On Friday’s broadcast of “CNN Newsroom,” Symone Sanders argued that Make America Great Again “takes us back to a time when we were in slavery, when we were in chains, when we worked on plantations, internment camps for the Chinese.” Sanders corrected the Chinese internment statement on Twitter, saying she misspoke and meant to refer to Japanese internment. Sanders said, “I do not think that every single Trump supporter is racist. But it is — we have to be real and understand that the populism around Donald Trump’s campaign was intrinsically tied to racism. it was intrinsically tied to making people that were not white working-class people the other. Make America Great Again takes us back — people that look like me, takes us back to a time when we were in slavery, when we were in chains, when we worked on plantations, internment camps for the Chinese. So, it is really, really important that if we want to heal, that if people want to get past, if Trump supporters want to say, well, why are you calling me racist? That we have to understand that the populism was tied to elements of racism. And the last thing I would say is that racism is — a racist is — I think people think racism is dogs and white hoods and water hoses and the n-word, and that is not the only form of racism. There are microaggressions. There are oh, I didn’t — you speak so well. These are microaggressions that are forms of prejudice and discrimination that we have to address.” Sanders added that just because a county voted for Obama, and then voted for Trump, “doesn’t mean that they don’t have elements of predjudice, of discrimination, of racism. That is the equivalent of saying I have a black friend.”
