Racism Without Shame
Guest blogger: Henna Maiwand, law student, University of San Francisco
Although America has never been free of racism, there was once a time when politicians at least pretended. People understood that some things, once said out loud, could not be unsaid, and may have damaging consequences. Bigotry was something to hide, not boast about. Now, that restraint has collapsed. Shame is no longer a barrier. We are witnessing the institutionalization of racism as an acceptable feature of mainstream rhetoric.
The transformation of racist rhetoric from taboo to talking point has been boosted by political leaders in America, especially President Donald Trump. In 2015, President Trump launched his presidential campaign by declaring that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs, bringing crime” and were “rapists.”[i] In 2018, he referred to several African nations as “shithole countries” and asked why the United States couldn’t attract more immigrants from Norway instead.[ii] President Trump has claimed that immigrants have “bad genes” that make them murderers.[iii] In 2023, he told rally attendees that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”[iv] Although this language echoed Adolf Hitler’s writings in “Mein Kampf” on the supposed contamination of Aryan blood, President Trump repeated and defended these remarks on multiple occasions.[v] President Trump has publicly told four congresswomen of color to “go back” to their “crime-infested” countries that he assumed they came from, repeating a classic expression of racial hostility.[vi] In 2024, President Trump declared to a crowd that immigrants are “not humans, they’re animals.”[vii]
There was a time when racist remarks ended political careers. In 2002, Senator Trent Lott, the Majority Leader of the Senate, said the country might have been “better off” if Thurmond, a man who promoted racial segregation, won the presidency.[viii] After political pressure and being publicly condemned by President George W. Bush, Lott resigned from his role as Senate Majority Leader.[ix] In 2006, Senator George Allen used a racial slur against an Indian-American, causing a viral outcry and costing him his seat in the Senate.[x]
This explicitly racist career-ending language has now become campaign strategy. Today it is met with applause, public backing, and political rewards rather than condemnation. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert publicly joked that her Muslim colleagues are part of a “Jihad Squad,” and that she felt safe in an elevator with them only because there was no backpack, invoking a suicide bomber stereotype.[xi] She is still in office. Vice President JD Vance was caught spreading a debunked lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets, and although that lie led to bomb threats against schools, hospitals, and government buildings in Ohio, he refused to apologize.[xii] Rather, he doubled down and confessed that if he must “create stories so that the American media actually pays attention,” then that is what he will continue to do.[xiii] President Trump never publicly condemned Vice President Vance for purposely spreading racially damaging lies.
Many other figures in power have promoted the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white nationalist conspiracy that mass immigration is deliberately displacing white Americans. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene warned Americans that immigrants are “replacing you, replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school, and coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture.”[xiv] Tucker Carlson also promoted the theory in more than 400 episodes on Fox News, telling millions of viewers that Democrats want to “replace legacy Americans” and that immigration is making America “poor and dirtier.”[xv][xvi] Multibillionaire Elon Musk has repeatedly posted rhetoric promoting this theory to over 229 million followers, such as concerns that Americans are a “rapidly diminishing minority of global population.”[xvii] One-third of Americans now agree with this rhetoric on immigrants; among Republicans, 61% do.[xviii]
This rhetoric translates directly into violence. Reported hate crimes have more than doubled in the last decade.[xix] In 2024, the FBI recorded its second highest total of hate crimes since 1991 with nearly 12,000 criminal incidents motivated by bias.[xx] The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated more than 300,000 people experienced hate crimes in 2019, nearly 40 times higher than what the FBI recorded that year.[xxi] The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported the highest number of complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination (8,658) in the organization’s three decades of record-keeping.[xxii] Antisemitic incidents increased 344% over the past five years.[xxiii] 2024 marked the second-worst year for anti-Asian hate crimes on record.[xxiv] In 2022, anti-Hispanic hate crimes hit the highest number recorded by the FBI, with a 43% increase from just two years prior.[xxv]
This is what the normalization of racism produces. Repetition of this rhetoric has numbed Americans to egregious levels of hate. The boundaries that once constrained racist expression, to a certain degree in the American public, have been dismantled by political actors who face no penalty for doing so. They gaslight Americans into believing racism is an exaggeration, even when the evidence is overwhelming. Many Americans, especially those not directly targeted, no longer recognize how the words they hear every day are connected to the violence they read in the headlines. Nothing will change until America decides to make racism shameful again.
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[i] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-mexico-vice-versa/story?id=41767704&utm
[ii] https://theconversation.com/how-trumps-racist-talk-of-immigrant-bad-genes-echoes-some-of-the-last-centurys-darkest-ideas-about-eugenics-241548
[iii] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trumps-racist-rants-against-immigrants-hide-under-the-language-of-eugenics/
[iv] https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-defends-comments-about-immigrants-poisoning-the-blood-of-america/7405198.html
[v] https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-defends-comments-about-immigrants-poisoning-the-blood-of-america/7405198.html
[vi] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/14/trump-congress-go-back-where-they-came-from-1415692
[vii] https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2024/04/02/trump-calls-migrants-animals-and-not-human-intensifying-focus-on-immigration/
[viii] https://www.wired.com/2002/12/less-lott/?utm
[ix] Id.
[x] https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/allen-apologizes-for-macaca-moment-056212
[xi] https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/30/politics/lauren-boebert-ilhan-omar-video-comments
[xii] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance-haitians-if-i-have-to-create-stories-1235102572/
[xiii] Id.
[xiv] https://nul.org/news/dog-whistle-rhetoric-giving-way-tuberville-greenes-overt-racism
[xv] https://www.ms.now/opinion/msnbc-opinion/fox-s-tucker-carlson-s-biggest-racist-conspiracy-theory-n1295212
[xvi] https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/may/19/tucker-carlson-feigned-ignorance-over-great-replac/
[xvii] https://x.com/elonmusk
[xviii] https://www.axios.com/2024/10/18/americans-immigrants-poisoning-blood-trump
[xix] https://usafacts.org/articles/which-groups-have-experienced-an-increase-in-hate-crimes/
[xx] https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics
[xxi] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/03/25/asian-hate-crime-fbi-black-lgbtq
[xxii] https://www.cair.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/UPDATE_2024-Report_Online-2.pdf
[xxiii] https://www.adl.org/resources/report/audit-antisemitic-incidents-2024
[xxiv] https://nwasianweekly.com/2025/08/anti-asian-hate-crimes-in-2024-second-highest-on-record/
[xxv] https://www.aaiusa.org/library/hatecrime2023
