Berniemademewhite

2016Hashtag / political satiredead

Also known as: Bernie Made Me White

Berniemademewhite is a March 2016 satirical Twitter hashtag by Leslie Lee III celebrating minority Bernie Sanders supporters and countering narratives of overwhelmingly white campaign support.

#BernieMadeMeWhite was a satirical Twitter hashtag created in March 2016 by Black writer Leslie Lee III to mock media outlets that characterized Bernie Sanders' support base as overwhelmingly white, even after Sanders won landslide victories in ethnically diverse states like Hawaii. The hashtag trended at #1 in the United States on March 27, 2016, with Sanders supporters of color using humor to push back against the "Bernie Bro" narrative that erased their existence from the political conversation3.

TL;DR

#BernieMadeMeWhite was a satirical Twitter hashtag created in March 2016 by Black writer Leslie Lee III to mock media outlets that characterized Bernie Sanders' support base as overwhelmingly white, even after Sanders won landslide victories in ethnically diverse states like Hawaii.

Overview

#BernieMadeMeWhite was a hashtag movement where people of color who supported Bernie Sanders joked that their political preference had magically turned them white. The humor worked on a simple premise: if media coverage kept insisting Sanders only appealed to white voters, then non-white Sanders supporters must have undergone some kind of racial transformation3. Participants posted jokes about suddenly enjoying stereotypically "white" activities like binge-watching *Friends*, drinking pumpkin spice lattes, and singing "Don't Stop Believin'" at karaoke3. The hashtag doubled as sharp media criticism and comedic relief during a tense primary season.

On March 26, 2016, Bernie Sanders swept the Democratic caucuses in Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska by massive margins1. CNN senior digital correspondent Chris Moody wrote in his analysis of the results: "These caucus states, largely white and rural, are the type of places Sanders traditionally does well"4. The problem was obvious to anyone who checked a census report. Hawaii's white non-Hispanic population sits at roughly 26.7%4. It is the least white state in the entire country7. Alaska, where one-third of the population is Native, is the sixth least white state10. The Washington Post ran a headline about "caucuses in whiter states" before quietly changing it2.

The next day, March 27, 2016, Leslie Lee III, a Black American freelance writer and educator living in Japan, tweeted: "I knew it. I knew if Bernie won Hawaii it would magically become a white state"3. He followed up with: "Ever since I voted for Bernie, I've been bingewatching Friends. #BernieMadeMeWhite"8. The tweet picked up 668 retweets and over 1,900 likes4.

Lee told NPR he created the hashtag to contradict what he saw as a persistent media erasure. "Me, myself, and many other POC, people of color, who support Bernie Sanders, feel like we don't get to be a part of the conversation. We get ignored. We get erased"3. His approach was deliberately playful: "Hey, if you're gonna ignore me as a black person, I might as well embrace my whiteness. I might as well start watching *Friends*, or enjoying pumpkin spice latte"3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter
Key People
Leslie Lee III
Date
2016
Year
2016

On March 26, 2016, Bernie Sanders swept the Democratic caucuses in Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska by massive margins. CNN senior digital correspondent Chris Moody wrote in his analysis of the results: "These caucus states, largely white and rural, are the type of places Sanders traditionally does well". The problem was obvious to anyone who checked a census report. Hawaii's white non-Hispanic population sits at roughly 26.7%. It is the least white state in the entire country. Alaska, where one-third of the population is Native, is the sixth least white state. The Washington Post ran a headline about "caucuses in whiter states" before quietly changing it.

The next day, March 27, 2016, Leslie Lee III, a Black American freelance writer and educator living in Japan, tweeted: "I knew it. I knew if Bernie won Hawaii it would magically become a white state". He followed up with: "Ever since I voted for Bernie, I've been bingewatching Friends. #BernieMadeMeWhite". The tweet picked up 668 retweets and over 1,900 likes.

