Hillary Clinton on Tuesday offered a veiled rebuke of Bernie Sanders, arguing in a sweeping speech on the state of race in America that his fight to end economic inequality does little to address the systemic racism gripping the country.

“Big banks and excesses of Wall Street, these are important issues,” Clinton told a packed auditorium in Harlem. “But Flint reminds us, my friends, that there’s a lot more going on in our country that we should be concerned about.”


Raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires, Clinton added, singling out her rival's favorite targets, does little to change “the painful reality that African-Americans are nearly three times as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage.”

Clinton’s point was hard to miss: The contrast she drew was that Sanders merely addresses racism through the lens of economic inequality, as he did in the most recent Democratic debate when he said that the "African-American community lost half of their wealth as a result of the Wall Street collapse."

In her speech Tuesday, Clinton implied that her Democratic rival's worldview is too narrow. “These are not only problems of economic inequality," she said, "these are problems of racial inequality.”

“The truth is, we aren't a single-issue country,” she said. “We face a complex set of economic, social and political challenges. … So it's not enough for your economic plan to be break up the banks. You also need a serious plan to create jobs, especially in places where unemployment remains stubbornly high. You need a plan to address the generations of underinvestment and neglect.”

Clinton’s new focus on race comes ahead of the Feb. 27 primary in South Carolina, where a CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday showed her leading by 18 points. Following a crushing defeat in New Hampshire and a tightening race in Nevada, South Carolina has become something of a must-win state for Clinton, who for over a week has focused on cementing her support among black voters.

She has rolled out endorsements from African-American religious leaders in Flint and from the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. And she has campaigned with surrogates like Rep. John Lewis. Clinton spent the morning on Tuesday meeting with leaders from the NAACP, the National Action Network and the National Urban League for a wide-ranging discussion about issues facing African-American voters. After her speech in Harlem, she met privately with the Black Puerto Rican Hispanic and Asian Caucus from the New York State legislature.

The change of topic in the Democratic primary from Wall Street to race places Clinton on a surer footing — she often sounds as if she is playing on her rival’s home turf when talking about raising taxes on the wealthy and cracking down on big banks. But on the issue of race, Clinton is seeking to position herself as a standard-bearer, calling racial inequalities “immoral.”

It is also a conversation in which she feels more comfortable and less equivocal. “She’s looking at the divisions in this country, and she’s agonizing over it,” said longtime Clinton confidante Minyon Moore, who accompanied her to her meetings in New York on Tuesday. “She’s trying to figure out how we lift our country up and be in this together. I think this is her truth.”

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said after the closed-door meeting: “Secretary Clinton demonstrated an ease and familiarity with many of the issues we discussed this morning.” In the meeting, attendees said Clinton asked for lists of names for potential judicial nominations to beginning a vetting process if she wins the nomination.

Speaking in Harlem later in the day, Clinton declared that “America’s struggle with race is far from finished” and that “anyone asking for your vote has a responsibility to grapple with this reality, to see things as they actually are.”

In her speech, Clinton also sought to show off a holistic view of what it means to be black in America. Standing in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, she quoted Langston Hughes, telling a packed auditorium that “when life ain’t no crystal stair, you’ve got to keep climbing.”

She pointed to the West Harlem neighborhood around her — home to a postwar artistic explosion of music and literature — as a reminder that “any view of Black America that focuses exclusively on crime, poverty or other challenges is missing so much.”

And she called on white Americans to show empathy and “do a better job of listening when African-Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers” that stand in their way, barriers that reflect systemic racism.

Joining her on stage were Rep. Charles Rangel — who Clinton reminded the audience was responsible for pushing her to run for Senate in 2000 — and former Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Discussing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, Clinton said what made it a horrifying story was that “it’s not a coincidence that this was allowed to happen in a largely black, largely poor community. Would this have ever occurred in a wealthy, white suburb of Detroit? Absolutely not.” She added that “there are many Flints across our country, places where people of color and the poor have been left out and left behind.”

Clinton’s sweeping speech comes almost exactly eight years after Barack Obama’s now-famous speech on race relations in Philadelphia, which became a turning point in his campaign. Clinton said the country has made progress during Obama’s two terms in the White House but suggested racism was at play in Republicans’ insistence that they would reject any Supreme Court nominations put forward by Obama to replace late Justice Antonin Scalia.

“Some are even saying he doesn’t have the right to nominate anyone, as if somehow he’s not the real president,” she said. “That’s in keeping with what we’ve heard all along, isn’t it? Republicans talk in coded racial language. They demonize Obama. This kind of hatred and bigotry has no place in our politics.”

In her speech, Clinton announced a new $2 billion investment proposal to try and end the "school-to-prison" pipeline. But uncharacteristically, Clinton's speech was more about her husband’s "feel your pain" brand than her mode of ticking off new policy proposals.

"None of this is a 'they' problem," she said. "It's a 'we' problem, and all of us have to admit that."