Sen. Bernie Sanders is running as a Democratic candidate for President seeking not only to succeed another Democratic President, but our first African-American President.
In South Carolina, Sanders is inviting Cornel West to introduce him at events. This is disturbing. Over the course of the past seven years, West has continually employed the ugliest race-based attacks against Barack Obama and others with whom he disagrees, regularly insinuating that the President is not truly a black man, that he maintains a "plantation," and even calling him the global equivalent of Trayvon Martin's killer.
Someone who employs this kind of rhetoric has no place in a Democratic presidential primary:
"[T]oo many black people are niggerized. I would say the first black president has become the first niggerized black president." - June 2015
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. [...] He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable. [...] He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” - November 2013
"You got these black leaders on the Obama Plantation, won't say a criminal word about the master in the big house. Will only try to tame the field folk so that they're not critical of the master in the big house." - July 2013
And on, and on, and on... West is obsessed with using incendiary racially-charged language meant to offend in order to make headlines. He provides a veneer of legitimacy to those on the right who make the
exact same types of comments about our Party and our President. The Democratic Party shouldn't give him a platform. Bernie Sanders shouldn't give him a platform.