Washington Post: "How Cornel West Hurts Bernie Sanders" [View all]
By Jonathan Capehart
My problem with Sen. Bernie Sanders and his outreach to African Americans can be summed up in two words: Cornel West.
Much has been written about the Vermont independent’s appeal to black voters and whether he can pry them away from Hillary Clinton. And all I can say is good luck with that. I and plenty of other African Americans won’t soon forget the deranged ravings of the revered Ivy League professor against President Obama.
During a November 2012 interview with Democracy Now, West branded Obama “a Republican, a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.” Then there was that May 2011 interview with Truthdig where West called the nation’s first African American president “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” In that same sitdown, West talked about his 2010 run-in with the president. “I wanted to slap him on the side of his head,” West said, who took his significant policy disagreements with the president down an ugly path zealously cut by birthers.
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West said. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white … When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.”
“Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive,” West said. “He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/01/22/how-cornel-west-hurts-bernie-sanders/?postshare=4561453490135953&tid=ss_fb
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