Nina Turner, the former national co-chairwoman of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential campaign, in a Monday interview with Hill.TV’s “Rising” praised Cornel West’s comments criticizing black leaders.
Asked Monday on The Hill.TV’s Rising to respond to West’s remarks, Turner called them “poignant, right on time, as usual an indictment of both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.”
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the death of George Floyd, West said, “It looks as if the system cannot reform itself.”
He said it wasn’t enough to elect black people and argued for a change from a capitalist culture.
“We’ve tried black faces in high places. Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class, become too accommodated to the capitalist economy,” West said in the interview. “Too accommodated to the militarized nation state, too accommodated to the market culture tied with celebrity status, power, fame, all of that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens.”
Turner applauded West for “not letting anybody go unscathed.”
“It is not enough to just have somebody of a certain ethnic or racial group in leadership if that person or those people don’t have a deep-seated commitment to justice and to love,” Turner said.
“Dr. West is making people very uncomfortable, especially the Democrats, and they should be uncomfortable,” she added. “For me right now, this is not about your political affiliation, this is about right or wrong. Whether you have the commitment, the character, the clarity, the vision and the leadership to sacrifice something and to do the right thing on behalf of black people in the United States of America.”
Floyd died last week in Minneapolis police custody. An officer who put his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes as he was pinned to the ground has been charged with murder.
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