I'm pretty insulted by your response, in turn, because it feels like you didn't actually read anything I wrote and are arguing with a bunch of stuff I never said. I never said that all criticisms of Bernie's healthcare legislation are based on abstractions. Indeed, specific criticisms of his health care law based on how it materially affects people's access to health care would be the opposite of abstract concerns. My arguments about abstractions were, as I think you would realize if you had actually read my post, not apropos of any specific policy or legislation. They were a response to your argument, which is of course not yours alone, in which (as I construed it) you set up racial equality, access to abortion, and economic equality as abstract ideals and then implicitly pit them against each other, implying that Bernie wants us to sacrifice the first two to get the third one.
I said the following:
I think there is a fairly large contingent of Democrats who believe that racial equality ought to come part and parcel with economic inequality. That one without the other is not significantly helpful to racial minorities, and evidence tends to back that conclusion up.
How that pits one against the other is, frankly, completely beyond me. I think it pretty plainly says that
doing one without the other is ultimately fruitless. It seems like a pretty fundamental truth to me, and I'm still flummoxed as to why you had to set up an elaborate strawman to knock down. And to top it all off, you assumed "abstractions" even though I've many times voiced specific substantive concerns.
I've always, I thought, been crystal clear that I don't believe it's an either/or proposition. What I believe, and what many people whose opinions I read, subscribe to is that you need to do both together if you want to affect real, positive, revolutionary change for communities of color in this country. And elevate the downtrodden white people at the same time.
As I discussed above, this is a ridiculous leap - I never once said that anyone who criticizes Bernie's health care plan is "thinking in abstractions." I think maybe this misunderstanding stemmed from us taking "chafed behinds" to refer to different things. I did not believe that in writing off the chafed behinds I was writing off anyone who ever criticized anything Bernie did for any reason. As I believe my post made clear I was referring to a specific type of chafed behind, the type chafed because the person it belongs to believes that racial equality and economic equality are somehow at odds.
Who believes this, exactly? Again, you're importing this idea into the conversation and I don't even know where it's coming from. Maybe there are a bunch of people out there advancing this idea, and I'm unaware of it? I'm sure as hell not, even though you think otherwise.
And quite frankly, I think this concern is itself absurd. We don't have access to abortion for all now, and as much as I'd like to see it, rejecting any single-player plan on the basis that it does not provide abortion access to all is the definition of making the perfect the enemy of the good. I just flat-out don't believe that any universal health care policy would make access to abortion worse than it is now.
Here's where you're missing the point. If access to reproductive health care was the policy you cared about most, that you though was most critical need in society today, you just wouldn't be all that into a candidate who didn't seem that interested in it as a policy goal. Right? This is what I'm talking about. You wouldn't be against the single payer plan, but you wouldn't be all that enthused about it, either.
It's not about rejecting it. You're positing a binary here when it is more complicated than that. There aren't two simple positions on a given policy - in favor or against. Surely you can see why one might be tepid or even hostile to a single payer plan that doesn't expand access to reproductive health care, if that is their primary issue, their primary motivator at the ballot box. That doesn't mean they reject it as policy, but it means the candidate pushing that plan isn't going to get far with that particular voter.
Now, I'm not super-familiar with the facts here by any means, but...do you think that the disparity in graduation rates might have anything to do with the fact that black families are so much poorer, on average, than white families? The only way you can frame this as a policy that doesn't help black people is if you believe that black people's lower graduation rates have nothing whatever to do with the cost of a college education - or with wealth in general. Since I think that's likely not a tenable position (indeed, I think I recall reading a piece on the issue that argued part of the reason for the difference in graduation rates is that white students have much greater access to the resources required to sustain them through a crisis) I happen to think that free college would benefit black people a great deal.
And of course there is more to the story than just differential graduation rates. Black graduates have significantly more debt than white graduates- that issue is addressed by free college. Black people just plain don't go to college proportionally more than white people, which is unsurprising since the median wealth of a black family is less than one-tenth the median wealth of a white family.
Surely part of the reason is family wealth disparity. Just as part of the reason is less access to quality secondary education. Part of the reason is lack of support for minority students by universities themselves. And part of the reason is good old-fashioned racism that students face on college campuses.
But the overarching issue is
inequality, is it not? To tie this into what I said above about health care - if you believe in racial equality as the end goal of public policy, and not just the idea of policies that help people of color, you might look at free college and conclude that all it's going to do is further widen the educational achievement gap. As a measure to tackle inequality, on its own this one fails.
That doesn't mean you wouldn't support it, that you wouldn't like it to happen. But it means you might look at a candidate who is pushing it as this wonderful policy idea, and be skeptical. You want to blame people who are lukewarm or hostile towards Bernie Sanders as if they're blind, or stupid, or thinking in "abstractions," or whatever. What I think you're not understanding is that depending on one's main political concern(s), it is eminently reasonable to be skeptical of his policies, and of him.
This is one area where you
have to do both elements if you want to try to close the gap in inequality along both economic and racial axes. Free college is a wonderful idea, but you need to go a lot further than simply paying for people's college education.
The answer, of course, is that black people would benefit immensely from increasing the minimum wage as black people are more likely than white people to be minimum wage workers. Per
the EPI
Seriously, you attempting to frame a minimum wage increase as not helpful to black people is just preposterous.
That wasn't how I was framing it at all. I was framing it as, maybe some people think Black unemployment is a bigger deal than the minimum wage. That it has a larger impact on communities and people than what the minimum wage is. And that if you're going to address one but not the other, you're missing a large part of the picture with regards to employment issues facing communities of color.
I think many activists would argue very strongly that if all we can do for people of color is increase the wage of their minimum wage job, and not go the, admittedly, much more difficult extra mile of also removing the roadblocks that exist keeping more people from getting jobs, and people who wish to from moving on from those minimum wage jobs, then we've failed.
Notice also how African Americans and women approve of Bernie at higher rates than whites or men.
