Thread by @jessesingal

1/ One more point on this fascinating story that you should read, if only to rubberneck: I'm intrigued by the extent to which people overlook a blindingly obvious reason why the DSA might be failing to appeal to people of color: It is associated with lots

newrepublic.com/article/152789…

2/ of radical positions! There's a misguided tendency among leftists, particularly white ones, to treat radical positions as inherently appealing to PoC. In this article alone, we hear that the East Bay DSA/people around it have bandied about ideas like cutting the Oakland police

3/ budget in half, and that many see any involvement in charter schools as politically disqualifying. The national DSA has endorsed prison abolition. Are African-Americans (to take one subset of PoC) broadly in favor of prison abolition and radically cutting police budgets, and

4/ staunchly opposed to charter schools? I'm having trouble finding much polling on the first two issues, but I'd be really skeptical! The poli sci on African-American attitudes toward the police/justice system show that it's long been a tortured relationship, but attitudes are

5/ a lot more complicated than simply wanting less policing -- in some cases, the complaint is that the police IGNORE black communities and don't protect them the way they do white ones. And police departments themselves are often heavily black. In Oakland, for example, 61.1%.

6/ So cutting the Oakland PD budget in half would mean hundreds of black people would lose some combination of their jobs, OT pay, or benefits -- factor in their friends and family and this is a policy that would likely face opposition from thousands of black Oakland residents.

7/ As for charter schools, the nationally representative surveys I can find suggest black liberals are MORE supportive of charter schools than white liberals! None of this suggests what the *right* policies on these questions are, of course. But they highlight that

8/ radical communities, particularly disproportionately white ones, sometimes have a way of essentializing and talking over people of color. And they REALLY have trouble internalizing the fact that there are some issues on which black liberals are a bit more conservative than

9/ white liberals on average. It's not an either-or thing -- it could be that some of the other factors mentioned in the TNR article ALSO make DSA less than appealing to nonwhites. But still: People take their cues about unfamiliar organizations from the news stories that trickle

10/ out, and if the sense people are getting about DSA is that it staunchly embraces the sorts of radical policies ticked off in this article, it's no wonder PoC might not be interested. If you're a white DSA member and your view of a black Oakland resident is someone who

11/will likely want to severely cut the police budget, rather than someone who very likely has a friend or relative IN the police dept., that suggests a blind spot, and that you're spending too much time with fellow DSA members and not enough with the community. (To be fair, the

12/ person who proposed cutting the budget happened to be black, but that doesn't detract from the broader point.)