I just need to document this somewhere, because it is beginning to piss me off.
Most of us have seen Bernie’s “closing argument” ad in Iowa, an evocative and brilliant piece of political advertising set to Paul Simon’s iconic song “America”. I will not go into all the reasons why it is moving and effective. People will be studying it for years to come.
Clinton surrogate David Brock, however, felt a need to pee in the punchbowl with these words:
From this ad it seems black lives don’t matter much to Bernie Sanders
creating a manufactured “controversy” over the number of black people in the ad.
But David Brock (or whoever put those words in his mouth) is the one for whom black lives don’t matter, since he (or whoever put those words in his mouth) apparently watched the ad and did not see the black people who appear in it.
From a lifetime of practice I am something of an expert at the “count the black people” game.
I can tell you stories of scanning the entirety of Boston Garden trying to count the number of black folks at a Bob Dylan concert, or the entire of Rosemont Horizon trying to count the number of black folks at a Bruce Springsteen concert (i think that was the time my friend and I successfully sneaked backstage claiming to be relatives of Clarence Clemons).
But without going into details, suffice it to say that when I look at a crowd of people I think I am better at accurately noticing the number of people of color who are present than people who have not had reason to practice this over a number of decades.
The very first time I saw the America ad, I remember thinking it was cool that, in addition to the black faces featured, there were black folks visible in the background. No big deal, they are just a part of the people who are present and hanging around the campaign.
So when this charge that the ad was “too white” was first floated, I was surprised. For an ad aimed at Iowa, I figured the number of people I saw was about right for 60 seconds.
After hearing the too white charge one time too many, I watched the ad in slow/stop motion and was able to see a few more PoC:
at :20 there is a person sitting in the front, a woman in blue in the back with a sign, and a man at the far right
at :21 the featured woman is enthusiastically slapping hands, but another woman 3 people behind her in the line looks similar to her
at :30 a black man is walking behind Bernie and Jane (may be a security person?)
at :31 there is a man in a baseball cap at far right, a man in a green suit center left, and a person with glasses behind man in green suit. The man in the center of the shot standing right behind the woman in the American flag shirt could be a PoC but it’s hard to know
in the :33 to :36 montage there seem to be faces of many different colors going by. the still photo at the top of the diary shows one black woman and we can also see the same faces are repeated more than once.
at :40 there is a black woman on the rope line
at :41 Bernie has his arm around a black woman, but there are also two black men in the shot, one wearing glasses at the far left and one wearing a sweatshirt and walking behind Bernie from the right
the woman in the center frame at :42 and the man with the Robin Hood Tax sign at :44 may not be African American, but they are people of color
the man and little girl at :47 have been called PoC by others, but I am not a good judge of that
at :49 there appears to be a black woman holding a sign at center right and an Asian woman cheering at bottom center
at :54 there appears to be an Asian woman cheering at center left
and at :57 in the closing “warm smile” shot, there is a young man with glasses who might be Asian applauding at the top left.
I saw about half these people the very first time I saw the ad, but since my gut was telling me there might be more, I was not surprised to see additional faces of color after I slowed it down to watch it one second at a time.
In short, when I saw the ad the very first time I noticed there were people of color in it in addition to the ones who are more prominently featured.
So I will answer David Brock’s specious assertion with an assertion of my own:
Anyone who looked at the America ad and decided that it showed black lives don’t matter needs to check his or her own privilege.
How much do black lives matter to someone who can look right at people of color and not see them there?
update: after I hit publish I realized I had forgotten to include the ad itself...