Nader Confronts Minority Critics

It may seem odd for a presidential candidate who favors reparations for slavery and regularly denounces the "discriminatory prison-industrial complex" to be on the defensive about race relations, but that's exactly where Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader has found himself this week.

After being accused by several business-oriented minority groups on Monday of being "oblivious" to race and gender issues and of campaigning in a "cloistered environment" of white males, Nader spoke out Thursday in uncharacteristically specific language against the "racial chasm" and the "discrimination [that] persists throughout American life."

In his statement, and in meetings Wednesday with Wisconsin minority leaders, Nader sought to quell what has for him become a disturbing trend: groups on the left wing of the Democratic Party challenging his progressive credentials

This month alone, Liberal icon Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) has traveled to Wisconsin to convince Nader supporters that Gore is actually better on red-meat liberal issues; Robert Kennedy Jr. -- whose father was one of the few politicians Nader has ever truly admired -- has told anyone who will listen that a vote for the Green Party candidate would be a vote against the environment; National Organization of Women President Patricia Ireland accused Nader of being "willfully ignorant" of women's issues; and Monday's letter charges the candidate with failing to actively seek minority support.

"Mexican-American people, poor people, need him the most," Ben Benavidez, president emeritus of the Mexican American Political Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "In the [California] Central Valley, we never see him here."

Nader and his supporters have lashed back at the critics, accusing them of acting out of "political expediency," or suffering from "Frightened Liberal Syndrome."

"It just shows you how totally servile some of these constituency groups are toward the Democratic Party," Nader said last week in Las Vegas. "[They] have been given the back of the hand for eight years by the Democratic Party, but crawl to an endorsement in return for no policy agenda because 'They're not as bad as George Bush.'"

But behind the political skirmishing there are some very real differences in approach towards race between Nader and his critics on the Left. Where they see a Green Party and presidential campaign made up largely of middle-class whites, he sees "constituency group" critics hooked on "symbolism" instead of progress.

Where some of his critics see a candidate who, in the words of writer Vanessa Daniel, "appears to be tiptoeing around an elephant when he fails to mention ... race and racism," Nader sees a more "systemic" class struggle against corporations, of which racial discrimination is an important but lesser component.

And when potential supporters all but plead for a warmer, more human personal touch, Nader stubbornly remains who he is: a solitary and frequently awkward man who brags that his campaign is "about ideas, not emotion."

Uses a Different Lens

Perhaps the most accurate critique of Nader is that he rarely spotlights problems through the lens of race.

"Nader often speaks to problems that have their most devastating effects in communities of color," Daniel wrote. "However, he almost never points to the racial dimensions of these issues."

A reading of Nader's writing quickly bears this out. In 19 months worth of columns posted on his Web site, he uses the words "African-American," "black," "Latino," "Hispanic," "minority" and "race" a total of nine times combined, over 69 columns. In one press conference last week, by comparison, he used the words "corporate" or "corporation" at least 57 times.

Nader's overriding ideology -- shaped by a career which began with him exposing faulty General Motors designs and then being hounded by GM private investigators -- is that corporations, "will push the envelope to its limit of oppression if they're allowed to," as he told a Long Beach State class last week. Nader, comfortable in the role of pedant, often lectures his fellow travelers in The Struggle about how their narrow concerns are part of a broader pattern of corporate wrongdoing.