Chapter two of Elizabeth Warren’s 2002 book (with her daughter) The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke? expresses sympathy for white people going bankrupt due to white flight — buying expensive houses—with only a few caveats and crocodile tears for the neighborhoods left behind.

At a minimum, Warren doesn’t challenge racism. Rather, she sweeps that topic under the rug.

In this book, Warren lets fly many racist stereotypes and uses coded language to paper over racist behavior. There is no doubt that she is concerned about middle-class white people. Black people, “working class” neighborhoods, and any other “problem” minority do not figure in her calculations except as problems to be avoided, not as co-equal citizens.

There is almost nothing progressive about this chapter. For Warren, racism seems as natural as bad weather. Why complain about it or try to change it? White flight: that’s fine. What is the problem? White people going bankrupt buying expensive houses to get away from dangerous minorities.

Remember when Trump denigrated Baltimore as “rat and rodent-infested mess” and the “worst in the USA”? Here is Warren on Baltimore in 2002:

What’s wrong with this? She doesn’t voice any concern for whoever might have to left behind. While she is much more delicate than Trump, isn’t she basically denigrating Baltimore just as did Trump? What’s the substantive difference?

Also, “parental psychology—worry” or “parental psychology-racist”?

There are other ways to discuss this issue. You could say, for example, that white, middle-class couples are in a sense also victims of systematic racism. By setting white, black and Hispanic apart, by creating poor urban zones by design, the system limits the options for middle-class whites and exposes them to increased risk of bankruptcy. Thus, white people have an interest in ending systemic racism. This line of reasoning seems obvious to me, but I don’t see it much.

Why do we have towns or areas with almost nothing but single-family homes? Why not an apartment building or two mixed into the area? And a mansion? all in the same school district? You could, in theory, have people of different economic stations living in the same area and walking to the same school. Some of these people could be of different races. If this were the case, and there were few or no pockets of crime, bad schools, and misery, you might be able to get whatever kind of house you might want.

Zoning, lending, policy: the world we have was made by people. We have the physical structure we have due to institutional racism, in large part. White people are not, by and large, better off due to this system of local taxes supporting local schools, local zoning designed to exclude and separate populations.

But that’s me thinking about this issue. Warren sees the problem differently.

Economically segregated? Are you sure it’s economic? And if it is, then it’s okay?

Again, what is the book about? White, middle-class families going bankrupt. What about the black kids getting killed? That is not the subject of the book, not the problem that she sees.

Could white people be moving away from urban areas and putting their kids in private schools because they are often racist? If you read this book, you would never encounter that hypothesis.

Maybe white flight is more complicated than simple racism. But Warren never even considers the possibility of racism playing a part in these decisions. She never stops the narrative to talk about the people too poor to declare bankruptcy. She isn’t even candid about the fact that these different neighborhoods have different racial compositions.

Read the whole chapter. Where is the anti-racism? Where is the systemic change?

Chapter two of this book is not the only extreme-white behavior on the part of Senator Warren. She also didn’t notice, or it didn’t bother her, that Republicans might be racist although Reagan supported Goldwater, hated Martin Luther King, defended Apartheid… but none of that bothered Warren. She voted for Reagan. She never explained why she missed his obvious racism, and as far as I know, no one ever asked her.

Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for President in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The racist dog-whistle quality of this neo-confederate symbolic act was lost on Warren, then 37 and a professor of law at Harvard University. She continued to be a Republican.

When her Republican past was dug up — she tried to hide it— the racism of the Republican party was far from her reason for abandoning the R next to her name. No. The problem for Warren with Republicans is they are capitalist enough.

“I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore,” Warren told the Daily Beast in 2011. “I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role.”

Warren has statistically insignificant support among Black voters, less than the Republican party. The suburban, high-income white families she wrote about in 2002 remain the defining American population for Warren.

For Warren, supporting Apartheid is okay. Genocide in Guatemala, no problem. Segregation is natural. The problems that really get her up and moving are well off people going bankrupt and too much government regulation of financial markets. Some progressive.