I am a bit sad about what I read here in several diaries about the failing spectacle that happened on stage of the NN15 conference with Sanders in relation to the Black Live Matters voices, which were not heard at all. So far I consider that a stage management failure to structure the appearances of Black Live Matters folks on stage appropriately.
I just like to show you some videos I made during the Populism Conference 2015 in Washington DC. on April 19, 2015. Black Live Matters groups as well as many, many others managed to speak up clearly with a couple of speakers directly speaking to BLM issues. This is raw material unedited, because I never used it anywhere and it just came to my mind to pull it out.
I remember that I was amazed how strong and well expressed the view points of the BLM groups were. They certainly had a lot of attentively listening white and other folks in the audience.
Look at the videos and imagine that the first video would have been a stage event at NN15, followed by specific speakers for the BLM issues and then imagine instead of Keith Ellison speaking, it would have been Sanders and O'Malley and continue on dreaming about an orderly Q&A session after that, one question asked and one question answered at the time.
Everybody should have to stand up, have a microphone close up and speak clearly. You speak just more forcefully standing up. It has been done often at previous NN conferences.
There were also some slight glitches, but they were funny and the messages came out loud and clear nevertheless. That's what I would consider a very good performance of expressing the voices from the BLM movement.
Some special voices:
He sounds sometimes like Sanders:-)
Imagine that would have been Sanders instead of Keith Ellison. It could have been:
And all of you could have had a happy end.
Well, may be next time. May be someone shows this to the Sanders campaign to get an idea what he needs to listen to and what he needs to answer to and how to put up an event similar to this including Reverend Barber as speaker, imo.