Tell Your Kids This Shit Is Racist

I didn’t think the old man could upset me anymore. I thought I had become numb to the bile he has vomited into our lives for so long. I was wrong. 

It was 7:30 a.m. and my daughter was busily making her lunch for school, humming Wham's Last Christmas, deciding between yogurts, when I called her over to the dining room, where I sat with my phone and watched the president belch up some fresh gutter racism to go along with my coffee and oatmeal. The old man babbled on and on about making American immigration strictly the domain of white people. The president of the United States was openly waxing about how to ethnically cleanse the fatherland and it didn’t register as a story, not even a blip in the media ecosystem that fears the president with a 33 percent approval rating. 

I called my nine-year-old daughter to the table because I needed her to see this hideous melting man who cosplays as president while 4Chan trolls run the executive branch say unconscionable shit about immigrants from African nations. He was fixated on Somali immigrants on this grey morning as high-ranking Republican officials all but urged violence against House Rep. Ilhan Omar and other Somali representatives in Minnesota. They pretended to be upset about some kind of fraud investigation among the state's Somali folks – bad-faith cover for an old-fashioned pogrom.

I asked my daughter if she knew the skin color of people from Somalia. Black and brown, she said, unsure of where this was going, or if she had said something wrong. I then asked if she knew what skin color people from Norway and Denmark and Sweden primary had. White, she said. Then I rolled the clip, watching my sweet girl watch this monstrous man blurt out gutter racism that makes his rallies indistinguishable from Ku Klux Klan rallies. She listened to the two-term president call an entire people "filthy" and "dirty" and "disgusting."

"Send us some nice people," he asked of Denmark, "would you mind?"

She watched the twice-elected president denigrate black immigrants as subhuman. It was hardly the first time he had denied the humanity of those who do not share his skin color. And yet, he is president. For the second time.

I wanted my daughter to see this and to understand that the president is an unreformed racist who hates people for their immutable traits. I needed her to watch this tiny horror film because I know one day someone – maybe many someones – will tell her and your kids and their kids that Uncle Donald was a crazy old hoot who just loved America and crossed the line sometimes. He was an entertainer at heart, they'll say, a funny old guy. The man said what he meant, and if that hurt your feelings, that was on you. Uncle Donald said what everyone was thinking, no more, no less. That's what our children will be told when he's long gone and we face the long tail of the Trump political dynasty.

The clip ended and my daughter shook her head. So he only wants white people here, she said. Without hesitation I said yes, not because I think it's true, but because White House spokeswoman Caroline Levitt said this month that no immigrant is entering the country right now unless they are a white Afrikaner for South Africa, an aggrieved minority in the fascist imagination.

Trump's attacks on Somali people in the US wreaked of the pogrom JD Vance headed against Haitian-Americans in the weeks before the 2024 election, when the Trump campaign pitched ethnic cleansing as a national housing policy and Vance – despite knowing it to be untrue – pushed the lie that Haitians in the US were capturing and eating their neighbors’ pets. Vance’s lies, spread in service of a man he has once deemed the American Hitler, was the sort of terrorizing of a marginalized group that has become official policy under the second Trump regime. 

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I hadn’t talked with my kids about Vance’s shameless attacks against Haitian families in his home state of Ohio (maybe it’s his home state; it’s hard to say considering no one knows anything about Vance, who has changed his name four times). Maybe it was self preservation. Not having to tell my children that the potential next vice president was spreading lies that led to shootings and threats of bombings and kids staying home from school was too much to bear at the time. I suppose I hoped, like a lot of white American parents, that I could keep my head down and wait for the Democrats to maintain executive power and let this fascist tide pass and not have to explain the details of our leaders' rampant racism to my kids. It was not exactly a foolproof plan in hindsight.

It's not that my children don't know the president is a racist. They've heard and seen the clips, boiled down to nihilistic memes more readily processed by the zoomer brain. My wife and I have fielded questions about what it means when Republicans say welfare recipients are lazy and undeserving. We've told them what it means – how loaded with hate it is – when a white person says a person of color is low-IQ. They've come to protests with me and my wife. We've tried to show them that there remains massive opposition to this disgusting agenda animated by the echoes of the 20th century's darkest ideology.

Watching the president say such nakedly racist shit in a public setting, with his worshippers smiling and clapping and hanging on every last word dripping with malice for the Other, struck me as a moment to share with my nine year old. She needed to see his racism out in the open, undiluted and fully weaponized against a population he sees as vulnerable and unable to defend itself from the full force of our fascist occupation. Because he is a bully first, and a president second. My daughter needed to be exposed to this bile, to see what it looks like when racists eschew dog whistles and just say the shit aloud.

American kids, I think, deserve to know the president is a racist. They need to know it's not OK to be a racist, and that those who engage in such open hate should feel shame and should face social consequences. Kids growing up in the Trump era should be told clearly and straightforwardly that they were raised – for a time – under a regime that espouses white supremacy as if it is a legitimate politics, the same as any other.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.