Democratic debate: Do black lives matter?

Hillary Clinton, who also has met with Black Lives Matter activists, was not asked the question directly but rather was asked: “What would you do for African Americans in this country that President Obama couldn’t?”

Democratic presidential candidates gave a meaningful public nod to the Black Lives Matter movement in their first televised debate, fully adopting its slogan and raising the core concerns stemming from police killings of African-Americans that protesters have articulated while disrupting a few of their campaign events. “And we need major major reforms in a broken criminal justice system, in which we have more people in jail than China”.

Bernie Sanders didn’t hesitate with his response, and said, “black lives matter”. Clinton’s choice to stay away from uttering the phrase “black lives matter” during the debate signaled that the seasoned politician was “being strategic in her approach” Cullors said.

Former Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia took a different position.

He didn’t clarify exactly what he meant by “the situation” but later discussed the importance of criminal justice reform.

If white people were unemployed, uninsured, undereducated and over-incarcerated at the rate that Blacks are in America today, our leaders would race into action with sweeping government programs to fix the problems, just as the nation did with Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, the G.I. bill, the bank bailout and the stimulus. In 2012, the percentage of black voters eclipsed the percentage of whites for the first time, when 66.2 percent of blacks voted, compared to 64.1 percent of non-Hispanics whites and about 48 percent of Hispanics and Asians.

Nationwide – Lamar Advertising, a Louisiana-based advertising company, has donated company-owned billboards across the country to a new campaign called “Blue Lives Matter” that is created to bring attention to the amount of police officers that are killed each year. But when African Americans experience Depression-like conditions in this country, it’s just considered business as usual. “We need to combat institutional racism from top to bottom”. Getting the candidates to talk not just about the phrase, but about issues like mass incarceration and income inequality was a big win, he said. The point is to get people to understand that Black lives have not mattered for centuries with American policy makers, and only by specifically declaring that Black lives do matter are we able to get our nation to address the ongoing crises in Black America. “We need a new New Deal for communities of color”, Clinton said. “We actually have people on both sides of the aisle who have reached the same conclusion, that we cannot keep imprisoning more people than anybody else in the world, but I believe that the debate and the discussion has to go further, Anderson, because we’ve got to do more about the lives of these children”, she said.

Yeah, we get that, Senator Webb. “I don’t even see color”, McPherson mockingly said.