The response of #BLM by white liberals indicates the overall problem...

[MADem]

105. You might like this....

Roderick Morrow: .... The thing about the Bernie Sanders fans is while they're very obtuse and they don't listen, they are more polite than the people who just call you the n-word or a racial slur or something. It's more like that passive-aggressive "We're on the same side, man!" where clearly they don't want you to talk about anything that their candidate can do better, but they do want you to just vote for him.
There's a lot of "You're not saying this stuff to other candidates," but we are. He just kind of had a bad 48 hours or so. I'm not expecting him to drop out of the race; I think he'll be fine. Hopefully, from the tweets I've seen, I think his campaign's listening, and hopefully they're going to regroup and hopefully reform and be more vocal around some of these issues....


Dara Lind:So the Sanders supporters who aren't with the campaign, did you see any receptiveness from them, or was it just a lot of unironic "#BernieSoBlack he marched with MLK," which missed the point completely?
Roderick Morrow:Oh, yeah, there's a ton of that. Honestly, the joke is not even on Bernie Sanders. That's what's so funny — the joke is on the defense of him, which is, if you extrapolate to the furthest extent, he can do no wrong on race. Like, we should not even expect anything of him, he put in his time already, we need to just shut up.

I'm sure it does happen, but I can't imagine people doing this to other constituencies, because you do rely on those votes. At Netroots Nation, you're going to be addressing a very diverse but very black-centric audience, and to not really be prepared to talk about race there is a little bit of a slap in the face. So for us — and when I say "us," I just mean black people, I'm not any level of an activist or anything — for us to just say, Hey, you kind of did a bad job, hope you do better in the future, and then get bombarded with "He marched in 1968!" it's like, All right, man, I don't know what to tell you.
And it's kind of scary, too, because on a deeper level, when he talked about Ferguson, he was like, "Well, the real problem is that there's not enough jobs." And while I agree — jobs are definitely a problem, and opportunities are a problem, and you definitely want people to be working — Mike Brown was going to college. He was on his way to school in a couple of days. I don't think that was necessarily the problem in that situation. I hope it's not just him saying, "If these Negroes were working there wouldn't be any problems," because ooh, that's not too far from some really bold negative statements that we've heard about the black race in the past. I don't think that's what's underlying it, I just think he needs to be more vocal and speak with some authority about it because he seems to run from talking about it. I don't think it's that hard to talk about it. Elizabeth Warren knocked the socks off the room, because she was talking about the economy, but she just happened to mention, "Hey, black lives matter, we do need people working, we do need to get people out of jails." She was very vocal about it, but I didn't feel like she was just coming there to kiss butt. I felt like she was just being sincere.

Dara Lind:After today, are you more or less hopeful about the white progressives who have been using Sanders's civil rights record?
Roderick Morrow:I'm more hopeful for the campaign than I am for his defenders. The campaign itself tweeted out a couple things. Obviously they're seeing the trends on social media and they're obviously seeing they need to do better.

.....
As far as fans ... I don't know, man. You're talking about hundreds of years of history of people who can kind of be very ... they can ignore a lot of voices if they don't sign up exactly with what they're saying. There will always be a struggle, even in progressive spaces, to have people who don't dismiss you for having a different goal than they do. You see the same thing with, like, immigration. A lot of black people who love President Obama don't care about immigration. Because it's like, "Not our problem!" The challenge is always how can you support each other without turning on each other? I don't know that the Sanders camp fans will learn that lesson. But it ain't going to stop people from wanting #BlackLivesMatter to be talked about, so they might as well let it go.

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/9005855/black-twitter-bernie-sanders