Or at least that's what he said.

From the NY Daily News:

Speaking Wednesday night at a Washington fund-raiser to retire the debt from his 2004 presidential campaign, Nader complained that Democratic Party powerbrokers had kept him off the ballot in such Southern states as Georgia and Virginia - which reminded him of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that denied African-Americans equal rights.

"I felt like a [n-word]," remarked the 70-year-old white multimillionaire graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

Actually Nader is Lebanese, but we won't go into specifics.  And from what I heard, it isn't the first time he's used that word either.

At least Al Sharpton was honest when commenting on this:

"If Ed Koch had said what Ralph Nader said, we'd be marching," Sharpton noted. "This [scolding] doesn't rise to the level of a march. It rises to the level of a wrist slap."

But why is that the case?  It's because Sharpton likes Nader and hates Ed Koch, even though neither of them have been accused of being racist.  As long as you're rubbing elbows with Sharpton or someone on the left, you're allowed a few blunders here and there.