Lee told NPR he created the hashtag to contradict what he saw as a persistent media erasure. "Me, myself, and many other POC, people of color, who support Bernie Sanders, feel like we don't get to be a part of the conversation. We get ignored. We get erased". His approach was deliberately playful: "Hey, if you're gonna ignore me as a black person, I might as well embrace my whiteness. I might as well start watching *Friends*, or enjoying pumpkin spice latte".

How It Spread

The hashtag caught fire within hours. Twitter user Chris420Redmond posted screenshots of two CNN segments side by side: one calling the caucus states "largely white and rural," and another from January calling an Anchorage neighborhood "the most diverse place in America." That tweet pulled in 1,000 retweets and nearly 1,000 likes. User welknett posted a photo of a Black woman and a white woman embracing with the caption "This isn't a picture of two friends, it's actually a before and after voting for Bernie pic," earning 2,074 retweets and 4,688 likes.

By 8:25 PM on March 27, Trendinalia data showed #BernieMadeMeWhite as the number one trending topic in the United States and the tenth top trending topic globally. It held as the 47th top trending topic the following day, March 28. Lee himself wrote in Jacobin that the hashtag beat out even #TheWalkingDead for the top spot.

The movement spawned related hashtags. Women tired of being dismissed as "Bernie Bros" launched #BernieMadeMeMale. Older voters pushed back with #BernieMadeMeYoung. Hispanic, Asian, Arab American, and Indigenous voters all contributed their own variations.

Major news outlets picked up the story quickly. NPR interviewed Lee on March 28. The BBC covered it as a spotlight on minority voters in the U.S.. Salon ran a lengthy piece connecting the hashtag to the broader "Bernie Bro" smear. BET, HuffPost, Yahoo News, the Observer, and Raw Story all published coverage. Notably absent from the coverage: CNN, whose reporting had sparked the whole thing.

How to Use This Meme

The #BernieMadeMeWhite format typically follows a simple pattern: a person of color jokes that supporting Bernie Sanders transformed them into a stereotypically white person.

Common approaches include:

1

The lifestyle change: "Ever since I voted for Bernie, I [stereotypically white activity]"

2

The before-and-after: Posting a photo showing a supposed racial transformation

3

The confession: Admitting to newly acquired "white" habits in a mock-confessional tone

4

The media callout: Directly quoting contradictory media coverage and adding the hashtag

Cultural Impact

The hashtag drew coverage from a wide range of major outlets across multiple countries. NPR, Salon, BBC News, BET, HuffPost, Yahoo News, the Observer, Jacobin, and Raw Story all ran stories. The BBC framed it as putting "a long-overdue spotlight on US minority voters".

The movement fed into a broader conversation about how American media defaults to a Black-white binary when discussing race, erasing Asian Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latino voters from political analysis. HuffPost noted that the 2010 census showed only 76% of Americans were non-Hispanic white or Black, down from 95% in 1970, yet political coverage hadn't caught up.

Within the Sanders campaign, the hashtag arrived at a useful moment. The campaign released a statement pointing to California polling showing Sanders leading among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders 43 to 35 percent. Sanders himself said in Wisconsin after the Saturday results: "It is hard for anybody to deny that our campaign has the momentum".

Full History

The roots of #BernieMadeMeWhite stretch back to late 2015, when The Atlantic's Robinson Meyer coined the term "Bernie Bro" to describe Sanders supporters as white and relatively affluent men "aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands". The framing stuck. Across months of primary coverage, the median Sanders voter was painted as a young white guy on Reddit. This narrative ran headfirst into a wall on Western Saturday.

Sanders didn't just win on March 26. He dominated. In Alaska, he led by nearly 60 percentage points. In Washington, he was ahead by more than 50 points, a margin that threatened to outpace Barack Obama's 2008 performance in the state. Hawaii went for Sanders in a landslide. Yet the immediate media framing slotted these wins into the existing template: white states, white voters, nothing to see here.

