Share Email 2K Shares

At first, Rutland Area NAACP president Tabitha Pohl-Moore was excited about the prospect of last week’s Sanders Institute Gathering, which its publicity said would bring 250 “leading progressive minds” to Burlington “to envision — and to actualize — a better future for our country and the world.”

“A progressive agenda that promised to raise an intersectional approach to ending injustice and oppression … in our backyard?” Pohl-Moore recalls thinking. “We would finally be heard and seen here in Vermont.”

Get Final Reading delivered to your inbox. Sign up free.

Then the Wallingford counselor, wife and mother read the guest list for the Burlington-based nonprofit think tank’s $350-suggested-donation gathering: U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife, institute co-founder Jane O’Meara Sanders, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis …

“As I neared the end of the star-laden roster,” she says, “I wondered how many justice leaders from Vermont had been invited.”

A schedule of speakers revealed that, amid such celebrities as Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon, only a half-dozen Green Mountain State residents would take the stage: Sanders and his wife, ice cream icon Ben Cohen, Burlington Associates partner John Davis, environmental writer Bill McKibben and Champlain Housing Trust CEO Brenda Torpy.

Not seeing any local social-justice volunteers like herself represented, Pohl-Moore contacted friend and peer Steffen Gillom, president of the Windham County NAACP.

“I thought progressive politics was about lifting the voices of common people,” Gillom says. “For a group that prides itself on grassroots organization, it seemed that this progressive event had forgotten its roots — the people of Vermont.”

And so Pohl-Moore and Gillom composed a letter and shared it with more than a dozen other Vermont diversity leaders who added their signatures and have posted the statement on Facebook.

VTDigger is underwritten by:

“I write this not to complain about the fact that none of us were invited; I write this to point out the hypocrisy of the situation,” says the letter directed to the senator and institute staff. “How do you say that you are a person of the people, how can you be ‘awoken,’ in the words of Victor Lee Lewis, when you come home to Vermont to talk about justice and institutional oppression and don’t invite the very people you represent?”

“We hope that we are missing something,” the letter continues, “but if we are not, this is either a major oversight or just one more example of how institutional oppression looks, even among those who are progressive.”

Pohl-Moore and Gillom’s letter has been endorsed by, in alphabetical order, ACLU community organizer Nico Amador; Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington leaders Katrina Battle and Jabari Jones; Migrant Justice representative Marita Canedo; Vermonters for Justice in Palestine member Wafic Faour; Vermont Coalition for Ethnic and Social Equity in Schools member Amanda Garces; Justice For All executive director Mark Hughes; Brattleboro’s The Root Social Justice Center co-founder Shela Linton; Lakota community Kunsi Keya Tamakoce founder Beverly Little Thunder; I Am Vermont Too co-coordinator Sha’an Mouliert; the Vermont State Police’s Fair and Impartial Policing Committee co-chair Etan Nasreddin-Longo; and Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity executive director Curtiss Reed Jr. and special projects assistant Gemma Seymour.

Former state Rep. Kiah Morris, D-Bennington, who recently resigned as one of just five lawmakers of color in the 180-member Legislature after facing racial harassment, not only added her name but also shared her own concerns on Twitter.

‏“How many POC (person of color) leaders in Vermont were invited to the #sandersinstitutegathering18?” Morris tweeted. “I am just curious what sort of future plans might be discussed without us in the room.”

“I have no problem w/ @SenSanders,” she continued. “He has been a friend & supporter for years now. I DO have a problem with systems of exclusion, segregation, power and control used by many predominantly white-led institutions that deny marginalized peoples an equal seat at the table.”

In response, the Sanders Institute, founded by Jane Sanders and her son, David Driscoll, who serves as its executive director, told VTDigger: “There seems to be some confusion about what this event was, and was not, about. The Sanders Institute Gathering was not a Vermont meeting sponsored by Senator Sanders. It was a gathering of progressive leaders from across the country and around the world hosted by the Sanders Institute. We understand the overall concerns the writers of the letter addressed and will continue to work for the same goals of racial, social, economic and environmental justice.”

Bernie Sanders’ Senate office, for its part, emailed Vermont Public Radio: “The Sanders Institute is a totally independent 501(c)3 organization. The senator is proud that the Sanders Institute was able to bring progressives from all over the country and from throughout the world to our state of Vermont to discuss some of the biggest issues we face. Needless to say, in Vermont, like other states across the country, there are some very serious social and racial justice challenges, and the senator looks forward to continuing his work with Vermonters on these issues.”

Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, who saw Morris’ tweet while attending the gathering, is one of the few participants so far to comment.

“Always good (to) be critiqued and learn,” Zuckerman wrote on Facebook. “I brought up to the organizers these concerns, and they are aware and planning to incorporate these concerns for next time. I agree, we need to ‘build the bench.’ We also need to build the knowledge of those who are in all levels.”

Outside protesters seeking to promote local issues said they had spoken with Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign manager Jeff Weaver and event speaker Dr. Cornel West, both who reportedly replied they’d convey what was communicated to them to the Vermont senator.

The Sanders Institute Gathering capped a week in which Bernie Sanders released a new book, “Where We Go from Here,” that many pundits view as a precursor to a 2020 White House bid.

Sanders is no stranger to questions about his handling of diversity issues. In 2015, he no sooner had stepped onto the stage of the Netroots Nation convention — the country’s largest annual gathering of progressive activists — when young Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted him with cries for racial equality.

“Black lives, of course, matter, and I’ve spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and for dignity,” he replied. “But if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK. I don’t want to outscream people.”

VTDigger is underwritten by:

Sanders’ response soon echoed nationally. The candidate “flashed with annoyance,” Time magazine reported, and “became frustrated,” the New Republic added.

“Sanders is understandably irritated,” Salon writer Joan Walsh opined, “that 50 years of work on civil rights — going back to attending the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fighting segregation with CORE in Chicago, endorsing Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential run in 1988 — don’t seem to count, especially with people who were born a generation after those events.”

Sanders didn’t help himself last month when, commenting on Democratic midterm election near-misses in the South, he told The Daily Beast: “I think you know there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American.”

After, Sanders’ spokesman said the quote was taken out of context.

Vermont diversity leaders say their letter wasn’t written to enrage but instead to educate.

“The purpose of publicizing these feelings is not to throw shade at the national progressive movement that Senator Bernie Sanders is trying to foster,” they said in their statement, “but to point out that Vermonters in marginalized positions, be they poor, disabled, LGBTQ, people of color, indigenous, immigrant or non-mainstream in other facets of identity, help to create this state and make it what it is, yet still, we find ourselves excluded from the movement.”

“How could Senator Sanders host what is supposed to be an intersectional, progressive event without inviting the very people whom he serves? If this is really about economic justice, where are the poor folks? If it is really about racial justice, why are there no local racial justice leaders? Chief Don Stevens of the Abenaki? Disability rights? Where is Justicia Migrante? I don’t see them on the list.”

“To call out when we have been excluded invariably elicits an accusation of sabotage, selfishness, or saltiness. To ignore it is to relegate ourselves to invisibility, thus fortifying the very systemic inequity the progressive movement works to deconstruct.”

Pohl-Moore, now fielding calls from the press and fellow activists, hopes the Sanders Institute will learn and adapt.

“All we’ve gotten is a litany of excuses, yet ‘I’m sorry, let’s make this right’ doesn’t take that much,” she says. “If we here in progressive Vermont are missing the boat, imagine what’s happening in the rest of the nation. If Bernie Sanders and his people are making these kinds of mistakes, imagine the mistakes that are being made elsewhere.”

Share Email 2K Shares