Michael Harriot, The Root, March 5, 2020

Dear Sir or White Man,

I’m writing this letter, lurking outside the threshold to equality, peering through the same peephole through which we watched you enjoy 401 years of unfettered, glorious freedom while black people presented themselves as a living sacrifice, offering their necks to nooses, their skulls to batons and their children’s bodies to firebombs.

A few days ago, I was informed that some of you may have a problem with black voters who actually went to voting booths and exercised their right to vote for whomever the fuck they wanted. Apparently, anyone who didn’t vote the way outraged, left-leaning white liberals wanted must have been an uninformed heathen, a moderate or, even worse, a “centrist.”

And now your fragile brittle hearts are broken into a thousand little pieces because black people have rejected the Buddha of Birkenstock-wearers during his quest for the presidency. And, by not choosing Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden supporters are somehow ruining America.

{snip}

Also, why don’t they just say “black people”? That’s who rejected Sanders. According to exit polls, Biden bested Sanders among black voters in every state on Super Tuesday, winning 58 percent of black voters, according to the Washington Post.

Undeterred by actual data, Sanders surrogates’ new tactic seems to be an attempt to paint blacks as low-information voters who somehow don’t know Biden’s record. Apparently, the people who vote for Sanders are genius-level political strategists but the ones who cast a ballot against him just aren’t smart enough to wade through the publicly available information.

Or maybe it’s because black people really like Barack Obama and don’t know enough to distinguish Biden’s record from pictures of him standing next to Obama, as Sanders himself insinuated on Rachel Maddow’s show Wednesday.

I accept responsibility. Black people killed Bernie Sanders. The reason why does not matter.

I know, from your position atop the privilege pyramid, the lowly black voters who voted for Biden must have done so because of pragmatism or fear of revolution or electability’s sake. Everyone knows how black voters incessantly “clamor for the past.” Or maybe black people are just not as smart and brave enough for this fearless “movement.”

And it’s not just white Sanders supporters who are doing this. There are a lot of super-progressive black youth who dismissively cast anyone who hasn’t seen the light of Socialist Democratic Jesus as an uninformed, backwater hillbilly who needs education.

{snip}

Biden might be a shit choice but black Southerners are aware that criminalizing black people may be the oldest American tradition and might make no distinction between the man who wrote the bill and the guy who signed the bill. Maybe black people voted for Biden because he worked in the administration that gave them healthcare. Perhaps those people trust him because he was part of the largest tax increase on the wealthy since the 1950s. They also know how white people react when the government starts helping people. They remember when a “living wage” was called “welfare” and “criminal justice reform” was called “soft on crime”

Maybe they’re voting on Biden’s ability alone. You act as if black people aren’t aware that, in 30 years, your boy hasn’t written a single piece of successful legislation. In three decades, what has Sanders ever achieved? What has he ever done that improved the lives of black people?

Or white people?

{snip}

Only a white man can keep a job for three decades with absolutely no results and then expect a promotion. Only a white man would blame black people’s stupidity when his supposedly “diverse coalition of new voters” didn’t bother to show up to vote.

{snip}

Only white liberals would call something a “revolution” that could be defeated by supposedly dumb, old black “centrists.” What the hell is a black “centrist” anyway? Is “moderate” the nickname you give to people who don’t share your values or do what you say? Is “centrist” the new “nigger”? Every black person is a centrist because we are always at the center of America’s crosshairs.

{snip}

{snip} For some black voters, the rabid toxicity of inflexible white liberals is the one thing that repels them from joining the great aluminum-free deodorant mass movement.

{snip}