by Ijeoma Oluo
We can find racism in the fact that the “other methods” for desegregating schools and providing equal education for students of color never materialized after busing was defeated. Discussion of the solutions promised by the antibusing crusaders like Biden disappeared the moment busing did. I look at the rising resegregation of schools across the country. I see generations of students of color being denied the quality education they deserve, and I see the heartbreaking racism of a nation that can mobilize to kill the one effective desegregation strategy we’ve had—and then just walk away, leaving our children behind.
THE WRATH OF THE BERNIE BROS
In the late spring of 2019, I had a dream about Bernie Sanders. I was doing what I’m normally doing in my waking life—desperately rushing to meet a writing deadline. But this time, Bernie Sanders was in the room. He was following me around trying to explain that his work for Black America was even better now than when he had marched with King. If I would just listen to how he had changed his approach since the 2016 election, I would see.
“Bernie,” I said, “I have a book due.”
I tried to ignore Sanders and focus on my writing, but every time I’d look at my Word document, a message would pop up from somebody on social media saying, “You should listen to Bernie,” and, “Did you know he marched with King?”
I woke up and tried to laugh off my anxiety, but I could feel it—the election season was coming.
I wasn’t the only person in my circle with Sanders-related anxiety. I asked my friend and fellow writer Imani Gandy how she felt leading up to the 2020 election, and she laughed. “I literally have to pause and think before I say anything about Bernie Sanders, because it will become absolute insanity.”
Why was I having anxiety dreams about Sanders? Why was Imani trying to avoid “absolute insanity” from talking freely about Sanders? It is not because of Sanders himself—well, not exactly.
No matter what you think of Bernie, he ran a very progressive campaign. There is no surprise that it appealed to so many young people. And many people who supported Sanders showed the care and respect for others that you would expect from a campaign so focused on social issues.
But for others, especially a group of particularly vocal white men, the support for Bernie took on a sharper edge, a darker tone.
I’m talking about the Bernie Bros.
Perhaps I should have taken Imani’s lead and kept my Sanders thoughts to myself, because when I woke up from my dream, I decided to tweet about it. I tweet about pretty much everything (ask my kids; it annoys them to no end), and I felt like the dream was a humorous illustration of both writing anxiety and political anxiety.
Although many people found the tweet funny, others apparently had left their sense of humor at home. Suddenly, my tweet was being shared by pro-Bernie accounts, and the response was far less jovial. A sampling:
“I was recently in the ICU for diabetes. Couldn’t keep going at my job after. And you’re getting annoyed about a dream [about] Bernie Sanders. Really.”
“You’re a barren clown.”
“I had a dream that politics wasn’t a wasteland of rich idiot blue checked dipshits who write about any wine fueled nonsense that pops in their head.”
“I dreamt poor people had healthcare and weren’t dying of treatable illness and we fixed the economy. I guess that would be inconvenient if you were a real selfish ghoul using politics to try to make yourself feel special while shitting on people with real struggles and heartbreak.”
“‘Bestselling authors’ using their platform to halt momentum towards single payer are threatening to me and others like me the same way Nazis are to you.”35
Yikes.
What is a Bernie Bro? The term appears to have been first coined by Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic. It has come to stand for what some see as the stereotypical supersupporter of Sanders: a young, white man who will vigorously defend Sanders from any negative comment—usually with long lectures explaining how the commenter doesn’t understand politics or doesn’t care about poor people, people of color, and women if they don’t support Bernie, even if the person he is lecturing happens to be a woman of color.
Assholes exist everywhere, and they always seem to come out in force during an election season—for every single candidate. So what made the Bernie Bros so special that they inspired countless think pieces and even a section of this book?
One factor was their anger. The image of white men on the left was usually stereotyped with a hippie-like concern for others and often dismissed as ineffective (and “feminized”) due to their dedication to political correctness and overall politeness. So observers were surprised to see the palpable rage coming from many in the Sanders camp. These were white men who felt personally wronged by our system and were dedicated to Sanders’s campaign for their own self-interests. The anger they voiced over the cruelties of “establishment” politics, their disdain for “liberal elites,” and their feeling of exclusion from modern-day “identity politics” felt like a funhouse mirror of the grievances of white male Trump supporters.
Then there was their use of social media. Rapidly expanding use of the platforms in the years leading up to the 2016 election provided millions of people with countless new opportunities to debate, commiserate, and squabble about their political beliefs. The internet provided an instant political rally at the push of a retweet button. This meant that writers and commentators were constantly and quickly met with a large, vocal response to any of their political opinions—but also that any everyday person who dared speak their mind could find themselves the target of angry political opposition.