The Washington Post's original headline read "Why Did Bernie Sanders Dominate Saturday? Caucuses in Whiter States". The Atlantic and CNN offered similar characterizations. These assessments were, as HuffPost put it, "inexcusable from a fact-checking perspective". Hawaii has never had a white majority population in its history. Over half of all Hawaiians are Asian American, and more than 10% are Native Hawaiian. Washington ranks among the country's ten most diverse states.

Lee told Jacobin he and others had predicted the media would whitewash Sanders' anticipated Pacific victories. "But such brazen whitewashing was too much". His first tweet about binge-watching *Friends* set the tone: absurdist humor as political critique. The formula was simple and endlessly remixable. One Black woman tweeted a "confession" that she had "stopped carrying hot sauce in my bag ever since I got the heart bern". Another user joked: "This election I learned that black voters over the age of 45 in the deep south were the only racial minorities".

The hashtag's success exposed a genuine tension in the primary data. Sanders had struggled badly with Black voters in the South, winning only 14% of the Black vote in South Carolina. He freely admitted it, telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "We got decimated". But the picture was far more complicated than the coverage suggested. According to Reuters polling data, Sanders was at 60% among non-white voters under 35, and 54% among Black voters in that age group. Edison Research confirmed to NPR that among Black Americans aged 17 to 29, Sanders actually led Clinton 51 to 48 percent. Among Hispanics in that range, he led 66 to 34.

HuffPost raised another angle that got almost no coverage. The media's obsession with a Black-white binary erased entire populations. Native Hawaiians, Alaska Natives, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders were all rendered invisible by coverage that treated "non-white" as synonymous with "Black". A Los Angeles Times poll showed Sanders leading Clinton 43 to 35 percent among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in California.

Not everyone embraced the hashtag. Some Clinton supporters argued that #BernieMadeMeWhite proved "EXACTLY how white his supporters are". When it came out that Lee, a Black man, had started it, he was accused of being a "self-hating black man" and a "token". He received a direct message on Twitter containing a single word: "COON". At least one critic accused Lee of actually being white, an irony he did not let pass without comment.

The hashtag landed during a period when several prominent commentators had made statements that aged poorly in context. Gloria Steinem had suggested young women supported Sanders "because the boys are with Bernie". Clay Shirky had tweeted that supporting Sanders sent the message "Black votes don't matter," directed at a tweet by former NAACP President Ben Jealous. Joan Walsh of The Nation had commented on the whiteness of a Sanders rally in Washington just as a camera panned over Hispanic voters holding a "V-I-V-A B-E-R-N-I-E" sign.

Walsh was not impressed by #BernieMadeMeWhite. "Hashtags, while cool, can't create facts," she said. Lee pushed back: "When I told her that media figures like her are the reason why people are so upset, she responded: 'I'm sorry they feel erased by the demographic data provided by exit polls'".

Lee was realistic about the hashtag's limits. "It helps connect progressives on Twitter," he told NPR. "It's not going to convince people in the media that they're wrong. It's not going to convince people who support Hillary Clinton that they're wrong. But it is going to help connect people who do support Bernie Sanders and, more importantly, believe in progressive values".

Fun Facts

Lee was living in Japan when he created the hashtag, making this a case of American political satire originating from across the Pacific.

The hashtag peaked higher than #TheWalkingDead on Twitter trending charts that night.

CNN, whose reporting triggered the entire movement, was notably absent from outlets covering the hashtag's virality.

Lee told BET he considered Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton all racists, calling Sanders "the only candidate still in the race without a decades-long history of racism".

At least one person accused the hashtag's Black creator of being white, which is exactly the kind of irony the hashtag was designed to call out.

Derivatives & Variations

#BernieMadeMeMale:

Launched by women Sanders supporters who were tired of being lumped in with the "Bernie Bro" stereotype[7].

#BernieMadeMeYoung:

Used by older voters pushing back against the narrative that only young people supported Sanders[7].

CNN contradiction memes:

Screenshots placing CNN's "largely white and rural" description next to their own earlier reporting on Anchorage as "the most diverse place in America"[4].

