Three things HRC supporters could do here to make things less toxic here

[Ken Burch]

122. I'm sure it was a temporary omission(agreed that it should have been there).

I have no idea why it wasn't there. If I'd been in the headquarters in Burlington(or had a way of contacting them-they didn't even have an email address at that point) I'd have pushed them directly to include it. I did do that in the Bernie group on DU. Repeatedly. It was an accident that it wasn't in the platform(Bernie's campaign was never going to be based on appeasing racists and ignoring institutional racism and police murders of PoC). Most likely, they were putting together the website in a hurry and they just spaced it.

The point of the references to Bernie's past that so annoyed you was that he'd already proved his commitment on anti-racism issues in that past, for fifty years of that past. If you were an organizer for SNCC(a position in which, like all other organizers, he was at physical risk, given that Chicago was and is just as insanely racist as Mississippi), you have walked the walk and you always will walk the walk. I've personally never heard of any former SNCC people who ever ended up becoming dismissive of the need to fight racism. If you know of such people, I'd really like to hear examples, because that would be a horrible thing.

And you didn't exactly let up on the guy when he ADDED the anti-racism plank and made attacks on institutional racism a daily part of his stump speech(he was already FOR social justice...people on the left always are, for God's sakes). You STILL personally treated him like he couldn't be trusted, and you helped abet the meme that Bernie was intentionally running a campaign based on ignoring racism. And you endlessly perpetuated the canard that Bernie believed that economic justice would automatically end racism, when he had never said anything, at any point, that came remotely close to that absurd idea.
What he did and DOES believe is that you have to fight for social justice AND economic justice, because economic injustice essentially makes social justice impossible(as the Clinton adminstration proved).

Bernie's feelings aren't the main issue here(and I'm pretty sure he'd agree with that), but I think it looked to a lot of his supporters, especially, that there was this deliberate campaign to discredit him and drive him out of the presidential race over this(it sometimes seemed as though BLM thought the only way to stop police killings of blacks was to get Bernie to withdraw from the race, for God's sakes), and the intemperance of their responses was driven, I think, by the perception that the first politician those idealistic young people had ever trusted was being demonized for a failing he didn't actually have. I'd say it's comparable to how a lot of Obama supporters(including myself) felt about the "birther" slur.

Would you at least agree that Bernie should no longer be under suspicion on this issue? That, while he needs to keep talking about it(obviously, as a DLC member, HRC never really cared about opposing racism, since the main point of forming the DLC in the first place was to get the Democratic Party to ditch blacks and black issues), he has proven himself on this? That he has put the issue to rest in terms of his own trustworthiness? That would do a lot, I think, to stop the harsher comments from Bernie supporters.