How does it feel to be called a racist? In today’s hearing on Jeff Sessions’s confirmation for the job of attorney general, his fellow senator, Lindsey Graham, commiserated with him about being a southern conservative and having to deal with the label. It was a sorry show of white fragility of the sort you usually see on Twitter.

In a hearing punctuated by sympathetic comments and softball questions, Graham’s question struck a particularly farcical note.

“I’m from South Carolina. So I know what it’s like sometimes to be accused of being a conservative from the South,” said Graham. “In your case, people have tried fairly promptly to label you as a racist or a bigot or whatever you want to say. How does that make you feel?”

Protesters answered that before Sessions could — shouting, as others had earlier in the hearing, “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,” before being removed from the room. But after Graham chuckled a joke about “clearing the room” for Sessions, the nominee replied with complete tone deafness.

“Well it does not feel good,” Sessions said. “I didn’t prepare myself well in 1986,” when the Senate rejected his nomination to a federal judgeship on the grounds that he lacked racial sensitivity, “and there was an organized effort to characterize myself as something that wasn’t true. It was very painful.”

Sessions was doing what some people across the country can’t seem to stop doing either — getting more upset over the charge of racism than over racism itself. Racism is not a matter of how racists, or those accused of racism, feel — it’s about how the lives of those on the receiving end of racist views and systems are affected. It would be great if elected officials could focus on the actual impact of racism rather than the hurt feelings of those called out for their racism.

A future attorney general should be asked about whether he will be able to apply the law equally and fairly — not about how being called a racist makes him “feel.” While Sessions’s moral character is relevant, and supposedly under scrutiny in this hearing, his “feelings” are not.

Sessions’s next statement — which referred to discrimination as an evil of the past — was no less tone deaf. “I just want you to know that as a southerner, who actually saw discrimination and have no doubt it existed in a systematic and powerful and negative way to the people, great millions of people in the south particularly of our country,” he said. “I know that was wrong.”

Except, of course, it still is — something the man who will soon be tasked with fighting that discrimination can’t seem to comprehend.