You see, if Sanders wanted to see white people living in a “ghetto”—white people who are living with long-term unemployment under the strictures of environmental injustice, economic flight, and crumbling schools—he needed only peer out of the window of his SUV along the drive to the CNN debate.

Flint has a per capita income is less than $16,000 and falling. While the population is just over 50 percent black, 41 percent of its residents are white. Those are knowable facts for anyone who cares enough to know them.

Sanders spent the day repeatedly trying to clarify his statements about race and poverty, only to widen the chasm in the ground beneath him. Rather than walk them back, Sanders seemed to double-down on the notion that poverty is exclusively a black problem.

“What I meant to say,” Sanders told an NBC News reporter, “is when you talk about ghettos, traditionally what you’re talking about is African-American communities.”