In September of 2026, Republicans held a fundraising event down in Texas that they dressed up as an "historic" midterm convention. The President spoke, of course, because that's something he loves to do, but the Vice President did also, and he expressed his bigotry in a way that caused a stir. Under Joe Biden, he said, Republicans were "called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer."
Let's break that down.
First, this is his premise: Since it is true, it is not racist to say. This was also his position when he insisted that one specific immigrant population in Ohio was stealing and consuming the beloved pets of their beleaguered white neighbors.
In both instances, of course, the core claim is absolutely not true. The racism lies in insisting that it is. The racism lies in the unspoken but unmistakable assertion that white skin is "clean" (and racially "pure") and brown skin is "dirty." That's revolting.
The other unspoken but unmistakable claim? Liberals use charges of racism to keep conservatives from telling "the truth" about Black and brown people in America and around the globe. In this framing, conservatives who fetishize whiteness and denigrate Blackness and brownness are brave, moral "truth tellers" who do not deserve to be smeared as racists.
Except they do.
There is zero truth in white supremacist propaganda, and people who traffic in that propaganda are in fact racists. Period. The Vice President is an enthusiastically racist waffle cone who looks over the millions of people in the United States, finds the ones he doesn't like, and calls them "dirty" and dangerous. Accuses them of barbarism. Says they threaten "us" - and thereby and in that rhetorical moment constitutes "us" as a group of people who gain false righteousness in feeling threatened and victimized by "them." There is no reason to feel threatened, no data undergirding the racist hysteria, so the spotlight is placed on one very bad actor in this state, another very bad actor in that state, and then the media is charged with "not caring" about the imaginary threat to whiteness everywhere.
This is how you get indignant, affluent members of a majority coalescing around factually unsupportable, fundamentally racist ideas while congratulating themselves on their morality, their righteousness, and their bravery. The position of "furiously indignant and oppressed bigots whose moral superiority is visible in their irrational hatred" is of course absurd, but in a nation institutionally deeply imbued with racism and other bigotries, it is also deadly effective.
The whole truth
Pretty much everyone agrees that "the truth" has immutable value. Even the most outlandish conspiracy theory purports to be the truth that some larger institution doesn't want "us" to know about - and thereby and in that rhetorical moment constitutes a we who are wiser than the rest of the herd, less susceptible to institutional deception and blessed with unique powers of discernment. What we discern we must then spread like gospel.
The difference between the two mainstream American political parties, of course, is the specific truth or set of truths on which we stand. Democrats stand - or damn well should - on the self-evident truths that we are all human beings, that we are all created equal, and that we should therefore have a society based upon cooperation and respect for the equality and rights of all, with strong protections in place for the people in minority groups who are most vulnerable to harm. In this vision, it is morally unacceptable to have bigots in positions of power and public trust. Republicans stand on the "truth" that the majority should reign supreme, that white supremacist Christian values should be codified in law, and that public officials have a religious right if not an obligation to slander various racial, ethnic, religious, and sex-and gender-based sub-groups as dangerous, dirty, deviant, and even sub-human. To do otherwise would be to violate the higher law of the deity.
There is a clear moral answer here, and it is not to let the the values of one particular faith group dictate the value of any human being before the law. It is not to be complicit in the dehumanization, vilification, and sub-classing of any group. It is not to lean into prejudice or promote propaganda.
Now, I say this, but let's be very, very clear that white Americans at every point on the ideological spectrum are at this very moment complicit in the dehumanization, vilification, and sub-classing of Black Americans. That's the core lie and the core failing at the heart of our history as a democratic republic, which trumpeted freedom and equality for all even as it conceded to treat the seizing, torture, rape, enslavement, and utter dehumanization of human beings as lawful and respectable. White Americans could have gotten much closer to justice during the Reconstruction, but we blew it again. Instead of equality, we offered still more trauma, horror, unfreedom, and inequality. We have yet to address any of this - for the past, in the present, or for the future. White Americans, on the whole, either dehumanize or consent to the dehumanization of Black Americans and either explicitly advocate or tacitly accept ideas about white racial superiority. The movement for Black liberation is seen as fundamentally un-American because it is fundamentally incompatible with the white supremacist systems almost all white Americans accept the way we begrudgingly (and with periodic fits of indignation) accept lines at the grocery store or crowds on the way home from a concert.
We currently have a nation where structural dehumanization and subclassing are "normal" to those whose humanity is assumed, a nation where anti-Blackness is like electrical current running along the wires above and below ground in every neighborhood on the grid. It is very easy for immoral actors to plug other prejudices into the same outlets. Anti-Semitism. Xenophobia. Islamophobia. Transphobia. There are structures in place to support an infinity of violent oppressions, which means the structures must go. Morality demands removing the outlets, cutting the electrical wires, and rebuilding the ways we manage power.
