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Just want to talk about this tweet a little, because it's not completely wrong, but not completely right, either, and that space in between is an important one.
Waldman's suggestion that the phrase "the N-word" was about fifteen years old struck me as off, so I did a little digging in the NY Times archives and Google Books.
The phrase "the N-word" starts appearing in mainstream sources in the early 1990s, as far as I can tell—it seems to have been spurred by around the underlying term's use in rap music.
Given that it takes a while for popular usage to seep into books and newspapers, I think it's likely that the phrase was in common use in some circles by the late 1980s, if not earlier, though it probably would have been unfamiliar to many.
Around the same time, you start to see the phrase "the use-mention distinction" popping up more often—the idea behind that distinction being that there's a difference between deploying a slur and referring to it, and that the latter might be okay where the former is not.
Even bearing that distinction in mind, though, the word definitely made a lot of people uncomfortable in the mid-1990s—there's a Times article from that 1995 about Huckleberry Finn in which a teacher shouts it in a speech to colleagues to try to get them past their discomfort.
(The argument over whether the n-word renders Huckleberry Finn unfit for classroom use wasn't new in the 1990s, by the way—it appears in the Times for the first time in 1957.)
So yes, attitudes about the use of the word in an antiracist context have changed considerably since Bernie's book came out in 1997, but no, controversies over that question didn't suddenly arise after the millennium.
So while it's obvious that Sanders' intent was antiracist, it's not pure presentism to suggest that his phrasing might have made some readers uncomfortable even when the book came out.
