“Sanders seems to assume that if a Latina wants to run for office, she comes with no agenda other than being a Latina ... That is remarkably insulting. And then he suggests that the only way they can become ‘good enough’ is if they embrace his agenda. That is precisely how white men have always attempted to dominate their spheres of influence,” she wrote. “If you are a woman or a person of color who has tried to have your voice heard, you’ve experienced that response regularly.”

To assume a Latina comes with no agenda other than her ethnic identity would be insulting and worthy of stigma. Of course, that distorts what Sanders said––the Vermont senator clearly presumed that a Latina candidate would have an agenda beyond being Latina, and argued that she must articulate it, in addition to her identity, if she hoped to win enough voters to gain election. That was his advice to the aspiring pol (advice that would be incoherent if he really presumed that she had no agenda).

LeTourneau went on say this:

It is true that in order to end racism and sexism we have to begin by giving women and people of color a seat at the table. But that accomplishes very little unless/until we listen to them and find a way to work with them in coalition. To the extent that Sanders wants to avoid doing that in order to foster division within the Democratic Party, he is merely defending white male supremacy. I’m not suggesting that the senator’s agenda is necessarily white male supremacy. If he were to actually listen to what that woman wants to accomplish as the second Latina senator, he might find ways that their vision overlaps. But giving her a seat at the table means that first of all, you don’t assume that she has none, and second of all, you hear her out.

Again, this seems flagrantly uncharitable to Sanders—his motivation almost certainly isn’t “to foster division within the Democratic Party”—but what caught the attention of many in this intra-left debate was the writer’s use of “white male supremacy.”

For Kevin Drum, the longtime progressive blogger at Mother Jones, it typified what he sees as a “terrible fad” of defining “white supremacy” down and overusing the term. He believes overuse of that sort is both inaccurate––an incorrect usage of the term based on its denotation––and harms the ability of liberals to reach vast swaths of America.

“With the exception of actual neo-Nazis and a few others, there isn't anyone in America who's trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks or Latinos,” he argued. “Conversely, there are loads of Americans who display signs of overt racism—or unconscious bias or racial insensitivity or resentment over loss of status—in varying degrees. This isn't just pedantic. It matters. It's bad enough that liberals toss around charges of racism with more abandon than we should, but it's far worse if we start calling every sign of racial animus—big or small, accidental or deliberate—white supremacy. I can hardly imagine a better way of proving to the non-liberal community that we're all a bunch of out-of-touch nutbars who are going to label everyone and everything we don't like as racist.”