If you don't think Bernie and his campaign and his supporters basically calling Hillary

[JCanete]

135. Well good for you about never voting for a racist. The problem with that statement though,

is it ignores the historic reality that just about everybody who could vote(white males) used to vote for racists in this nation, and that in fact most people who technically could be were racist, because it is a condition of social engineering and ignorance. It is very hard to accept, but people who vote for racists, or themselves are racist--as horrible as the consequences of their hatred is--still think of themselves as well meaning, good people. That's because the mechanisms that allow them to be cruel or indifferent to minorities are built into their faulty presumptions about people of different cultures and ethnicities. They think they are actually rejecting something bad, because they have been trained to. Their ability to extend their empathy to people of color is greatly diminished because of this, which is often made easier by any kind of cultural isolation.

Sanders did not say we should abandon our principles or soften our messages for social justice to pander to this group of voters. I'm on a page with him, that we can speak to social and economic justice together, as they go hand-in-hand. In fact, any perceived threat to the latter makes work with the former more difficult because scapegoating messaging quickly goes to the limbic systems of these people and shuts off their receptiveness to philosophical and logical discourse. Again, the work goes hand-in-hand, and one should not, and cannot be, done before the other.

The poor and middle class of all ethnicities are of common cause. They don't think they are, because nobody has effectively showed them, but they are. Racism has always been used as a tool for keeping not just minorities, but poor whites in their place. There is no comparing the suffering. I would never suggest that. But rather than blaming people for being racist(which in so many ways, or even all ways, is beyond their control), we could be showing them that they too are in-fact also victims of the narrative. They are being duped. Rather than making them the bad guys, show them how they are also the victims, because that isn't pandering and it isn't a lie.

People don't want to let go of the evils that men have done and are doing, and that is human. It does not fit our sense of justice that somebody should skirt punishment for their hand in crimes against humanity. It doesn't sit well that focusing on people's pain rather than their insults should be their reward for shitty behavior. But I think this approach is more effective at changing that behavior...to undermine the bad assumptions and ignorance that feeds it.

A huge step in that direction is to get people to see they need each other. A huge step in that direction is saying to people that there is a class war being waged and that they are losing, and that they are losing because there is a power structure that benefits by dividing and conquering with demagoguery and race-baiting. We can offer hope and economic justice to everybody while stripping the away the lies that people have bought into, not by adding to them.