And the people they targeted were another factor in generating taxonomical articles and giving these supporters space in the culture. A lot of people who felt besieged by Bernie Bros (especially online) were women and people of color. Feminist writer Sady Doyle, for example, found herself the focus of hundreds of angry and abusive messages after an online confrontation with writer and Sanders supporter Freddie deBoer. She documented her experience on Tumblr: “I am now the subject of blog posts labeling me ‘the most extreme opponent of the Bernie Army’ (yes, it’s an army now) and various gross-out pictures of pig testicles. There have been, I’d estimate, a little over 100 messages on Twitter today alone.”36
When Senator Jeanne Shaheen endorsed Clinton during the 2016 campaign, she was flooded with comments from Sanders fans who were angry at any Clinton mention:
“Hey Shaheen, if your daughter was raped, would you still stand with Hillary? You do know what rape it [sic], right Jeanne?”
“Hooray for another paid $hillary troll, enjoy the rest of your stay jeanne, your time is up. The revolution will is coming for you. #feelthebern”
“Their vaginas are making terrible choices!”37
And then there was the Bernie Bros’ fervor. A light critique of Sanders would bring down the wrath of God: immediate, angry responses from Sanders supporters that seemed vastly disproportionate to what was said. In addition, the critiques would have you forever labeled by this group of fans an “enemy” of Sanders and what he represents.
When Imani Gandy spoke up about issues she had with how some Sanders fans were treating Black Lives Matter protesters who interrupted a Bernie Sanders rally, she quickly became a target of the more zealous Bernie Bros. She was hounded online in every space she occupied. Blog posts were written about her. YouTube videos were made about her. They started digging through her past. They found that she had worked as a lawyer in foreclosures for a few months in 2011. That was enough to paint Gandy, even with her years of activism, as the enemy. From then on it was regular insults, threats, and attacks on her character.
“I was the target of them for about two straight years,” Imani recalled in a conversation with me, “and it was nasty and it was vicious.”38
The extreme anger in defense of Sanders didn’t just appear online. In 2016, when Clinton won more delegates in a heated Nevada primary than Sanders, chaos erupted.
According to reports by attendees, angry Sanders supporters yelled obscenities and threw chairs. Some even had to be escorted out of the room by security when they refused to leave after the convention ended.39 Even though by the time of the Nevada primary, Clinton already had a pretty insurmountable national-delegate lead, angry Bernie fans still left violent and sexist voice mails and text messages for Nevada Democratic chairwoman Roberta Lange. Here are a few snippets:
“I just wanted to let you know that I think people like you should be hung in a public execution to show this world that we won’t stand for this sort of corruption. I don’t know what kind of money they are paying to you, but I don’t know how you sleep at night. You are a sick, twisted piece of shit and I hope you burn for this!… You cowardless [sic] bitch, running off the stage! I hope people find you.”
“You fucking stupid bitch! What the hell are you doing? You’re a fucking corrupt bitch!”
“Oh Roberta, Roberta, Roberta, you old, old hag. Oh, we watched the whole thing in Nevada. You’re really kinda screwed, lady. Um, yeah. Really stupid. Fuck you.”
“You’re a cunt. Fuck you!”
“Bitch answer me! How much did the Hillary campaign pay you for that shit? You weren’t a coward yesterday, don’t be one now! Biggest cunt in politics next to Clinton”
“You stupid ass bitch. We’re coming for your ass.”40
Finally, there’s Sanders’s politics. You might not have expected candidate Bernie Sanders to attract such racist and misogynistic followers. He had a strong record of civil rights activism and a very liberal presidential campaign platform. He was concerned about the environment, he was antiwar, he was prochoice, he wanted free college tuition. If you were to list all the Sanders talking points to someone who was unfamiliar with the candidates and then ask that person who they thought his most vocal supporters were likely to be, chances are the answer wouldn’t be “white male millennials who like to yell at women of color on the internet.” We were all supposed to be on the same side, so why did it seem so hard sometimes to tell Bernie Bros from Trump supporters?
Sanders did not create these more extreme and sometimes abusive supporters. Each one decided for themselves what to believe and how to act. But Sanders has always carried his white male privilege into his politics, even when discussing issues of race and class. The anxiety over a Black president and over the rising gender and racial political consciousness in America was felt not just by conservative white men. That gender and racial power shift impacted the material conditions in progressive political circles as well, and white men who had long vocally supported a more free and equitable future were becoming uncomfortable with what that future might look like and whether or not they would have a starring role.
The candidacy of Sanders, who prioritized progressive issues of working- and middle-class white men over those of women and people of color (although if you were to ask Sanders or his supporters, they’d likely insist that the issues most important to working-class white men are the same as those facing working-class women and people of color), became an opportunity for white men to still see themselves centered in a new progressive future when the only other alternatives were a woman president or Donald Trump.
