Sanders: voters uncomfortable with voting for AAs aren’t necessarily racist

[Kleine Scheiße]

Bernie, like a lot of the left, confuses violent racism with racist prejudice.

A better way to phrase what I think he meant -- "you know, there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily Klan members who still felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American."

The American left has a particularly nasty problem with downplaying the importance of personal conviction in the conversation about racism. To many of these people, "being a racist" is essentially a point system -- one point for every time you've used the n-word, five points for every time you've voted against a black candidate because you're uncomfortable with their race, fifty points for every lynching you've participated in, and if you come in under a certain threshold, you're good.

That is absolutely not the way racism works. Racism is a set of values inspired by a worldview based on the assumption that individuals are different from one another in part due to inherent, non-biological (that is, stuff like earlobe length and eyelash curvature, things that don't really matter) qualities inborn via race. Refusing to vote for someone on the grounds that they're black is racism, plain and simple.

[Kleine Scheiße]

Bernie, like a lot of the left, confuses violent racism with racist prejudice.

A better way to phrase what I think he meant -- "you know, there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily Klan members who still felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American."

The American left has a particularly nasty problem with downplaying the importance of personal conviction in the conversation about racism. To many of these people, "being a racist" is essentially a point system -- one point for every time you've used the n-word, five points for every time you've voted against a black candidate because you're uncomfortable with their race, fifty points for every lynching you've participated in, and if you come in under a certain threshold, you're good.

That is absolutely not the way racism works. Racism is a set of values inspired by a worldview based on the assumption that individuals are different from one another in part due to inherent, non-biological (that is, stuff like earlobe length and eyelash curvature, things that don't really matter) qualities inborn via race. Refusing to vote for someone on the grounds that they're black is racism, plain and simple.

He said that racism played a part in these elections. Are you going to claim that he didn't think the segregation he fought against in Chicago was racism?

Are you saying segregation is not "violent racism?"