Recently our house needed some substantial repairs. Weekly, it needs maintenance. All of the workers on these projects, as it happens, have been Hispanics. I say, “as it happens,” because hiring Hispanics, or folks of any ethnicity, was not our intent. We needed the work done, engaged reputable contractors, and these were the folks who came. Their work was excellent, cheerful, and polite. Only their supervisors spoke comprehensible English (and our Spanish is nil). The jobs got done.

We live in north-eastern America, far from our southern border. Many of our neighbors vociferously support Trump and inveigh against immigrants, Hispanics especially. Do they notice, I wonder, who’s helping them live their lives, doing strenuous jobs native-born Americans won’t? Their racist invective is not just vile by any ethical measure, it’s blind and stupid. Anger rises in me. What’s wrong with these prideful palookas? They live OK lives, most of them, on well-tended quarter-acre lots, with two-car garages and wide-screen TV’s. They go to work at jobs they don’t mind that pay OK. Their kids go to well-rated public schools, which send kids into colleges and careers. Medicare and Social Security are available to them when they qualify, and Medicaid and other services if required. No Hispanics are stealing their jobs or undermining their wellbeing. Yet here they are, fulminous, furious, frothing with false facts, fed-up, fit to be tied, close our borders, let those invaders starve! Hello, hello, I want to knock their skulls, is anybody home?

Racism is a disease of mind. It’s no more justified by evidence than other phobias or manias. It is born of fear and blame. Racists, convinced their failure is not their fault, blame an abhorrent Other. Racists fear they will be supplanted by the Other because they distrust their own adequacy. Racism should be treated, not debated.

Since before literacy, political leaders have used racism to enforce their authority. The more dreadful the Other, the more necessary the Leader. Racism justifies savagery in war and economic exploitation. The Other does not deserve justice or decency because, face it, they’re not really human. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” Lyndon Johnson told an interviewer. “Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Racism in our neighbors should be viewed as sickness, not a different point of view. It should never be shrugged off as acceptable variation (“It takes all sorts”) or discounted in the interests of civility (“Live and let live”). Politicians who inculcate this fear to advance their careers should be scotched.

Easy enough to excoriate, racism’s impossible to expunge. It reappears in every generation as convenient bait for the unscrupulous and balm to losers. Humans, I think, are the only species that need to win for the sake of winning. Never satisfied, we feel our little eminence threatened. When we fail, as we’re likely to, we insist it was not our fault. Disappointed parents infect their children with their excuses. As Oscar Hammerstein Jr. put it in his searing lyric,

I’m preaching to the choir here, I realize, but dammit, this makes me mad.