DEFENDING BERNIE SANDERS (!): Bernie Sanders Says Not All Voters Who Feel ‘Uncomfortable’ With Black Candidates Are Racist.

People of Sanders’s generation would have distinguished between being “prejudiced” and being “racist.” That linguistic distinction has been lost, but it’s a useful one. Most people who are “prejudiced” against members of a group don’t have the hatred/hostility that “racist” implies. (Same is true of “anti-Semitism.”) It would be better if we had still a way to linguistically distinguish, for example, between people who have mild negative stereotypes of a group but interact with members of those groups in a totally respectful way (“mildly prejudiced”) and, say, fans of Stormfront (“virulently racist”).