Today the Bernie Sanders campaign agreed to meet with activist DeRay McKesson and have a conversation about the candidate’s new racial justice platform, Politico reports.
@deray Let’s do it. We will PM you this week to arrange.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 17, 2015
McKesson started garnering national attention for his organizing work during protests that followed the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. His aims, as he says, are clear: Stop killing us.
His primary concern seems to be the cessation of police brutality. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, McKesson focuses on the the way racist systems affect black bodies, a point he argues forcefully in a recent reflection on the Ferguson protests last year:
I am often asked what it is like to be on the “front line”. But I do not use the term “front line” to describe us, the protestors. Because everywhere in America, wherever we are, our blackness puts us in close proximity to police violence. Some of us have chosen a more immediate proximity, as we use our bodies to confront and disrupt corrupt state practices. But every black person is in closer proximity to police violence than we sometimes choose to acknowledge: in many ways, we are all on the “front line” – whether we want to be or not.
But unlike Coates, McKesson has a more optimistic view of the arc of history:
We did not start this. We have never started any of it. They kill(ed) us. They creat(ed) systems to harm us. We did not start this. We are fighting to end it.
We are, and have always been, more than our pain. We will win.
It’s hard to say that Bernie wouldn’t have met with a prominent activist—one who was recently named of one Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders, and one who’d recently met with Hillary to discuss similar issues—if it weren’t for Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford interrupting Bernie’s speech at Westlake Center earlier this month, but the fact that Bernie’s campaign was so quick to respond to McKesson’s tweet suggests that they’re listening to these young activists and are willing to keep listening.
