I have less concern about Bernie's use of the term "ghetto" than that his frame of reference for POC [View all]

[EffieBlack]

seems to be limited to poverty, criminal justice and welfare.

For example, when he was asked last night what he would do to improve race relations in this country, he talked about crime, poverty and welfare.

And last night was not an aberration; that's a common refrain for him. For example, in a debate a few weeks ago, he was asked what he would do to improve race relations and he responded as follows:

"And the progress that we can build on is to understand that we should not have 35 percent of African-American kids in this country living in poverty ... we need real police reform. We need to make sure that when people are in jail, often, African-American and Latino, there is a path back -- back to civil society so that we don't have the rates of recidivism that we do right now.

"We have got to do away with mandatory minimum sentences. And I'll give you one example where we can make huge progress.

"Right now, it turns out that the African-American community and the white community smoke marijuana at about equal levels, OK? But it also turns out that blacks are four times more likely to be arrested than whites for possession of marijuana, OK? And that is why I believe that we should take marijuana out of The Federal Controlled Substance Act. Too many lives have been destroyed. Too many young people have been -- incurred police records for possession of marijuana."

This is why so many people think that Bernie is tone deaf. But his tone deafness comes from a cramped view of race, which is not surprising since race and race relations is just not something he has focused much attention on in the half century since he worked in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

That doesn't mean that he is a bad person, that he is a racist or that he hates black people. But it does mean that he is not as racially sensitive as he and his supporters are trying to convince us that he is.