Frequently Asked Questions

Berniemademewhite

2016Hashtag / political satiredead

Also known as: Bernie Made Me White

Berniemademewhite is a March 2016 satirical Twitter hashtag by Leslie Lee III celebrating minority Bernie Sanders supporters and countering narratives of overwhelmingly white campaign support.

#BernieMadeMeWhite was a satirical Twitter hashtag created in March 2016 by Black writer Leslie Lee III to mock media outlets that characterized Bernie Sanders' support base as overwhelmingly white, even after Sanders won landslide victories in ethnically diverse states like Hawaii. The hashtag trended at #1 in the United States on March 27, 2016, with Sanders supporters of color using humor to push back against the "Bernie Bro" narrative that erased their existence from the political conversation.

TL;DR

#BernieMadeMeWhite was a satirical Twitter hashtag created in March 2016 by Black writer Leslie Lee III to mock media outlets that characterized Bernie Sanders' support base as overwhelmingly white, even after Sanders won landslide victories in ethnically diverse states like Hawaii.

Overview

#BernieMadeMeWhite was a hashtag movement where people of color who supported Bernie Sanders joked that their political preference had magically turned them white. The humor worked on a simple premise: if media coverage kept insisting Sanders only appealed to white voters, then non-white Sanders supporters must have undergone some kind of racial transformation. Participants posted jokes about suddenly enjoying stereotypically "white" activities like binge-watching *Friends*, drinking pumpkin spice lattes, and singing "Don't Stop Believin'" at karaoke. The hashtag doubled as sharp media criticism and comedic relief during a tense primary season.

On March 26, 2016, Bernie Sanders swept the Democratic caucuses in Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska by massive margins. CNN senior digital correspondent Chris Moody wrote in his analysis of the results: "These caucus states, largely white and rural, are the type of places Sanders traditionally does well". The problem was obvious to anyone who checked a census report. Hawaii's white non-Hispanic population sits at roughly 26.7%. It is the least white state in the entire country. Alaska, where one-third of the population is Native, is the sixth least white state. The Washington Post ran a headline about "caucuses in whiter states" before quietly changing it.

The next day, March 27, 2016, Leslie Lee III, a Black American freelance writer and educator living in Japan, tweeted: "I knew it. I knew if Bernie won Hawaii it would magically become a white state". He followed up with: "Ever since I voted for Bernie, I've been bingewatching Friends. #BernieMadeMeWhite". The tweet picked up 668 retweets and over 1,900 likes.

Lee told NPR he created the hashtag to contradict what he saw as a persistent media erasure. "Me, myself, and many other POC, people of color, who support Bernie Sanders, feel like we don't get to be a part of the conversation. We get ignored. We get erased". His approach was deliberately playful: "Hey, if you're gonna ignore me as a black person, I might as well embrace my whiteness. I might as well start watching *Friends*, or enjoying pumpkin spice latte".

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter
Key People
Leslie Lee III
Date
2016
Year
2016

On March 26, 2016, Bernie Sanders swept the Democratic caucuses in Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska by massive margins. CNN senior digital correspondent Chris Moody wrote in his analysis of the results: "These caucus states, largely white and rural, are the type of places Sanders traditionally does well". The problem was obvious to anyone who checked a census report. Hawaii's white non-Hispanic population sits at roughly 26.7%. It is the least white state in the entire country. Alaska, where one-third of the population is Native, is the sixth least white state. The Washington Post ran a headline about "caucuses in whiter states" before quietly changing it.

The next day, March 27, 2016, Leslie Lee III, a Black American freelance writer and educator living in Japan, tweeted: "I knew it. I knew if Bernie won Hawaii it would magically become a white state". He followed up with: "Ever since I voted for Bernie, I've been bingewatching Friends. #BernieMadeMeWhite". The tweet picked up 668 retweets and over 1,900 likes.

