Bernie's Campaign Killed by Diversity?

The 2020s will likely be defined by the push for diversity among the Democrats and left wing parties throughout the Western world. Nothing will be considered good enough unless there is adequate representation of each group. The recent DNC convention shows as much: 

Top Latino activists and politicians are criticizing the lack of representation during this week's Democratic National Convention. 

Only three Latino speakers have their own speaking slot in the Democratic National Convention’s primetime lineup: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada.

 ,,,

 "I’d be lying to you if I said that I’m not disappointed that there aren't more Latinos and Latinas generally speaking on that program," Castro told MSNBC Saturday, adding that he's also disappointed that there isn't someone who is Native or Muslim American speaking during this primetime hour.

"You think about the beautiful coalition that has become the Democratic Party over the last few years, I'm not sure right now that it's fully represented on that stage," he added.

 USA Today

Ultimately, we can imagine that every single political campaign will see its diversity credentials brought into question. 

Indeed, it is potentially the case that some campaigns may even sabotage themselves by putting too much faith in diversity, as may be the case with the Sanders campaign. Some have put forth the theory that the bid of Bernie Sanders to win the nomination was ultimately destroyed by clamoring about making the staff more representative, which led to incompetent people being placed in key positions. 

Part of the explanation for this lies in the 2020 iteration of the Sanders campaign being predicated on multiple concessions to bad-faith critics. Immediately upon his official entry into the race last February, Sanders apologized for the 2016 campaign having been “too white and too male-oriented.” ... To make amends and preempt any future identity-related attacks, the 2020 campaign staff was heavily diversified. And at least in the case of South Carolina—in retrospect the most important primary state of the 2020 cycle—many of these personnel were hobbled by remarkable incompetence, while internal campaign criticism became impossible.

 Much of the day-to-day logistics of the Sanders South Carolina campaign were run de facto by Nina Turner, a talented orator and popular media surrogate, but someone whose skill set was clearly not suited to bolstering the image of a socialist from Vermont among southern black voters. For one thing, Turner’s political background was in metro Cleveland, which provides no necessary insight into best practices for winning over elderly, churchgoing black Democrats in the Deep South.

 In November 2019, Turner installed Jessica Bright as state director. Former staff members said Bright, who served as a Hillary Clinton delegate at the 2016 national convention, was hired in large part because her mother had filled the seat of Clementa Pinckney—the state senator killed in the 2015 Charleston church shooting. The idea was that such a transactional arrangement might compel the mother to endorse Sanders. “She couldn’t spell, she couldn’t speak coherently, and her mother ended up endorsing Biden,” one anguished former staffer recalled.2 Not only did basic tasks go unfulfilled, phone-banking and canvassing data were outright fabricated, multiple former staffers alleged, and sent to the national campaign headquarters to give the false impression of good progress being made in the state. “But you can’t say anything,” one staffer recounted thinking, “be­cause you’d be called a racist.” Communicating rationally with the twenty- and thirtysomething campaign staffers who dominated the South Carolina operation, this person said, was virtually impossible—almost like some kind of impenetrable generational and ideological divide had been erected. “I felt like I was in a daycare facility. These kids were just so clueless, and so full of themselves,” the person lamented. “It was a really dystopian feeling to work there, it was not like anything I’d ever been involved with.”3

American Affairs Journal 

Had Sanders received reliable data, he may have campaigned entirely different. Had there been a competent staff, the campaign may have made headway instead of rotting on the vine. 

While these sorts of what-ifs are impossible to resolve, it is certainly worth considering, especially as this problem looks like it will not be going away anytime soon. 

Colonialism & La Raza Cósmica

Res nullius, or terra nullius, was a doctrine that basically justified the colonization of massive parts of the world. Honestly, this is something that modern scholars have read back into the colonization efforts. Essentially, it deals with the justification for the taking of land from native populations. 

Basically, if a land is not effectively occupied, it is nobody's land. Some of the definitions try to make this more concrete by talking about societies that have not yet advanced to a position where they had not yet mixed their labor with the earth in any permanent way (Frost), but I think it may be more appropriate to emphasize the sparsity of population that usually described most of these places. The land was simply never occupied in truly significant ways, for one, and the obvious fact that when the English colonists took up position in Massachusetts Bay they could easily negotiate for settlement rights. 

The land could fit a lot more people than the 5,000 or so that were there, and, especially through technology and trade that the natives did not have, they would be able to radically change the region. We could say that the Europeans were able to apply a mix of res nullius and negotiated settlement: it was obvious that there was enough room for both parties, and it was also obvious that there would be advantages to mixing with the Europeans, so why not negotiate it? Why not be cooperative? 

From the perspective of the natives, the sacrifice of some amount of their hunting grounds for new potential allies that could give them trade and technological advances that would put them above their enemies. Moreover, the Wampanoag had just suffered a massive crisis of disease -- oddly enough, disease that may have had no connection to European colonization, and the disease even resulted in a spiritual crisis as their medicine men could not handle or explain it, and it led to many converting to Christianity early on (Wikipedia).

Obviously, conflict eventually occurred, and one can imagine that very similar stories unfolded in many other regions, where the initial settling was met with some amount of peace and acceptance, but it all boiled over, as it eventually boils over. 

I believe that when we think about the history of colonization in these terms, it is more understandable. Just as such, most sticking points in history can be tackled when we understand that the problem was less black & white. 

But because the interpretation of history can be weaponized for advancing a left or right position, we have to actually resolve it in a more final way. 

Cue la raza cósmica.

Perhaps the one thing that makes this a sticking point in North America is the lack of intermixing. The narrative among Latinos, as I understand it, is that they have become la raza cósmica -- the problem of colonization is resolved by bringing all Latino identity into a single racial construct. 

Are latinos white? Yes. 

Are they Indian? Yes.

Are they black? Yes. 

Can more recent immigrants from Asia and the Middle East have children & grandchildren grafted onto the Latino community? Well, that's the plan, isn't it? The Latin Americans are the cosmic race being unfurled by God: all peoples coming together into a post-racial existence. 

In a sense, the cosmic race is the post-race. 

While I am not sure if this is what was meant by Vasconcelos when he wrote about it in the 1920s, this is how I have understood it from interactions with a limited amount of Latinos that I know. The undestanding is far from scholarly, but just like in most cases, the folk understanding of an idea is often more important than the scholarly version. 

Jose Vasconcelos who coined the term 'cosmic race'

The Latin American world solved the problem of the legacy of colonialism through dissolution of racial identity and intermarriage. While there may still be some that think in terms of castizos & mestizos, and it may even be a theme that would one day reemerge, it is effective in making the sins of history be forgotten via the union of victim & offender into a single national identity. 

In a sense, it is the most elegant of all resolutions, for it renders conflict irrelevant by making the grief and guilty a little bit of everybody's, and its measuring becomes something irrelevant. It could even be said that the only reason that "native lands" is still relevant among Norte Americanos is because they have not dissolved their differences through intermarriage.

The racial heterogeneity of North Americans, and their obsession with diversity, may actually be what is holding them back from fixing the problem. Nobody can move forward because we are still in the game of counting grievances and using history to jockey for position. We are stuck in a narrative of diversity that is not helpful, instead of a narrative that resolves our identities into a single one.