"Sixty cents of every $1 of U.S. budget goes to the military-industrial complex, Trump’s $750 billion military budget. Who voted for that? Democrats as well as Republicans. That’s part of the imperial extension, that makes it difficult for us to speak to issues of healthcare, jobs with a living wage. It suffocates the domestic agenda. And Martin Luther King Jr., our dear Sister Dolores and Cesar Chavez and others, those grand exemplars of the social movements of the past, they understood that. And I think that’s part of the challenge that we have to bring." - West
- Well, as you know, I was blessed to do over a hundred events for my dear brother [Bernie Sanders]. And this is the first time I’ve had a chance to publicly endorse him again, but yes, indeed. I’ll be in his corner that we’re going to win this time. And it has to do with the Martin Luther King like criteria of assessing a candidate namely the issues of militarism, poverty, materialism, and racism, xenophobia in all of its forms that includes any kind of racism as you know against black people, brown people, yellow people, anybody, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Kashmirians, Tibetans and so forth. So that there’s no doubt that the my dear brother Bernie stands shoulders above any of the other candidates running in the Democratic primary when it comes to that Martin Luther King-like standards or criteria.
- Quoted in: Cornel West on Bernie, Trump, and Racism, The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan (7 March 2019)
- [Bernie Sanders is]...an anti-racist in his heart. Two, he’s old-school. He’s like me. He doesn’t know the buzzwords. He doesn’t endorse reparations, one moment in the last 30 years, silent on it. He has the consistency over the years decade after decade and therefore it’s true in his language, in his rhetoric. There are times in which he doesn’t... use the same kind of buzzwords. But when it comes to his fight against racism, going to jail in Chicago as a younger brother and he would go to jail again. He and I would go to jail together again in terms of fighting against police brutality. So in that sense, I would just tell my brothers and sisters, but especially my chocolate ones that they shouldn’t be blinded by certain kinds of words they’re looking for, that in the end, he is a long distance runner in the struggle against white supremacy.
- Quoted in: Cornel West on Bernie, Trump, and Racism, The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan (7 March 2019)