Hillary Clinton has won the nomination (and yes, she has) on the strength of strong support among Democrats, Latinos, older women and African Americans. Bernie Sanders’ base is independents, young voters (including significant numbers of young people of color) and white men. Those are the facts and they are incontrovertible.
Bernie Sanders, knowing he has no chance to win on the strength of democracy and votes, is now arguing that superdelegates should reward his loss by undemocratically handing him the nomination. He didn’t earn the victory at the polls, thus he should be coronated by fiat. He wants the establishment he attacks to grant him victory anyway.
If this were to happen, our party’s voters of color and the woman they back would be nullified in favor of the white male candidate predominantly supported by white men. This doesn’t mean that those pushing for this outcome, or Bernie Sanders himself, are racist. But it does betray a breathtaking amount of white privilege—a willful refusal to see that the policies they are advocating, for the benefit of themselves, would once again disenfranchise communities of color. They’d get the outcome they wanted, so what’s wrong with that?
To be clear, if you are advocating for Bernie’s superdelegate coup, you are not racist. You certainly have an autocratic lack of respect for the will of the voters, but that doesn’t make you racist. But the outcome of that superdelegate coup would absolutely be racist, And sexist.
If you disagree, your challenge isn’t to stomp your feet and whine about how horrible it is to be accused of being racist or sexist, when that is explicitly not the case. Your challenge is to show how undemocratically tossing aside the preferences of our party’s communities of color and women in favor of the white male preferred by the party’s white males isn’t racist.