Al Sharpton was really angry. No black candidate on the debate state. (On Nicole Wallace)

[StarfishSaver]

84. Thanks for sharing that experience

To answer your question, I certainly don't think it's all due to racial bias. But racial bias is a component - and while all candidates have to deal with all kinds of obstacles, minority candidates have an extra layer to deal with that white candidates don't. And it's wrong for people to assume that because there are other factors involved, racism is either not present or not worth discussing.

Consider this in the hiring context. If a company never hired black people or hired only one black person in the last thirty years, would the fact that they interviewed black applicants for jobs prove that no discrimination was at play in their hiring process? Does the fact that one extraordinarily over-qualified black person got through mean that the process is fair?

Some might answer yes, but anyone who has ever dealt with these issues know that the failure to hire any black people is a flag that there's a serious problem since a fair process will usually result in a diverse mix of people. Sure, there can be exceptions when a fair process results in a situation where there's actually no diversity. But if the results are always all white, those aren't an aberration in a fair process since aberrations in a fair process would not always just happen to be all white.

There will always be many reasons candidates don't succeed. But, as Democrats, we should not be ok with one of those reasons being racial or gender bias.