Writer and lawyer Jonathan Cahn explains why he's voting for Hillary Clinton as a black man in this post originally featured on Medium [1].

In an interview with Spike Lee in The Hollywood Reporter [2] today Sanders was asked about what he could do to strengthen his support among older African-Americans voters.

"You're like the new guy on the block." Said Lee, "You've got the young Hispanic, African-American, you got it. But the older generation, black folks, they know the Clintons 20-some years."

According to Sanders, "It's the weirdest thing in the world."

As an older black man and a Hillary supporter, I assure him it is not.

My support of the Secretary has nothing to do with a lack of education, as he and his surrogates have suggested was true in South Carolina, loyalty to the Clinton brand, or, as Lee suggests, a particular fondness for the dulcet tones of Bill's saxophone.

This is not to say that all old, educated black men are for Hillary. In a Politico article published in February titled "Brother Bernie is Better for Black People than Sister Hillary [3]," Cornel West writes that "As president, [Bernie] would be a more progressive than not just Clinton but also Obama — and that means better for black America."

It is an intellectual sleight of hand to suggest, as does brother Cornell, that Clinton is somehow emblematic of an Establishment that has never allowed a woman to be seated at the head of the table, or to suggest that the Congressional Black Caucus, which has endorsed Clinton [4], is somehow less a legitimate voice of black people because they don't pass brother Cornell's Leftist litmus test.

When I was 13, I picked up a copy of Das Kapital. I carried it around with me until my mother found it, lying on the kitchen table. "Only white people can afford this crap." she said, and in one dismissive gesture, disposed of Karl Marx, the white liberal left, and black people naïve enough to follow either.

She would do the same to Brother Cornell's argument, had she not passed away in 1991.

My mother was Jean Camper Cahn [5], a black lawyer and social activist who, with my father, led the fight to establish Federal financing of legal services for the poor. She represented Congressman Adam Clayton Powell as his legal counsel before the Supreme Court, stood behind King when he gave his "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and was the first director of the National Legal Services Program in President Johnson's War on Poverty.

And while she's not here to counsel my eldest through her twenties, or to see my youngest cast her first vote; to witness the rise of Trump, or the circus that is our 24-hour news cycle, I can say with some certainty what she'd make of the race between Bernie and Hillary. She put a high premium on guts and on staying power, because she knew that guts always trumped liberal rhetoric, because in a fight there is no one more dangerous than the friend who abandons you.

So, who has really got our back?

There is a reason that African-American activists in Sanders' home state of Vermont are not overly fond of him. Curtiss Reed Jr., the executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, told The Daily Beast, that he remembers the senator as "just really dismissive of anything that had to do with race and racism, saying that they didn't have anything to do with the issues of income inequality [6]."

In response to this, Sanders' supporters cite his brief and localized involvement in the civil rights movement. His sacrifices are limited to one arrest for protesting and a bad GPA from neglecting his studies, but West insists that his nomination would "put a smile on Martin's face from the grave."

Hillary Rodham Clinton is interested in change she can deliver, and in promises she can keep. She is a woman who converted her position as First Lady, to Senator, to Presidential candidate, to Secretary of State, to again Presidential candidate. That we have a woman in our country who, despite the odds stacked against women, has risen and repeatedly outflanked her adversaries at every turn, and that we doubt her qualifications says a great deal.

As the primaries drag on, I know that those of us feeling the Bern will continue to doubt, deride, and scoff at a woman who's worked indefatigably for over 40 years in support of essential and life-changing issues, all in favor of a candidate that has only ever been our friend when he needed us.

For my part, what Adam Clayton Powell once said of my mother, I now say of Hillary Clinton: "The sister is the one who knows what she's talking about."