Ta-Nehisi Coates: Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?

[Prism]

172. Bernie Sanders isn't a radical

That's a media and political meme. Many of the policies he supports are broadly supported by the American people in poll after poll.

Here's just one example among many. A story/poll from today showing that over 50% of Americans support single payer - including a quarter of Republicans.

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/229959-majority-still-support-single-payer-option-poll-finds

And yet, even on DU, Sanders is painted as some kind of crazy radical for supporting it. How is arguing for what a majority of Americans want a radical proposition?

But I agree with you that we shouldn't stop pushing for redress. I would love to see something like a New Deal For African Americans made into a plank of the Democratic platform with the expectation that all Democratic candidates support it. I think the idea of cash reparations would be a tough sell, but repackaging it as economic and institutional revitalization through investment in communities of color and reformation of discriminatory systems would be possible over time. It's just one of those things, it's right because it's right.

And, like gay marriage, this is something the AA community and their allies are going to have to really go after on a grass roots level until the national politicians are pressured into backing it. This will take years, if not decades. And the AA community, I think, has a tougher road to hoe here than the LGBT community did. America is still a segregated place. It's almost impossible to segregate straight America from LGBT America. We pop up everywhere, in every community, in families of every religion and ideology. That is not so with racial dynamics. Too many white people actually can live in areas where they never really know or befriend or include people of color in their families. There's a harder wall to break down there. The Otherization is strong both demographically and geographically. There is also the matter that gay marriage wasn't seriously seen as "taking" something away from anyone. The whole argument for it was, "Who is hurt by this?" With reparations, there's a question of billions if not trillions of dollars. People will read that as their money being taken from them. That's a political hurdle.

But, you're right. It is like gay marriage, but how many major presidential candidates came out for it in 1992 when it had similar poll numbers as reparations currently have? It wasn't until 2012 that we finally had a national candidate go for it. And even then, the support of the electorate was already in the majority.

We're simply not anywhere close to that with reparations. I don't understand why it's even an expectation with Sanders. I feel like Coates and others are addressing a fictional portrait of Sanders the Radical they themselves and the media have painted about the man.

I would love for him to lead on this issue, but I don't expect it. Not in this climate, not with those poll numbers. It's up to us to make it safe for the politicians to go there, just as we had to do with gay marriage.