Lee told NPR he created the hashtag to contradict what he saw as a persistent media erasure. "Me, myself, and many other POC, people of color, who support Bernie Sanders, feel like we don't get to be a part of the conversation. We get ignored. We get erased". His approach was deliberately playful: "Hey, if you're gonna ignore me as a black person, I might as well embrace my whiteness. I might as well start watching *Friends*, or enjoying pumpkin spice latte".

How It Spread

The hashtag caught fire within hours. Twitter user Chris420Redmond posted screenshots of two CNN segments side by side: one calling the caucus states "largely white and rural," and another from January calling an Anchorage neighborhood "the most diverse place in America." That tweet pulled in 1,000 retweets and nearly 1,000 likes. User welknett posted a photo of a Black woman and a white woman embracing with the caption "This isn't a picture of two friends, it's actually a before and after voting for Bernie pic," earning 2,074 retweets and 4,688 likes.

By 8:25 PM on March 27, Trendinalia data showed #BernieMadeMeWhite as the number one trending topic in the United States and the tenth top trending topic globally. It held as the 47th top trending topic the following day, March 28. Lee himself wrote in Jacobin that the hashtag beat out even #TheWalkingDead for the top spot.

The movement spawned related hashtags. Women tired of being dismissed as "Bernie Bros" launched #BernieMadeMeMale. Older voters pushed back with #BernieMadeMeYoung. Hispanic, Asian, Arab American, and Indigenous voters all contributed their own variations.

Major news outlets picked up the story quickly. NPR interviewed Lee on March 28. The BBC covered it as a spotlight on minority voters in the U.S.. Salon ran a lengthy piece connecting the hashtag to the broader "Bernie Bro" smear. BET, HuffPost, Yahoo News, the Observer, and Raw Story all published coverage. Notably absent from the coverage: CNN, whose reporting had sparked the whole thing.

How to Use This Meme

The #BernieMadeMeWhite format typically follows a simple pattern: a person of color jokes that supporting Bernie Sanders transformed them into a stereotypically white person.

Common approaches include:

1

The lifestyle change: "Ever since I voted for Bernie, I [stereotypically white activity]"

2

The before-and-after: Posting a photo showing a supposed racial transformation

3

The confession: Admitting to newly acquired "white" habits in a mock-confessional tone

4

The media callout: Directly quoting contradictory media coverage and adding the hashtag

Cultural Impact

The hashtag drew coverage from a wide range of major outlets across multiple countries. NPR, Salon, BBC News, BET, HuffPost, Yahoo News, the Observer, Jacobin, and Raw Story all ran stories. The BBC framed it as putting "a long-overdue spotlight on US minority voters".

The movement fed into a broader conversation about how American media defaults to a Black-white binary when discussing race, erasing Asian Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latino voters from political analysis. HuffPost noted that the 2010 census showed only 76% of Americans were non-Hispanic white or Black, down from 95% in 1970, yet political coverage hadn't caught up.

Within the Sanders campaign, the hashtag arrived at a useful moment. The campaign released a statement pointing to California polling showing Sanders leading among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders 43 to 35 percent. Sanders himself said in Wisconsin after the Saturday results: "It is hard for anybody to deny that our campaign has the momentum".

Full History

The roots of #BernieMadeMeWhite stretch back to late 2015, when The Atlantic's Robinson Meyer coined the term "Bernie Bro" to describe Sanders supporters as white and relatively affluent men "aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands". The framing stuck. Across months of primary coverage, the median Sanders voter was painted as a young white guy on Reddit. This narrative ran headfirst into a wall on Western Saturday.

Sanders didn't just win on March 26. He dominated. In Alaska, he led by nearly 60 percentage points. In Washington, he was ahead by more than 50 points, a margin that threatened to outpace Barack Obama's 2008 performance in the state. Hawaii went for Sanders in a landslide. Yet the immediate media framing slotted these wins into the existing template: white states, white voters, nothing to see here.

