Race, Class, and the 2016 Election
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The 2016 presidential election will be the first to unfold against the backdrop of the national Black Lives Matter movement. Even as the movement remains most active in local campaigns and continues to have a fractured national character, its imprint is all over the Democratic Party’s primary process. This is, of course, of little consequence to the Republican Party, but matters greatly in the Democratic Party race where the two leading candidates for the party’s nomination—for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—attempt to position themselves as heirs to Barack Obama’s historically high Black voter turnout in 2008 and 2012. From the earliest moments of the 2016 campaign season, Democratic Party candidates have been racing to keep up with the movement. For example, Clinton reluctantly declared in a public setting “black lives matter,” in December of 2014 as Black protests erupted nationally after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who choked Eric Garner to death. Those protests boiled over into the spring, fueled by the brutal murder of Walter Scott in South Carolina by officer Michael Slaeger that was captured on video. Indeed, the frustrations with perceptions of police lawlessness erupted into open rebellion in Baltimore, Maryland, in April when young Freddie Gray died of injuries sustained while in police custody. The struggle in Baltimore not only applied pressure on sitting politicians to reign in the police, but it also pressured those candidates vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.