Bernie's Stumbled on Race Because We All Do
In fact, only 26.2 percent of African-Americans fall below the poverty line, according to the latest census data. That's a higher rate than the 12.7 percent of non-Hispanic whites who live below the poverty line or the 23.6 percent of Hispanics.
But since we have almost five times more non-Hispanic whites than blacks in this nation, poor whites outnumber poor blacks by almost three-to-one. If we were being truly honest about race, we would be talking about poverty as a white problem, more than a black burden.
But stereotypes die hard, even among liberals who like to think of themselves as more candid about race than conservatives like Trump, who too often view racism as a non-issue unless it discriminates against whites.
Sanders' gaffe in the heat of debate, revealed a not very deeply hidden truth: He primarily views our national political and economic divides through a lens of class, not race.
Former NAACP president Ben Jealous, a Sanders surrogate and African-American, rushed to the senator's defense. He sympathetically described Sanders' own racial blind spot that has hindered his efforts to reach black voters. "Sen. Sanders is from Burlington," Jealous said. "He grew up in old Brooklyn, he knows white folks live in ghettos."
Yet Jealous and Sanders both emphasized that the crux of the issue was poverty, not race. As an African-American fortunate enough to earn a bit of the American Dream, thanks to hard-working parents and a decent public school system, I, too, see poverty as a more urgent issue than race, although both are important.
Politically, as Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has written ever since his breakthrough 1978 book "The Declining Significance of Race," the best way to build a multiracial anti-poverty consensus is to focus on class, not race.
Yet in today's presidential cycle, we seem to be more interested in arguing about race and poverty than finding some common-ground solutions.
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