The Washington Post's original headline read "Why Did Bernie Sanders Dominate Saturday? Caucuses in Whiter States". The Atlantic and CNN offered similar characterizations. These assessments were, as HuffPost put it, "inexcusable from a fact-checking perspective". Hawaii has never had a white majority population in its history. Over half of all Hawaiians are Asian American, and more than 10% are Native Hawaiian. Washington ranks among the country's ten most diverse states.

Lee told Jacobin he and others had predicted the media would whitewash Sanders' anticipated Pacific victories. "But such brazen whitewashing was too much". His first tweet about binge-watching *Friends* set the tone: absurdist humor as political critique. The formula was simple and endlessly remixable. One Black woman tweeted a "confession" that she had "stopped carrying hot sauce in my bag ever since I got the heart bern". Another user joked: "This election I learned that black voters over the age of 45 in the deep south were the only racial minorities".

The hashtag's success exposed a genuine tension in the primary data. Sanders had struggled badly with Black voters in the South, winning only 14% of the Black vote in South Carolina. He freely admitted it, telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "We got decimated". But the picture was far more complicated than the coverage suggested. According to Reuters polling data, Sanders was at 60% among non-white voters under 35, and 54% among Black voters in that age group. Edison Research confirmed to NPR that among Black Americans aged 17 to 29, Sanders actually led Clinton 51 to 48 percent. Among Hispanics in that range, he led 66 to 34.

HuffPost raised another angle that got almost no coverage. The media's obsession with a Black-white binary erased entire populations. Native Hawaiians, Alaska Natives, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders were all rendered invisible by coverage that treated "non-white" as synonymous with "Black". A Los Angeles Times poll showed Sanders leading Clinton 43 to 35 percent among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in California.

Not everyone embraced the hashtag. Some Clinton supporters argued that #BernieMadeMeWhite proved "EXACTLY how white his supporters are". When it came out that Lee, a Black man, had started it, he was accused of being a "self-hating black man" and a "token". He received a direct message on Twitter containing a single word: "COON". At least one critic accused Lee of actually being white, an irony he did not let pass without comment.

The hashtag landed during a period when several prominent commentators had made statements that aged poorly in context. Gloria Steinem had suggested young women supported Sanders "because the boys are with Bernie". Clay Shirky had tweeted that supporting Sanders sent the message "Black votes don't matter," directed at a tweet by former NAACP President Ben Jealous. Joan Walsh of The Nation had commented on the whiteness of a Sanders rally in Washington just as a camera panned over Hispanic voters holding a "V-I-V-A B-E-R-N-I-E" sign.

Walsh was not impressed by #BernieMadeMeWhite. "Hashtags, while cool, can't create facts," she said. Lee pushed back: "When I told her that media figures like her are the reason why people are so upset, she responded: 'I'm sorry they feel erased by the demographic data provided by exit polls'".

Lee was realistic about the hashtag's limits. "It helps connect progressives on Twitter," he told NPR. "It's not going to convince people in the media that they're wrong. It's not going to convince people who support Hillary Clinton that they're wrong. But it is going to help connect people who do support Bernie Sanders and, more importantly, believe in progressive values".

Fun Facts

Lee was living in Japan when he created the hashtag, making this a case of American political satire originating from across the Pacific.

The hashtag peaked higher than #TheWalkingDead on Twitter trending charts that night.

CNN, whose reporting triggered the entire movement, was notably absent from outlets covering the hashtag's virality.

Lee told BET he considered Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton all racists, calling Sanders "the only candidate still in the race without a decades-long history of racism".

At least one person accused the hashtag's Black creator of being white, which is exactly the kind of irony the hashtag was designed to call out.

Derivatives & Variations

#BernieMadeMeMale:

Launched by women Sanders supporters who were tired of being lumped in with the "Bernie Bro" stereotype[7].

#BernieMadeMeYoung:

Used by older voters pushing back against the narrative that only young people supported Sanders[7].

CNN contradiction memes:

Screenshots placing CNN's "largely white and rural" description next to their own earlier reporting on Anchorage as "the most diverse place in America"[4].

Frequently Asked Questions