits not of the plan,
but of the planners.
The planners, like the Sanders people, seem to have decided
to repress difference – the real history of African Americans in this country –
for their “own good”. It isn’t that Sanders doesn’t denounce racism, but he is
averse to the whole symbolic universe around that struggle, partly because he seems
to think that it is hypocritical – a buncha neoliberals celebrating the civil
rights era while collaborating with the immiseration of the black working class.
But just because a buncha neoliberals celebrate the civil rights era – for instance,
by attending the ceremony in Selma to commemorate the 1965 march – doesn’t mean
the civil rights era shouldn’t be commemorated. And it certainly doesn’t mean
that the black politicians that have inherited, and in many ways squandered,
the symbolic succession of that era should be treated with contempt, or kept at
arm’s length. That can only lead to disaster.
Universal healthcare will make our lives better, but it is
our lives, with all the symbolism and poetry of them, that are the dominant
party here. The “scientific plan” should serve the people, not the other way
around. Sanders campaign will fatally err if it doesn’t make a very forceful
correction here. Do not come on like the social worker who knows better, cause
that is only gonna lead to defeat.
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