Is Bernie Sanders the Racially Blind "White" Democratic Candidate?

This post is conceived as a response to Joan Walsh in The Nation ("What's Wrong With Bernie Sanders's Strategy," The Nation (3/21/16), at: http://www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-with-bernie-sanderss-strategy/).  Walsh, who apparently is an expert on the latent problem of trying to build a successful electoral strategy around the idea of winning White, working-class Reagan Democrats back to the Democratic Party, makes the argument that this is precisely the source of Sanders' failure to generate greater momentum among African-American voters in Southern Democratic primaries.  To take Walsh's argument a step further than she seems to be willing to take it, the sort of electoral mass that Sanders seeks to assemble to win Democratic primaries in economically marginalized constituencies in the South and in other less favored regions appears to be decisively split on racial lines, with African-Americans voting for Clinton and White working-class voters overwhelmingly sticking to the GOP and running into the arms of Donald Trump.  Who can help the confusion of working-class Whites?  Both Trump and Sanders appear as decisive and uncompromising enemies of free trade and globalization, generally!  Oddly enough, for the sake of at least maintaining some appeal along these lines, Clinton now opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that, in principle, I would support but, in its details, few people can because its details have in no way been clarified!  Proceeding thus, Trump appears to manifest himself as the implicit and never mentioned background to Walsh's piece, in the same sense that the initial White, working-class turn toward the GOP demanded Reagan.
               Being a post-structuralist Marxist thinker, this piece just screams out the larger conclusion that, notwithstanding all of the old-time united front strategies of the 1930s, there is no such thing as a monolithic working-class voter, either in the United States or anywhere else!  Conversely, it seems somehow to be my mission here to argue, as decisively as I can, that there are no monolithic White voters and no monolithic African-American voters in the Democratic primaries, their results notwithstanding (to say nothing about monolithic women voters!!).  That is to say, if we want to be truly serious about the demographics of the Democratic primaries, then we have to acknowledge the multifarious cross-cutting racial, ethnic, and gender specificities of the Democratic electorate, the relative appeal of particular policy positions by particular candidates toward particular constituencies, and the relative effects of mass media and social media on the electorate.  In these respects, it might be true that Sanders has not made a career in Washington by catering to traditionally African-American issues.  For that matter, neither has Hillary Clinton.  Walsh acknowledges substantially that Clinton's 2008 campaign for the nomination against Obama was oriented toward a Democratic "Southern strategy" to rebuild the "(Bill) Clinton coalition."  I may have missed something but it does not seem abundantly clear, at a time where the idea that "Black lives matter" has entered into debate in the mainstream American consciousness, that Hillary Clinton has ever embarked on a strategy that might, in some way, be characterized as an appeal to African-American voters.  In this respect, no, I don't buy Walsh's argument on Clinton's electoral strategy in 2016 - Clinton has done absolutely nothing in my view to command a decisive advantage against Sanders with African-American voters.  As such, I cannot help but say that when I saw the results of voting in South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, notwithstanding the pronouncements of political analysts, I could not help but question why so many African-American voters would have instinctively thrown their support to Hillary Clinton with nothing at least palpably suggested as a possible return to their support.
               In the end, two propositions seem clear to explain why Clinton has, to date, run away with African-American support in the Democratic primaries.  First, working-class African-American voters seem even less inclined than working-class White voters, especially in Southern states, to cast votes for a self-described "democratic socialist."  Second, working-class White voters, especially in Southern states, seem much more inclined to cross party lines to vote for Trump, Cruz, or other Republican primary candidates than to stick around to decide whether they want to choose between a corrupt Washington veteran from a Democratic political dynasty and an out-in-left-field radical socialist.  Either way, there is something to Walsh's notion that a working-class White strategy, at least in the Democratic primaries, is a dead end, but not as much as she seems to want to make of it.  Emphatically, African-American voters, especially in Southern Democratic primaries, are voting for Clinton because they perceive that they have no where else to go - what good is it ever going to do to listen to the promises of socialist?!  On the other hand, no one on the other side of the two-party divide is, in any way, singing their tune, even if Hillary Clinton isn't exactly Aretha Franklin!  In the end, I am not prepared to make a big deal about the racial dynamics of the 2016 Democratic primaries - Bernie Sanders might be the Democratic Socialist candidate in the race, but he is by no means the definitively White candidate, at least with respect to the positions embodied either on the Clinton or Sanders side of the contest.  There are other sources readily evident for the racial divide between the Democratic candidates, especially in the Southern primaries.