Hillary Clinton’s Black Lives Matter ‘Disruption’ Is Nothing Like Bernie Sander’s Shutdowns

The latest faux “confrontation” between Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Black Lives Matter movement happened Thursday afternoon in Ohio, where protesters holding signs yelled a few demands about black transgender women from a great distance at Mrs. Clinton.

The moment was captured on video:

Video from today’s #BlackTransLivesMatter action calling on @HillaryClinton to divest from private prisons… pic.twitter.com/yo2RqkZLFu

— GetEQUAL (@GetEQUAL) August 27, 2015

This latest non-frontation is much like the recent pleasant offstage chat Clinton had with Black Lives Matter activists, in that it’s a far cry from the multiple shutdowns that Clinton’s main opponent Bernie Sanders has faced from the groups. In two highly publicized direct actions by Black Lives Matter, Sanders was forced to flee the stage in Seattle and at the Netroots Nation conference.

In contrast to the screaming suppressing of Bernie Sanders, at Cleveland’s supposed disruption, one of the protestors told website Fusion that she made eye contact with Clinton once. Fusion also reported on the extremely narrow interest group, within an interest group agenda, of the two protestors—the issue of black transgender women, which has become a focus of Black Lives Matter recently:

“We called on [Clinton] to actually have a conversation with black trans women and take their lead,” said Angela Peoples, one of the women who disrupted the event. Peoples leads the grassroots LGBTQ network at the civil rights group GetEQUAL.

Peoples said she decided to disrupt the event after she heard there was a call for cisgender black men and women “to show up for black trans people.” She was referring to a call-to-action that Black Lives Matter activists in New York issued this week, asking members to hold rallies in honor of trans women. She carried a sign that read “Hillary: Divest from Private Prisons, Invest in Black Trans Women.”

“Hillary Clinton must stand with Black people, especially Black trans women, by refusing to accept funds from or bundled by executives of or lobbyists for private prison companies—and investing the money she’s already accepted from those companies in the work toward Black trans liberation,” said Rian Brown, an organizer with GetEQUAL, in a statement sent to Fusion. “Until that happens, we cannot for a moment think that Hillary believes Black Lives Matter.”

However narrow the demographic, Black Lives Matter has gotten traction: Fusion said that “earlier this week, 100 civil-rights groups wrote a letter to the White House urging the administration not to transfer transgender immigrant detainees to a private prison in California with a history of alleged abuse.”