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Sanders seemed to also view women’s issues as secondary to socioeconomic class. When in 2016 Trump said that women who have abortions should be punished, Sanders replied that his remarks were a “distraction” from the “serious issues facing America.”49 To many women (and anyone with a uterus, regardless of gender), especially on the left, the assault on reproductive rights was a serious issue facing America. Sanders further alienated many women when he endorsed an antichoice congressional candidate, Marcy Kaptur, in 2016, and then an antichoice gubernatorial candidate, Tom Perriello, in 2017.
Often, when issues of gender were brought directly to Sanders, his answers were awkward, if not dismissive. When a young woman at an event asked him what she should do to become the second-ever Latina senator, he replied, “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’ No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry. In other words, one of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.”50
The assumption that women would vote for women for no other reason than their gender is insulting to all women’s intelligence, as is the insinuation that women candidates who focus on “women’s issues” are not also concerned about economic or health care issues. In this statement also lies the quieter yet just as harmful assumption that white men only vote for candidates that center their own white male interests.
This dismissive and condescending attitude toward issues of race and gender may have rubbed many women and people of color like me the wrong way, but it was exactly what young white men who were threatened by an increasing political focus on the needs of minorities and marginalized people wanted to hear.
Jordan, a twenty-nine-year-old self-described Bernie Bro, talked with Ruth Graham at Slate in 2019 about Sanders’s appeal to him in a diversifying political climate where “identity politics” seemed to reign:
I’m not even going to say “identity politics” but identity crisis, where people feel the need to defend their identity more than their politics.… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that with this new Congress. It bothers me being a white man who honestly has gotten schlonged most of his life. I didn’t have the privilege of having my parents go to a great school. When you hear that this Congress needs to be more brown, or the future is female, I’m not even sure what it means. To a dude, it’s like, “No men on the earth.”51
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.
In 2016 Sanders was asked by a Black woman at a campaign town hall, “Can you please talk about specifically Black people and reparations?” The case for reparations is based not only on wealth inequality, but also on the specific history of systemic economic exploitation of Black Americans for over four hundred years—starting with slavery and moving through Jim Crow and mass incarceration—by a white supremacist government. Sanders (who had previously dismissed the idea of reparations as “divisive”), however, insisted on bringing the issue back to whiteness: “It’s not just black, it is Latino, there are areas in poor rural America, where it’s white.” Sanders then focused his talk on helping “all” poor communities, refusing to actually touch the issue of reparations for the Black community.54
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.
The white male supremacy of the Sanders campaign and its followers is not the violent, overt white supremacy and sexism of the Trump administration. The Sanders campaign wants to ignore women and people of color. The Trump administration and its supporters want the removal of rights and privileges of women and people of color, and they want vengeance against women and people of color for the rights that they view were gained at white male expense. The Trump administration’s white supremacist patriarchy is not white supremacy and patriarchy by the laziness of unexamined privilege—it is the deliberate quest to increase cis, straight, abled, white male power over women, people of color, trans people, queer people, and disabled people.
But the unchecked white male privilege of Sanders and many of his followers will guarantee that privilege and oppression are baked into the policies they create and support. A political movement that focuses on class and ignores the specific ways in which race determines financial health and well-being for people of color in this country will be a movement that maintains white supremacy, because it will not be able to identify or address the specific, race-based systems that are the main causes of inequality for people of color. Health care discrimination, job discrimination, the school-to-prison pipeline, educational bias, mass incarceration, police brutality, community trauma—none of these issues are addressed in a class-only approach. A class-only approach will lift only poor whites out of poverty and will therefore maintain white supremacy.
A political movement that focuses on class and ignores the specific ways in which gender determines the financial health and well-being of women in this country will be a movement that maintains the patriarchy. Reproductive justice, job discrimination, health care discrimination, educational bias, gendered violence, sexual harassment—none of these issues are addressed in a class-only approach. A class-only approach will help some women financially, but not much beyond the degree that their economic status is tied to white supremacy. It will not help women of color much at all.