Interviews with Black volunteers and staff members of the 2016 Sanders campaign showed that, even within the campaign, many Black people felt as if the Black community was a low priority for Sanders. The New York Times highlighted the experience of campaign staffer John Solomon: “When Mr. Solomon joined the campaign in late 2015, he was told his job would include networking with Black voters and planning events in Black communities. But almost immediately he was assigned tasks like keeping itineraries and chauffeuring surrogates that had little to do with outreach—which made him feel like ‘support staff,’ he said.”41
When Sanders had a campaign stop at Morehouse College, a historically Black institution (formally known as a historically Black college or university, or HBCU), Black campaign staffers wanted students to get the first chance at tickets, to increase the chance that young Black audiences would get to see Sanders speak. When the campaign refused, the majority of tickets were snatched up by white locals, leading to a majority-white audience and making the local Black community (and Black campaign staffers) feel undervalued.42
In an interview with Splinter News, campaign staffer Danny Glover, who is Black, detailed some of his difficulties in trying to get the Sanders campaign to reach out to the Black community. He felt that the campaign’s efforts at Black outreach were really more lip service than substance: “We threw some resources to it to say we did it, but they didn’t put as many people behind it as they should have.”43
Glover said that stops were cut from Sanders’s tour of HBCUs after the South Carolina primary, in late February. He said he was told by superiors that there wasn’t enough money to continue them. The Sanders campaign raised $44 million in March, its best performance to date.44
The experience for some women on the 2016 Sanders campaign was also disappointing, to say the least. The New York Times interviewed women staffers who reported dealing with sexual harassment from their male colleagues. When Giulianna Di Lauro reported sexual harassment to her manager, he apparently told her, “I bet you would have liked it if he were younger.” Campaign worker Samantha Davis reported that she was marginalized after she refused to go to her male supervisor’s hotel room. Masha Mendieta complained that women in the campaign were treated like personal secretaries for their male managers; they were asked to fetch things and run personal errands instead of doing substantial work. Women campaign staffers also reported dismay at finding out that some of them were paid as little as half the amount their male counterparts earned for the same work.45
The women who spoke to the Times said that they had reported this harassment and discrimination to superiors in the campaign and that their concerns were dismissed or ignored. After the New York Times ran its article in 2019 detailing these allegations, Sanders apologized.46
Sanders appealed to younger voters across the board, but he deliberately courted a specific kind of voter—young, white, progressive men—not only by speaking to issues they cared about, but also by making sure to avoid focusing too much on issues that they (and perhaps he) may have felt threatened by. Many people of color questioned Sanders’s stance on racial issues because he seemed to routinely focus on class over race. When he was asked directly about racial matters, especially about racial economic topics, the subject often pivoted back to class; we need, the line went, to look at issues that affect us all, and not just a few.
Sanders has always prioritized class over race. In an interview he gave the Chicago Tribune in 1990, he discussed his political activism of the 1960s:
During that period, I became active in the peace movement and the civil rights movement.… There were many people who were liberal and they were concerned about poverty, or they were concerned about racism, or they were concerned about militarism but they never put them together or saw the connection.… They never saw that the roots of many of these problems lie in an economic system in which 1 percent of the population owns half of the wealth of the country, an economic system in which the rich controls, to a large degree, the political and economic life of the country.47
In the young Bernie Sanders, I can see reflections of the modern-day Bernie Bros. There is no doubt that economic inequality is one of the biggest issues this country faces. I’m not arguing against that position, and I agree it’s a real problem that demands real solutions. But Bernie’s statement (and the words of many progressive white men I encounter) displays the patronizing assumption that poor activists, activists of color, and antiwar activists were ignorant of the role that economic inequality played in the issues they were trying to address. It’s an assumption that, even though someone might be focused on a concern that severely impacts their life and therefore is of top priority to them (like, say, Black people fighting for equality in the Jim Crow era), they were unable to see how
their issues were connected to those of other activists.
Even while claiming plenty of street cred for his marches with Dr. King, Sanders still felt that the activism of that time needed to pivot away from race. To many people of color, especially Black people, this can feel very disingenuous. And if you are a Black person who agrees with Sanders that economic inequality is a major issue in this country (as I am) but also feels that we must address issues of race if we are going to bring economic equality to everyone (as I do), Sanders can be very frustrating (and he is). He seems to fail to understand that the system of race has been built to ensure that Black and brown people will remain at the bottom of the economic ladder. And if you are a Black person who knows that economic inequality is a major issue, but you also need candidates to speak strongly on issues like police brutality, then hearing Sanders pivot to talk about jobs programs in the Black community as if a job will stop a bullet (as he suggested in a letter to the editor of the New York Times after Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri) can make you want to tear your hair out.48
