Bernie Sanders acknowledges the challenges and struggles faced by POC and female minorities, but prioritizes class-based issues, which in reality are white, male issues because they have been the predominant members of “classes” throughout history.
This approach attracts the “Bernie bros” who want to advance their own white, male agenda but don’t want to look bad doing it.
This claim that the focus on identity distracts from “real” politics—while simultaneously centering how “identity politics” affect white men and claiming not to be engaging in identity politics—is a tightrope of hypocrisy that Sanders himself likes to walk. Let’s be clear: centering the needs of progressive, working-class, white men is identity politics. It is just as steeped in individual identity as movements focusing on women and people of color. But it comes with a level of privilege built in that allows it to escape wider scrutiny. Here is an excerpt from an interview that Sanders gave GQ magazine in 2019: There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino.… My main belief is that we need to bring together a coalition of people—of black and white and Latino and Asian-American and Native-American—around a progressive agenda which is prepared to take on an extraordinarily powerful ruling class in this country. That is my view. Many of my opponents do not hold that view, and they think that all that we need is people who are candidates who are black or white, who are black or Latino or woman or gay, regardless of what they stand for, that the end result is diversity. 52 When Sanders has engaged on race, he’s quickly scurried away from it, in a way that isolates race issues from the issues of “ordinary” white Americans. When he was asked about how to keep voters focused on the issues in the midst of Trump scandals, he replied, “I mean, I think we’ve got to work in two ways. Number one, we have got to take on Trump’s attacks against the environment, against women, against Latinos and blacks and people in the gay community, we’ve got to fight back every day on those issues. But equally important, or more important: We have got to focus on bread-and-butter issues that mean so much to ordinary Americans.” 53 Oh man, fuck this. Seriously? Who exactly are these “ordinary Americans” whose issues are more important than the destruction of our environment and the systemic racism and sexism that are literally crushing women and people of color in this country? Hint: they don’t look like me. — Mediocre, pg 75, emphasis added
This line that Sanders insisted on walking had a special appeal to “progressive” white men who held more left-leaning and socialist views but were deeply afraid of being decentered politically by women and people of color. In Sanders, they had a candidate they could support who would allow them to appear “good”—he spoke of equality, of economic justice, of ending wars, of universal health care—while not having to engage with or challenge their own place in exploitative systems of racial and gender inequality. — Mediocre, pg 76