Bons mots are simply clever remarks. The following are cleverly enunciated policies that belie their stated purpose and raise serious questions:

(1) Sanctuary cities are unlawful and must be punished.
(but “sanctuary” defines a place safe and protected from persecution and violence)
The question: Who are sanctuary cities protecting and why?

(2) A travel or Muslim ban is necessary for national security.
(but an immigration ban is a no-admittance policy or, by definition, a discrimination policy)
The question: Who is being discriminated and why?

(3) Zero tolerance for illegal border crossing keeps America safe.
(but zero tolerance deports lawful asylum seekers without due process)
The question: Who is being denied lawful access to our country and why?

(4) Criminal justice demands maximum sentencing.
(but justice demands fair treatment under the law where the punishment fits the crime.)
The question: Who is denied fair treatment by maximum sentencing guidelines and why?

(5) Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of 309,000 people is no longer needed and will be revoked by 2020.
(but TPS has provided haven for people escaping catastrophic conditions in their home countries, including 50,000 Hondurans, 200,000 Salvadorans, 50,000 Haitians, and 9,000 Nepalese.)
The question: Who will suffer from this loss of temporary status and why?

(6) Obama-era guidelines for supporting diversity in college admissions are not needed and are redacted.
(but the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that race should be one factor amidst many to be considered in college admissions.)
The question: Who suffers from eliminating affirmative action guidelines in college admissions and why?

The “who” in all these instances is the same: black or brown people. The problem with these policy initiatives is their obvious intent to suppress the less privileged minorities in our country. And the targeted minorities are explicitly people of color. In other words, the common denominator is racial discrimination.

Further, in all but the last enumerated instance, families are terrorized, potentially torn apart by deportations, maybe separated from their children—who might even be incarcerated, possibly excluded from lawful visas, and often subjected to excessively punitive sentencing for non-violent crimes. Thousands of children have recently been separated from their parents seeking asylum in America. Tens of thousands of children face separation from parents who will be deported after TPS is revoked. By any definition, these actions display not only explicit racism but a total disregard for families. In simpler words, they are patently inhuman.

Explicit racism is an objective statement. But the experience of racism is subjective, both for the victim and the perpetrator. The victim feels judged and determined somehow unworthy of fair or equal treatment of which others are entitled. But the perpetrator may or may not believe he/she is racist. Racists may feel justified in their belief that certain classes of people are inferior and should be treated as such. Racism can, after all, reflect biases that are not recognized or even felt. Sometimes racism is not seen for what it is until its worst effects are manifested, like gas chambers, death marches, internment camps, and forced separation of family members.

Perhaps many of us feel not affected by President Trump’s war on the less privileged amongst us. And we resent being cast as racists or biased against families. There are many communities in America where their uniformity in ethnicity and values precludes any visible signs of prejudice. Family values may well be extolled in these communities. While Trump offers these communities a nation that reflects them, he ignores the reality of the nation of which they are a part. On the back of the one-dollar bill, we read the seal of the United States of America: E Pluribus Unum (out of many one). From the outset, America is and always has been a nation defined by its very diversity. It is true that various majorities have risen to prominence—whether comprised by white protestants at the outset, later outnumbered by white western Europeans of mixed religious affiliations, and then further enumerated by white eastern Europeans. By 2030 or shortly thereafter, the majority of Americans may well be a mixture of black and brown people—the latter will include some second and third generations of the Central America migrants currently crossing our southern border. But America will still be America. In fact, we depend upon every new majority to treat all inhabitants equally. Otherwise, there is dissent, protest, or even violence.

We are a country founded on ideals. But we have always struggled to realize those ideals. Those struggles were hard fought and on significant occasions resulted in Amendments to our Constitution: the 13th abolished slavery; the 14th defined the civil rights of all citizens and the rights of any person to due process and the equal protection of the laws; the 15th provided the right to vote to all citizens without regard to “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”; the 19th gave women the right to vote; and the 26th reduced the voting age to 18, equaling the draft age. Many people died to win these testaments to a free and civil society—hundreds of thousands in the Civil War, tens of thousands in Vietnam, most under the age of 21. But none of these amendments became law without the protests of Americans. They marched in the streets with signs, they petitioned their representatives, and they voted their conscience. Sometimes their protests turned violent, but they eventually won their citizenship and their civil rights, including the right to vote. Women in the Suffrage Movement blew up mail boxes. Draft age students were shot by National Guardsmen, but they continued their demands for Congress to give them the right to vote and to eliminate the draft.

Of course, there are many biases that go unnoticed. Unless you are a transgender person, the proposed military transgender ban may not have caught your attention. Unless you are a woman of limited means, you may not feel affected by legal attempts to suppress abortions or limit access to women’s preventative care. Most of us believe we live in a self-perceived bias free zone. Given that self-perception, we ought not to judge others who appear guilty of bias or prejudice. But we cannot excuse the objectively obvious results of racism. It is possible that our President, for example, feels entirely justified in enacting the policies listed above. But those policies, nevertheless, are demonstrably heinous and racist in their effects.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans protested last weekend. They did not fall for the cleverly worded phrase “zero-tolerance” or for its stated purpose to protect Americans from rapists and murderers. Since January of 2017, millions of Americans have protested Administration policies and positions that allegedly protected Americans by banning Muslims without cause, that left gun violence unaddressed, and that ignored various women’s issues from their right to preventive care, to decisions affecting their body and child birth, and to an insensitivity on issues of sexual harassment and assault. Why are the Administration’s stated policies and positions meeting such resistance? Well, perhaps the problem is with the shade intention casts on the semantics of phrases like “zero-tolerance,” “Muslim ban,” or “maximum sentencing.”

Words can characterize or even embellish reality. The clever use of words is a skill when it serves the truth with honest intent. But it is deceitful when it departs from the truth and demeans the good. The good, in this instance, is what Jefferson intended when he wrote “all men are created equal.” With the gift of our shared human nature comes “certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Racist and inhuman policies have never lived up to this intent. But, somehow, each generation of Americans must find a way to do so.