The Debate between Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders last Thursday was interesting in several ways. For me the most remarkable occurrence was the frank discussion of structural racism by both candidates. They used the terms “institutional” and “systemic.”
It appears that Hilary Clinton is pushing hard to retain her problematic hold on black voters for the primary election in SC on March 1, as blacks are the majority of the Democratic party electorate in SC. Thus she frequently invokes President Obama’s name and the issue of racism.
Earlier in the campaign it seemed Bernie Sanders had to be pushed to be more forthright about racism, although he had supported civil rights issues in Congress. And it did not start there. In
his youth he was a student leader of the University of Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and was arrested for protesting housing segregation.
Regardless of how they came to their current positions, it is a significant development that both of these individuals are so clear about the nature and extent of current structural racism in the country. I doubt such talk ever occurred in any previous campaign of the two major parties.
The country has not had this kind of discussion of racism from national leaders since the Kerner Commission Report in 1968. This commission, comprised of prominent politicians and business and civic leaders sought to answer several questions, including why the major riots of the mid-1960’s were occurring. They named white racism as the cause. They also showed how discrimination and segregation had long permeated much of American life, and they proclaimed it threatened the future of every American. They did not use the terms institutional racism or systemic racism as these expressions were just coming into usage at that time; however, they did discuss some of the issues of institutional racism. With the assassination of Martin Luther King, the election of Richard Nixon, and the slowdown in civil rights protests and advocacy, the impact of the Kerner Commission Report was muted.
Since the two contenders for the Democratic nomination for president are discussing structural racism so clearly, the genie is out of the bottle. Maybe we can begin to discuss and address “real” racism, the kind that affects how well and how long we live. Aside from the protests about the killings of blacks by police officers, much of the recent discussion about racism is about petit, or small, racism rather than structural racism. In other words, more often than not the discussion is about individual interpersonal slights and indignities than about more consequential issues like institutional racism. I hope the genie is out of the bottle and we can focus more attention on systemic racism.