LAS VEGAS, Nevada, U.S.A. — A pressing concern is whether U.S. Democratic actually care about African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American candidates, considering how racial minority candidates were shut out of the presidential race for the highest office.
African American candidates were left out of running for the presidency, but issues facing African Americans remain important for the future of the nation.
How much did white Democratic candidates talk about African Americans in the U.S. Democratic presidential debate? Below are all the mentions of Blacks and African Americans from the U.S. Democratic presidential debate.
O’MALLEY: We’ve saved over a thousand lives in Baltimore in the last 15 years of people working together. And the vast majority of them were young and poor and Black. It wasn’t easy on any day. But we saved lives and we gave our city a better future, improving police and community relations every single day that I was in office.
Anderson, the point that the Black Lives Matter movement is making is a very, very legitimate and serious point, and that is that as a nation we have undervalued the lives of black lives, people of color.
When I ran for Mayor of Baltimore — and we we burying over 350 young men ever single year, mostly young, and poor, and Black, and I said to our legislature, at the time when I appeared in front of them as a mayor, that if we were burying white, young, poor men in these number we would be marching in the streets and there would be a different reaction.
Black lives matter, and we have a lot of work to do to reform our criminal justice system, and to address race relations in our country.
I did not make our city immune to setbacks. But I attended a lot of funerals, including one for a family of seven who were firebombed in their sleep for picking up the phone in a poor African-American neighborhood and calling the police because of drug dealers on their corner.
SANDERS: Black lives matter.
Today in America, we have more people in jail than any other country on Earth. African-American youth unemployment is 51 percent. Hispanic youth unemployment is 36 percent. It seems to me that instead of building more jails and providing more incarceration, maybe — just maybe — we should be putting money into education and jobs for our kids.
And the reason — the reason those words matter is the African American community knows that on any given day some innocent person like Sandra Bland can get into a car, and then three days later she’s going to end up dead in jail, or their kids are going to get shot.
CHAFEE: America has many challenges confronting us — ending the perpetual wars, addressing climate change, addressing income inequality, funding education, funding infrastructure, funding healthcare, helping Black Americans, helping Native Americans. We have many challenges. Who is best able to confront these challenges?
WEBB: And as a clarification, I have always supported affirmative action for African Americans. That’s the way the program was originally designed because of their unique history in this country, with slavery and the Jim Crow laws that followed.
As a President of the United States, every life in this country matters. At the same time, I believe I can say to you, I have had a long history of working with the situation of African Americans. We’re talking about criminal justice reform, I risked my political life raising the issue of criminal justice reform when I ran for the Senate in Virginia in 2006.
I also represented a so-called war criminal, an African American Marine who was wounded — who was convicted of murder in Vietnam, for six years. He took his life three years into this. I cleared his name after — after three years.
And I put the African American soldier on the Mall. I made that recommendation and fought for it.
CLINTON: ZERO mentions!
She shouldn’t get away with this Africa America. You have to hold this woman to her bluff. She thinks she doesn’t need the Black vote. She even scoffs at it. Why give this lady the nomination. No. She is not good for Black America in the same way that here husband, Bill Clinton, was bad for African Americans, locking millions up for absolutely no law enforcement reason.
She cannot eat her cake and then have it. In this case she didn’t even bother to recognize the husband had eaten that cake long before she caught him with Monika Lewinsky. It is a problem. I hope African Americans will stay away from Hilary Clinton for a CHANGE!