There’s just no way to square this circle.
“I think you know there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American,”
With all due respect Senator Sanders, that’s racism. That’s the very textbook definition of what racism is. If you don’t feel comfortable voting for someone because they are Black then you are racist. Full Stop.
Please, stop the continued conflation of racism with hate.
This has become somewhat of a Liberal mantra. You see it on signs at all sorts of rallies, you hear it from the mouths of politicians and activists. And it’s wrong, completely wrong. It’s wrong when applied to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and any other sort of oppression that we see here in the US. Yes, there certainly are those small groups of Nazis who’s politics do revolve around hate, but that’s not how the vast majority of oppression actually functions.
When Black people have their resumes rejected because their name is “too Black”, it’s not hate, it’s people being uncomfortable. This is true with virtually all of the challenges faced by oppressed people.
This is why Sanders can say that white people who are uncomfortable with voting for Black candidates “are not necessarily racist”, because of the conflation of oppression and hate that is so common among liberals and progressive.