The idea that there are few, if any, differences between the experiences of white and black Americans than those related to economic status is painfully offensive. It not only denies race as the basis of the most pernicious forms of bigotry and ignores the full range of black experience in America when it comes to financial well being, it also enables a racist system of blaming poverty itself on black and brown people.

It tells black people that their experiences would change if only they made a little more money. The idea here is that deep-seated social and institutional racism are essentially myths, and that economic improvements would alter the experience of a black Harvard professor being arrested for attempting to enter his own home or a of a black woman dragged out of her car on her way to a new attractive job and later dying in police custody. That idea is not just wrong, it's a version of telling black people to just "get a job."

It also tells whites that it is right to blame black people for poverty-stricken neighborhoods and white poverty itself, since "ghettos" are supposedly a black thing now. What's more, this wasn't the only part of the debate Sanders eluded to this concept. At one point, Sanders made a reference to a prosperous Detroit in 1960, seemingly unaware that it was a time when Detroit was a white city and before the Civil Rights movement, riots, and white flight.

I say seemingly, because it is impossible to know if this scathing racial indifference on the part of Sen. Sanders is willful or simply ignorant. But I would posit that at this point, that is a distinction without a difference. Bernie Sanders' devastating failure as a candidate to look beyond his narrow focus of economics as panacea and to social justice as a distinct, more essential and broader issue than economic equality makes him ill suited to be President of the United States.