After all, there are several highly placed blacks in his campaign organization.

But he knows racists are a big part of his constituency and he does everything he can to not alienate them without actually supporting their views explicitly. If you actually analyze the texts of his pronouncements you can't really point to direct racist statements, not even in what he said about Mexicans or even Muslims.

But it is clear his statements and policies play on racist themes and appeal to racists. Of course, that can be said about all Republicans, to a certain extent.

People in position of power and influence are too smart too believe racist pseudoscience or propaganda. They are motivated more by questions of social and economic class than they are about genetics or race. However, they depend on the votes of individuals who DO harbor racist opinions, or have managed to justify them by calling them something else. For example, someone who claims he harbors no ill will against blacks may actually be saying the truth, and even sincerely believe it. But he also might have very strong opinions about welfare cheats and street criminals--which is subconscious slang for "black". Similar stereotypes are employed against Hispanics, even by self-hating racists who may be Hispanic or black themselves.

Since racism is ultimately irrational, its not surprising racists sometimes twist themselves into ideological knots in order to carry off their hatred. Remember that white kid that killed all those black churchgoers in South Carolina? He had a Negro friend, I saw him interviewed on TV. This kind of schizophrenia is often employed by racists to convince others (and themselves) they are not racist.

The conservative movement has been very successful at harnessing and exploiting this pathology to channel racial hatred in ideological, political and economic directions. Lee Atwater specialized in this sort thing, look up his Wiki entry and convince yourself this sort of racist channeling has deep roots in the GOP.

Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater (February 27, 1951 – March 29, 1991) was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican Party. He was an adviser to U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee.

In Atwater's own words:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[10][11]

You don't have to be a racist yourself to cultivate it, use it, and promote it, if it serves your purposes. Does that add any light to what's going on in Flint right now? No one wants to poison babies, but sometimes doing the Lord's work inflicts a little collateral damage.