And it's not like he muttered this swill in a drunken moment at a friends bar-b-que. He said this is a speech on the floor of the congress. Which, apparently, is fine.
For a serious discussion of one way this plays itself out in society, the New York Review of Books is featuring an essay by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who's done a bit of work on this over the years. The NY Times describes it this way:
In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, he wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,” had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.
But the good news is that racism is dead in America so at least we don't have to worry about that.