He doesn’t have the awareness to be a racist. He might very well be living in a race bubble, and never sees black people from one end of the day to the other.
His shallowness, his immunity from facts, his self-contradictory cites and references, all indicate a superficial intellect. He’s made up his mind to be a conservative Republican, but doesn’t know how to debate effectively with people who are better-informed than he is.
It actually makes me think of Jimmy Carter, way back when he made the blunder about the “ethnic purity” of segregated neighborhoods. Or when H. Ross Perot spoke to the NAACP and said, “You people.” These weren’t racist gaffes in the usual sense, but simply revealed an astonishing lack of consciousness of the issue in the first place.
Earl Butz…he was a fuckin’ racist.