The Racists Saw a Travesty. I Saw America.

A picture from a college football game incensed the online racists. They finally gave up hiding what they are really after.

The Texas Longhorns student section did the most American thing possible, cheering on their college football team, and the worst of our politics still took exception.

This weekend, Texas beat Ohio State in a genuinely thrilling comeback, the kind of football game that sends a stadium out of its mind. The Longhorns’ own social media account posted a hype video, and after a touchdown the camera panned across the student section and landed on a group of students, many of them of Indian descent, absolutely losing it. Jumping. Screaming. Hook ‘em signs in the air. Pure joy.

I looked at that clip and felt good. Here were a bunch of college kids on a Saturday night doing the single most American thing I can think of, screaming their lungs out for a big state school’s football team. A packed student section, an impossible win, and a group of young people who will remember that night for the rest of their lives.

Then I saw what the racists did with it.

They Aren’t Hiding It Anymore

Within hours, comments attacking the number of non-white students in that video had piled up thousands of likes. And it wasn’t just anonymous accounts. Bo French, a former Republican county chairman and a current candidate for statewide office in Texas, shared the photo and wrote, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Then he reposted the same image and added that social media is “exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.”

“Displaced.” “Foreigners.” About American college students at an American university celebrating an American football game.

French’s post on Sunday is unbecoming of another American, let alone a candidate for office. Rejecting the racism that has plagued mainstream politics in growing fashion is fundamental to the upkeep of our democracy.

Give French this much: he isn’t hiding it. When his own party asked him to take the post down, including outgoing Senator John Cornyn, he refused and doubled down on the radio. This is a man who last summer posted a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims are a bigger threat to America, and who earlier this year called for the deportation of 100 million people. He isn’t dog-whistling. He’s whistling into a megaphone. And that clarity, ugly as it is, is useful, because it lets the rest of us see exactly what we’re dealing with.

Here’s the kicker: the students in that photo are Americans.

Two of them, Dhairya Gupta and Rahul Kodali, spoke to the Dallas Morning News and said the obvious thing, that they’re US citizens and the post was blatantly racist. One of the students targeted has lived in Austin her whole life. And there’s a detail about how Texas fills its public universities that matters as more than a point of education policy in this discussion.

State law automatically admits the top students from every high school class in Texas to its public universities. These aren’t foreign students who took some Texan’s spot. They are, overwhelmingly, the sons and daughters of Texas, kids who finished at the top of their high school classes in Plano and Sugar Land and Houston and earned their seats fair and square.

Bo French is the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, a statewide office on the ballot this November. Over the weekend, his behavior showed the ugliest side of what’s become all too familiar in our politics today.

Did you catch what just happened with the racists’ argument? Because it’s important.

For years, the argument from this crowd was that immigrants don’t assimilate. That they come here and stay separate, cling to the old country, refuse to become American. That was the respectable-sounding version of the complaint, the one you could say on TV.

And then a camera showed the world the single purest image of assimilation you could ever ask for: second-generation kids so thoroughly, joyfully American that they’re painting their faces burnt orange and screaming for the Longhorns on a Saturday night.

The exact thing they claimed to want. And they hated it. They looked at total assimilation and it made them furious.

That tells you the assimilation argument was never the real one. Because when these folks saw brown kids doing the most American thing imaginable, the objection wasn’t that the kids hadn’t become American. The objection was the color of their skin.

The mask slipped, and underneath it was something much older and much uglier than a policy disagreement about immigration.

The Battle For American Identity

What French and the people cheering him on are really pushing is the idea that to be truly American, you have to be white. That the country belongs, by blood, to one kind of person, and everyone else is a guest here at best and an invader at worst.

It has a name. It’s called blood-and-soil nationalism, and it is one of the oldest and most dangerous lies in human history. When taken to its full end, it does not result in a healthy country. It ends in resentment, and resentment always goes looking for somewhere to put itself. It ends in people getting hurt.

The truth is, racism rarely arrives announcing itself. It comes in softly, dressed up as a reasonable concern. A question about assimilation. A statistic presented with a grave expression.

It sounds almost sensible, and that’s the danger of it, because by the time you’re nodding along to the reasonable-sounding version, the unreasonable version is already in the room.

And then something like this happens. America shows these cretins what our country actually looks like, and they can’t keep the disguise on.

This Fight Is Bigger Than Race

Here is what I believe, and I’ll say it as plainly as I know how: American is not a race. It never has been.

It is a creed, a set of ideas about freedom and equality and self-government that anyone, from anywhere, can pick up and carry. That’s the radical promise of this country, the thing that has made us the envy of the world and the destination of the world’s most ambitious people for 250 years.

The moment we decide that American means white, we stop being America. We become just another country organized around blood, and a small and frightened country at that.

The Statue of Liberty is a beacon of light and welcoming that encourages the world to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It does not qualify skin color for who can become an American.

The kids in that student section understand what America is better than Bo French ever will. They are the promise, kept. And a political movement that looks at those beaming faces and sees a threat has told you everything you need to know about what’s actually in its heart.

So no, I don’t see a travesty when I watch that clip. I see a group of Texans who earned their place, celebrating their team, living out the American story exactly as it’s supposed to go.

I see the country I love, and the country worth fighting for. I see America.

The racists saw something to fear. I feel sorry for them, because they’re going to spend the rest of their lives afraid of their own country.

I will be an Illinois State University Redbird until I die. But today, I say to my ALL my fellow Texans down the road in Austin:

Hook ‘em!

— Adam