The self-described democratic socialist presidential candidate was in Seattle to not only raise money for his campaign but to speak at the downtown celebration of Social Security’s 80th anniversary. The two protesters crashed the stage soon after Sanders started speaking and quickly began screaming their demands to be heard or they would shut down the event. Sanders and event organizers conceded to let them commemorate the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of an unarmed Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo.
When the protesters refused to give the floor back to Sanders, he quietly walked off and met with supporters.
Sanders shared his disappointment in a written statement following his aborted Westlake speech because, among other things, he fights institutional racism harder than any other presidential candidate, he said. Still, according to several local media reports of Sanders’ three events, the majority of his audiences were white. The activists called the Westlake gathering’s negative response “white supremacist liberalism.”
Though Sanders shared his progressive political message at a subsequent fundraising gathering in Capitol Hill and at a public rally of 15,000 at University of Washington’s Hec Edmundson Pavilion, it was still overshadowed by the protesters. And he obviously hasn’t reached the African-American community with his objectives.
At the same time, the activists need such a forum to communicate their anger to a larger population that has become complacent about the police-related deaths of African-American men and women.
But their intention was marred by their own actions. Much like the disturbance protesters caused at Westlake Center’s tree-lighting ceremony last year, the main focus this time was on the intrusion.
If Sanders is, indeed, the presidential candidate who could forward their agenda, as he claims to be, then the activists have missed an opportunity to discover this. Or they could have held him accountable for his perceived inactions there on-stage, instead of reportedly threatening to do so after the Westlake rally.
Black Lives Matter Seattle admittedly says, in a press release posted on Facebook, “We honor black lives by doing the unthinkable, the unapologetic and the unrespectable.” They should, by all means, continue to do the unthinkable to get everyone else thinking and be unapologetic about their efforts. But to honor anyone’s life is to respect it, yourself and others. Doing so would better serve the activists’ cause since they won’t need to fight so hard to be heard by the people they’re protesting.