Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says racism is a problem parallel to income inequality in the US after he was criticized for focusing only on economic issues.
“We have to address both” institutional racism and economic inequality to combat poverty in the United States, Sanders said.
“We have to end institutional racism, but we have to deal with the reality that 50 percent of young black kids are unemployed, that we have massive poverty in America, that we have an unsustainable level of income and wealth inequality,” he said on Sunday.
“Those are issues that do have to be dealt with, and just at the same time as we deal with institutional racism.”
He also touched on the issue of police brutality by mentioning the case of 28-year-old African-American woman, Sandra Bland, who died earlier this month in a Texas prison cell days after she was violently arrested for a minor traffic offense.
“When an African-American woman gets yanked out of her car, when that happens — when we all know that would not have happened to a middle class white woman, we know that we need some serious change in criminal justice in this country,” Sanders said.