When Sanders failed to win the 2016 Democratic nomination, a large reason why was his stubborn resistance to centering important issues that
impact many women, Black, and Latinx voters. Whereas exit polls showed that younger women, Black, and Latinx voters were more excited about Sanders, Clinton was overwhelmingly more popular with Black voters in the South, and with women, Black, and Latinx voters over age thirty-five across the country. Although appealing to the white male vote can carry an election on the right (even with white women voters), it cannot win national elections on the left. And it is easy to argue that the bile spewed during the primaries—with many Sanders supporters talking about Clinton with the same hate-filled, derogatory comments that Trump supporters did, and others insisting that there was no difference between Clinton and Trump—did serious damage to Clinton’s national campaign once she became the nominee. Sanders backed Clinton after the primary and asked his supporters to do the same, but many of those supporters had just spent a year talking about Clinton as a criminal warmonger who was no different than Trump, with very little effort from the Sanders campaign to curtail such vitriol until well past the primaries. Those riled-up voters were reluctant to throw any support her way.
After Clinton lost the general election, supporters of both Clinton and Sanders were angry. Many Clinton supporters blamed Sanders supporters, who they believed were so opposed to a woman in the White House that they had voted for either Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Many Sanders supporters blamed Clinton supporters and the DNC for “stealing” the Democratic nomination from Sanders, whom they viewed as much more electable than Clinton. The hashtag #BernieWouldHaveWon became popular on social media as many argued that the “identity politics” of the Clinton campaign made her unelectable and drove voters to Trump. They maintained that Sanders was right to refuse to engage on issues of race and gender.
Looking at the role that gender played in the 2016 election, the Center of Southern Politics and Society found that, even though sexism was more common in white Republican men, “roughly 11 million white male Independents and Democrats feel enough animosity towards working women and feminists to make them unlikely to vote for one of them.”55 In the end, 12 percent of Sanders supporters ended up supporting Trump in the general election. When surveyed, almost half of those Sanders supporters turned Trump voters said they disagreed that white people have advantages in the United States, whereas only about 5 percent of Clinton voters disagreed that white people have advantages.56
Defection after a tough primary isn’t unusual. In the 2008 election, 15 percent of Clinton primary voters ended up voting for McCain in the general election, and many remember the racial tensions in that primary almost as vividly as they do the ones from the 2016 election.57 But the combination of the charged rhetoric of the 2016 election, the blatant sexism, ableism, and white supremacy of the Trump campaign, and the large policy differences between Trump and Sanders led many to expect that the number of voters who were willing to cross over to support the Republican candidate would be much lower than it had been in the 2008 election.
Looking at the election of 2016, when there was so much at risk, we can ask why so many people would shift their support from a Democratic Socialist candidate to an openly bigoted, highly conservative, and wildly incompetent Republican. Why did Sanders appeal in particular to this subgroup that defected? The answer is that he prioritized issues affecting white men over those affecting women and people of color.
The “why” matters because as a nation where every president but one has been a white man; where, in 2019, only 24 percent of our congressional representatives and only 18 percent of our governors were women; where only 22 percent of our congressional representatives and 8 percent of our governors were people of color—as that nation, we must be able to politically empower women and people of color without it causing a backlash among liberal white men. A backlash that further endangers political representation for minority groups. The next white male candidate that angry white men rally behind may not be Trump or Sanders, and the next female candidate they turn against is unlikely to be Hillary Clinton. But as long as we refuse to address the ways in which white men cling to political power, even to their own detriment, there will always be a white male politician to take advantage of this white male anxiety over the rise of women and people of color.
The answer is not to let go of “identity politics”—we don’t magically get to a system that addresses issues affecting minority groups by ignoring issues affecting minority groups. The current numbers are testament to that. If we are going to continue to make progress on issues of race and gender, and if liberal white men want to be on the right side of history, they have to address their personal issues with race and gender.
