Reverend Al Sharpton is lashing out at Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader for using the word that only blacks can use.

"Nader is not a racist by any stretch of the imagination," Sharpton told me yesterday. "He has a good track record. But he ought to be sensitive that he does not sanitize that word."

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. . .

"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."

Yesterday, Nader told me he was using the word in the same spirit as the Black Panthers of the 1960s - "as a word of defiance."

But Sharpton retorted: "He's not a Black Panther."

Democratic operative Harold Ickes - a former civil rights activist who lost a kidney in 1965 after being beaten to a pulp by white racists in Tallulah, La. - was also troubled by Nader's use of the epithet.

"It's not something that I would say," Ickes told me yesterday. "Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I think it's not a word that whites can use."