BRATTLEBORO — While the response to my open letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders last week has been overwhelmingly positive, some misinterpretations merit clarification and some personal attacks compel response.
Some of my detractors felt Bernie's post-Netroots plea was rhetorical in nature and therefore absent the need for a direct response. Others felt that given that race is a sensitive topic, I should have responded in private. And a third group feels I am an operative of the twin devils incarnate, Hillary Clinton and the Republican Party, sent to destroy Bernie.
Bernie is leading a revolution, but not a mindless revolution. He made a conscious decision to ask for assistance in the public sphere. He could have picked up the phone and called me or any other leader of color for ideas. We would have had a private meeting to work through the challenges he faces, and no one would have known.
We all know Bernie to be a very adept politician, and I believe that he made that passionate public plea not only for himself but also for his supporters. The subtext of his plea is “how must white people at the individual level 'be' different to achieve racial justice?”
My recommendations to him - and, by extension, all Vermonters - focus on the “being.”
In a thread on vtdigger.org, Ron Pulcer wrote, “[Bernie] knows how 'divide and conquer' works [against us], and I think he is trying to avoid 'dividing' the electorate of this country.”
The false premise of the approach to avoid “divide and conquer” is that we are united. Bernie has now placed a high value on creating/being in a space where divergent points of view and lived experience are understood, valued, and forged into a powerful voice - an explicit invitation to discuss racial injustice.
Opposition research in communities of color across the nation will begin examining Sanders' relationship to Vermont's communities of color and can extrapolate that the relationship is at best one of benign neglect, an afterthought. They will justifiably question his commitment to racial justice in the national arena based on the state of his relationship with Vermont leaders of color.
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Bernie is on a steep learning curve; however, he is a fast study, and I have full confidence he will pull it off. The looming question is whether a critical mass of his white supporters will follow his lead on racial justice, study hard and fast, and build an inclusive movement across racial lines.
Unfortunately, some of Bernie's supporters in Vermont want to hear nothing of racial injustice, let alone recognize and nurture Bernie's growth potential to span the racial divide and work for racial justice in contemporary Vermont and beyond our borders. These supporters have sought to suppress these ideas.
The Facebook page “Bernie Sanders 2016 – Ideas Welcome!,” which is heavily populated with Vermonters, banned me from the group when I posted my letter to Bernie. This site is not an official campaign site but one of the many hundreds launched and managed by Bernie supporters and over which the campaign has no control.
Undeterred, I started a “The Education of Bernie” discussion group on Facebook only to shut it down within 24 hours because of the incendiary and personal attacks by Betty Frye, a longtime Democratic Party activist in the area and one of three of the Windham County Democratic Committee's delegates to the Vermont Democratic Party State Committee.
Among her missives: “goddamn f-ing egoistical article,” “your f-ing ego,” “who the hell do you think you are,” and “f- off you are so out of touch what the hell do you know.”
Many good people tried to reason with her, to no avail. I closed the group by asking Frye to write an apology for her incivility to my 15-year-old son, who was also in the discussion group.
Bernie, through his own personal example, must invite supporters like Betty Frye, for the sake of Vermont and the nation, to join him in “creating/being” a space where divergent points of view and lived experience are understood, valued, and forged into a powerful voice.