I asked Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, what she thought about the role of white men in racial and gender equality. She agreed that we have to find a way forward with white men: “We absolutely need them. It frustrates the hell out of me that there are very few white men in this work and in this field. And yet it”—the idea of including them—“also makes me nervous because it’s so easy for them to then slip into dominance and taking over.”58
Many women of color saw that slip into dominance in the white men who lectured us about Sanders, telling us that we were too ignorant to realize that Sanders was the best choice for women and people of color. These men may have truly believed that they were allies to women and people of color, unaware of how their white male supremacy was taking precedence over their desire for a more just world—even as they resorted to condescension, insults, and outright slurs.
In this discussion, white maleness is still centered. What happened to white men? What motivated them? What can we do to make sure we don’t lose their support in the next election? This matters, because we need a coalition in order to have the numbers to get representatives into office who will address issues affecting minority communities. But even in this discussion, it is important to realize that the real loss is not in the support of white men, but in the safety, freedom, and political voice of women and people of color.
For many women and people of color who engaged in social media during the 2016 presidential election, it will be remembered not only as the time a sexist white supremacist was voted into our highest office; it will also be remembered as the time when they were harassed by white men in their own party for daring to have a political opinion that differed from the men’s. This phenomenon has had a cooling effect on many people of color on social media—even some who once supported Sanders.
Imani Gandy has chosen to stay silent in the 2020 election season. “During this cycle, I am keeping my mouth shut,” she told me. “All I did in 2015 and 2016 was fight, and it took a really bad toll on me mentally—mental-health-wise.… It’s just not worth it.”
Not only have women, people of color, disabled people, and the LGBTQ+ community been increasingly endangered by the election of Donald Trump; they have been harmed and disenfranchised by the reactionary, anti–“identity politics” factions on the left. Many have learned that speaking out on issues impacting them may leave them further isolated and endangered than before, and they have learned this from people who claim to be friends and allies of marginalized people.
“I THINK HE FOCUSED TOO MUCH ON BLACK PEOPLE”
My partner and I were in a Lyft on our way to a dinner event when our white male driver asked me the question that I hate being asked more than just about any question: What do you do for a living?
I hate this question most when it’s asked by a man who is tasked with getting me safely from one place to another, who asks it when I’m stuck in a confined space with him. It’s a forward question to ask any stranger, but the answer is especially uncomfortable when you are a Black woman who writes about race in America. I know that the easy—and more fun—solution would be to make something up. I have never been a deep-sea diver, and every time I’m asked this question, I’m given the opportunity to be one—even if just for a few minutes—and every time, I let that opportunity slip by. The truth is, what I do for a living is document the world as I see it
. I’m not a good liar. So this conversation began begrudgingly (on my part) the way it usually does: he asked, and I answered that I was a writer. He asked what kind of writing I did. I told him I wrote about social issues. He pressed: “What kind of social issues?” I took a deep breath and told him. “Race and gender.”
We started on more neutral ground—how unbearable Trump is. This is a pretty safe place to start a political conversation with a Black woman who just told you she writes on race and gender in America. I gave plenty of ohs and yeps as he talked about how much he disliked Trump’s racist and sexist rhetoric. He was a friendly driver and obviously wasn’t trying to be confrontational. But after that safe introduction, he decided to jump into the deep end.
“Why do you think Hillary lost?” he asked me.
If the driver had been looking at my face instead of responsibly looking at the road, he would have seen every regret I’d ever had in my life flash through my eyes—including my decision to get up that day, put on a dress, and order a ride to my event instead of staying in my hotel room and eating ice cream.
“Oh… uh,” I stuttered. “I—”
“I just don’t think people liked her,” he interjected before I could answer. He started listing all the reasons why he thought people didn’t like Hillary Clinton. “She wasn’t very likeable. She seemed like a typical politician.” Equally popular and equally meaningless statements.
My monosyllabic replies must have sounded far more enthusiastic than I had intended them to, because the driver became even more bold.
“So, uh… race in America,” he started. “That’s really interesting. I am a white man and I like Obama, but one thing I’ll tell you about him is that I think he focused too much on Black people and ignored white men. I felt like, who was looking out for me? I know some people who voted for Trump were racist, but I think that if Obama had focused on white people more, Trump wouldn’t have won.”