Issac Bailey is a columnist at the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He’s the author of Proud. Black. Southern. (But I Still Don’t Eat Watermelon in front of White People). He was a 2014 Neiman Fellow.

A widely tweeted video of Susan Sarandon said it all.

Video journalist Ian McKenna captured the top Bernie Sanders surrogate achingly sitting through the opening days of the Democratic National Convention and posted it with a message: “Susan Sarandon is having literally the worst time at the #DemConvention.”


“Accurate,” the star responded.

It matched the mood of several of Sanders’ most die-hard fans, people who spent a good portion of their energy at the Democratic convention protesting, sometimes loudly, to shout down a candidate they saw as a creature of the establishment they were there to fight: Some made their protests silently, with tape over their mouths; others chanted them; some even booed while civil rights icon Elijah Cummings was speaking.

As the campaign lurches forward, some Sanders supporters are grudgingly getting behind Hillary Clinton, but others are clinging to the movement, hoping that there’s a way—through the Green Party, which officially nominates Jill Stein this weekend at its convention in Houston, or just refusing to vote at all—to keep fighting for their revolution.

But their willingness to shout down one of the most iconic figures in modern civil rights raises a question: Just what revolution are they talking about? And for whom?

A look at the Sanders rooting section, or a Green Party rally, is a striking picture: They are every bit as white as the typical Trump rally. Susan Sarandon, writer and activist Naomi Klein, novelist Jonathan Lethem. Black people? Aside from a few high-profile Sanders supporters—author Ta-Nehisi Coates and former NAACP president Ben Jealous, to name two—they overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton.

Black people’s absence raises an important—and uncomfortable question for the uber-progressives who see themselves at the heart of Sanders’ movement, which continues to march on. If you look at who’s really on the bottom of the American economic hierarchy, you realize that any genuine revolution is going to have to be a campaign to lift up people of color. This isn’t just a critique of the Sanders movement for not being diverse enough (though that’s a problem, too). The absence of black and brown people is a genuine impediment to their movement. It’s black Americans, not would-be white revolutionaries, who’ve led a successful movement to claim power and rights in this country. And it’s black people who are going to be the beneficiaries. If they're missing—which they are—it suggests both that the movement is getting something wrong, and isn’t long for the political world.

Sanders had some high-profile minority surrogates, but in exit polling data from 27 states, black voters ultimately rejected him by a margin of 7 to 1, and Clinton won the Latino vote by double digits. Jill Stein is now making an overt play for Sanders’ voters, but her supporters are overwhelmingly white, too: She has the support of only 3 percent of non-white people, according to a late July CNN poll, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 61 percent. Even if Stein can siphon off enough Sanders supporters to give Clinton headaches in November, can a revolution built upon the idea of tackling some of the country’s most pressuring divides and economic inequality be a legitimate movement if it is made up mostly of white activists and rabble rousers, given that those issues have hampered the lives of people of color more than anyone else’s?

It’s almost impossible to understand the fundamental nature of poverty and related social problems in the United States without understanding how race factors into it. It’s not happenstance that white families have 16 times the wealth of black families, or that 73 percent of white families own their homes, compared with less than half of black families. Those 21st century realities are rooted in discriminatory practices that date to the early 20th century and earlier.

To be sure, race and poverty are still two distinct issues. Economic troubles can’t explain the persistence of racial discrimination that comes in covert and overt forms, whether it is the reality that applicants with black-sounding names are less likely to receive a job interview or black men and women, regardless of their economic station in life, are more likely to be involved in uncomfortable and sometimes fatal encounters with police. These issues can’t simply be uprooted by a focus on economic inequality.

Sanders and Stein seem to get much of this. Each of them has been talking more about economic pain and racial injustice during this campaign season. And each can point to the support of one of the country’s best-known black scholars, Cornel West. And black people, in theory, share the goals of the Bernie dead-enders and Stein supporters. They want the oligarchs taken down and corrupt power brokers defanged.

But here’s another important difference: It’s likely that people of color also disagree with the candidates’ tactics and tone. Black people have experience with actually bringing about large-scale social change in a way that no other American demographic does, and that experience has made them expert pragmatists who for decades have swallowed hard to appease the feelings of white friends and colleagues in order not to disrupt fragile coalitions they knew were required to achieve and sustain progress.

Black people understand that not everything they want comes via magical thinking or screaming the loudest, even as they know the importance of consistent, strategic pressure. They understood why Barack Obama chose his words carefully while talking about race during the 2008 campaign and much of his presidency, even as they wanted him to be more explicitly forceful, something he has been doing late in his second term. American history is full of black leaders who have had to walk a line between commitment to a movement and a careful understanding that militancy of any kind would turn off a large number of white potential allies.

Black voters aren’t naive, aren’t complacent and aren’t simply falling in line because they are more familiar with Clinton, as West has suggested. Black rabble-rousing has been key in making progress—but the rabble-rousing was paired with a careful knowledge of when to push, and hard, and when to compromise, even know they wanted and needed more. They know if they take the route of Sanders’ or Stein’s loudness, not only could the horror of a Trump presidency be realized, there would have been no Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act or affirmative action programs—no first black president—each an imperfect but effective vessel of change.

Sanders seems to know this, which is why he pushed Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to adopt as many of his revolutionary ideas as possible before giving a full-throated endorsement of the Democratic nominee, knowing the harm a Trump presidency could bring. It’s clear that many of his supporters don’t see eye to eye with him.

Stein is a different story. “I’m terrified of Donald Trump. I’m terrified of Hillary Clinton. And I’m most terrified of a political system and people who apologize for it,” Stein told Salon. “I’m terrified of people who tell us that we have two deadly choices and we must pick our weapon of self-destruction.”

And people of color are terrified of that kind of thinking, which they know would end up hurting people like them more than Stein, Sarandon and their closest allies.