“Too many African-Americans today are simultaneously having to deal the crisis of racial justice while coping with the effects of poverty and economic deprivation… [T]here are neighborhoods where mothers are afraid to let their children outside for fear of gang violence and drugs. And they are also afraid of their children being targeted by the police because of the color of their skin. No person should have to worry that a routine interaction with law enforcement will end in violence or death.”
“People are angry. I am angry. And people have a right to be angry. Violence and brutality of any kind, particularly at the hands of law enforcement… is unacceptable and must not be tolerated. We must reform our criminal justice system.”
“Black lives do matter. And we must value black lives.”
“We must move away from the militarization of police forces… It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. This must change.”
Bernie went much deeper into the problems of Black communities in America and the responsibility of the federal government to ameliorate those problems, including body cameras and community policing.
Then Bernie tied the crisis in African-American communities to the economic crisis of us all.
“The American people… want change – they want a better deal. A fairer deal. A new deal. They want an America with laws and policies that truly reward hard work with economic mobility… There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans. This grotesque level of inequality is immoral. It is bad economics. It is unsustainable.”
You can read Bernie’s full speech on his website.
Image source: The All-Nite Images on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)