Yes Bernie, the System is Rigged. Whining about it won't win you Black votes. Here's why.

[highprincipleswork]

39. In politics, doesn't it feel and work best to go with the candidate that stands up for the issues

that mean the most to you? And I'm not saying you aren't doing that.

I tend to pick my friends and allies by picking people I think will stick with me when the going gets tough, no matter what assholes they may be before, during, and after. I'd prefer they be cool, but we all sometimes are not cool or don't understand.

I really wish Bernie's personal outreach to the PoC community had been better and with better surrogates early on. I would at least have played some different music sometimes when coming out to speak, but then I'm a fool for "Black music" - it's probably the best, most American music we've got.

I do think, however, that it can get little harsh and counter-productive to get on to White people for having the experience of being White. We understand through our experience, and we don't fully understand until we have had the experience. I was profiled recently, because I bought my car from my Hispanic mechanic and it's Black Lexus at night rolling through Hollywood with the lights turned off. They made assumptions, and they approached the car like I was public enemy number 1, even though there was no other violation I was guilty of. We White Liberals certainly have been known to feel the pain of PoC in some form, even just from simple humanity. And we have marched and fought and suffered, some of us, to some degree. Not to make it equivalent in any way.

But I work with people who have gone through trauma, and it might be surprising to find that trauma affects us all, to some degree. It could even be growing up rich and abandoned and uncared for by your corporate parents. That can be an even more lasting trauma than the lives of folks growing up poor but maybe well-loved and with many people close to them.

Therefore, after your long and thoughtful piece I'm still kind of mystified what "the number of reasons are" that convince anyone to vote for someone who seems less likely to back up Progressive values in a pinch. I mean, who wants to go back to the 90's!

In the end, I hope the Democratic Party comes together around the candidate who can truly carry Progressive values of all kinds for all people forward into the future. That, to me, is what we probably are looking for and moreover that is what I think has the best chance to win against Donald Trump in November.

For me, that is Bernie Sanders, but I am remaining open to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party showing that they can remember the really, really successful policies of FDR at least as much as the much less successful and often downright hurtful of the first Clinton years.