What my reaction to the NetRoots-Sanders kerfuffle omitted — my concentration was that of the critic's "bullshit" — is that racism is largely unresponsive to political action. Chanting slogans or demanding that some politician chant the approved slogans to demonstrate righteous "solidarity" never educated or fed a child — white, black, brown — and none of it never will. Nor does political chanting, sloganeering, marching, protesting and organizing directly affect America's underlying racism (except, too often, in harmful ways: see, for instance, the right's diseased reaction to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts).
Some of racism is humanly hardwired — the "Other" was once, in our more primitive Hobbesian state of nature, a real and present danger — but most of it is culturally learned. This is scarcely a revelation. What political activists eagerly overlook, however, since reality is unpleasant, is that racism, in a quite formidable way, is impervious to political action. No bigotry — whether white, black or brown — is subduable to politics. Racism is the accumulation of learned ignorance.
What Sen. Sanders understands is that politics, through mass mobilization and subsequent legislation, can properly redistribute wealth and thus, for example, see that today's poor schools are funded by a central authority at the same level that today's wealthier schools are funded. Politics, through legislation, can see that all children are free to partake of an authentically equal education offered, that all children are nourished, that all children are adequately housed and clothed, in short that children are protected from the ravishes of intolerable poverty and soul-rotting ignorance, which, as noted, is the fundamental basis of racism.
Assaulting racism from a sentimental, sloganeering angle may enrich NetRooters' self-image, but it doesn't do shit — except maybe bullshit — to racism itself. Only the hard, long, costly labor of philosophical socialism's redistributive properties can lay the foundations of enlightened and healthy minds, which, by virtue of healthful enlightenment, will reject racism.
Sen. Sanders needs no lectures on civil rights activism. As has been noted many times, he was acting for civil rights before NetRoots activists were in diapers or even on planet Earth. Yet what Sen. Sanders came to understand early in life — and I'll concede that his whiteness may well have influenced his politics — is precisely what Martin Luther King came to understand later in his life: America's race issue is, under all of it, an issue of class.