It's really hard out there for a Democrat right now.
No one is safe on the left. No one. The Democrats have old white sexagenarians and septuagenarians leading the presidential primary field. Clinton and Sanders are being mercilessly mowed down like fresh recruits going up against machine-gun emplacements at the Somme. It's brutal.
From Ruby Cramer, at BuzzFeed, "The Activists, The Candidate, And The Media: Clinton’s First Black Lives Matter Moment":
"I didn't hear a reflection on her part in perpetuating white supremacist violence." pic.twitter.com/LV2RdHFx9D
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) August 11, 2015In a matter of months, Black Lives Matter has become a powerful enough force in Democratic politics that campaign staffers actually accommodated would-be protesters as both worked the media. But what do activists actually want from Clinton?Ouch.
KEENE, N.H. — Standing beneath the hooded entrance to Keene Middle School, as rain hit the parking lot pavement early on Tuesday evening, the three activists exchanged a round of hugs, first with each other, then with the two videographers along to capture it all: another win for Black Lives Matter.
The small contingent, dressed in matching “Bulletproof” t-shirts, traveled from Massachusetts that morning with plans to stage a demonstration in the middle of a Hillary Clinton campaign event. As it turned out, the protest never happened. Instead, the group got 15 mostly private minutes with the candidate.
The activists — Daunasia Yancey, Julius Jones, and Vonds Dubuisson — declared the meeting a success. One, that is, for Black Lives Matter, not Clinton. Her answers, they told reporters afterward, had not been satisfying or sufficiently reflective.
Other Democrats, mostly Bernie Sanders, have already faced protests from Black Lives Matter on the campaign trail. The idea: to interrupt a candidate’s routine event or stump speech, and shift the conversation to questions about structural racism and police violence. This was Clinton’s first such encounter with the group whose name, often written as a one-word hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, has become the powerful avatar of a broader social and racial justice movement.
And what played out in New Hampshire over a single three-hour period, from 3:15 to 6:15 p.m., encapsulated the complicated dynamic between campaign, movement, and media that the other candidates have struggled to navigate in recent weeks.
On Tuesday, under the watch of the national press corps, Clinton took her turn at trying, and failing, to meet the expectations of the activists who have become increasingly influential figures in the Democratic primary.
So much so that when Yancey, Jones, and Dubuisson arrived too late to get into the event, a forum on mental health and substance abuse, Clinton aides tried hurriedly to get the activists into the campaign function they wanted to attend only to interrupt — setting off an unlikely sequence of events, shaped as much by the participants on the ground as by the coverage happening about them, in real time, on Twitter.
By 6:15 p.m., the result of this frenetic rush to manage the arrival of the three Black Lives Matter activists was, ultimately, three dissatisfied Black Lives Matter activists.
The organizers “didn’t hear a response” from Clinton to their direct concerns, according to Yancey, the co-founder of the group’s Boston chapter and the organizer leading the group in Keene. Fifteen minutes later, she said, “our time was up.”
Yancey said she and the other activists asked Clinton questions about her role, and Bill Clinton’s, in 1990s drug and crime policy — and “in perpetuating white supremacist violence.” The activists declined to relay Clinton’s answers — but they did express their disappointment with the exchange on the whole. “I didn’t hear a reflection on her part in perpetuating white supremacist violence,” Yancey said.
“I think she gave the answer she wanted to give.”
Keep reading.
And you gotta love how #BlackLivesMatter activists show up late to the Hillary event, are locked out by security, and then cause an existential meltdown in the Clinton camp, with campaign operatives frightened to the quick by the inevitably forthcoming "racist" and "white supremacist" attacks had not those black shakedown artists gotten inside.
They're eating their own on the left. Sometimes you just gotta sit back and watch. It's like Pol Pot's taking over.
0 comments:
Post a Comment