SINCE the publication of Omarosa Manigault Newman’s book about her time in the Trump administration, the president’s political opponents have been indulging in a charmingly old-fashioned debate. Ms Manigault Newman suggests she was fired because people in the White House thought she knew the whereabouts of a recording from the president’s reality TV days in which he used the N-word. Given President Donald Trump’s fondness for derogatory epithets, it would be mildly surprising if he had avoided this one. Yet to imagine that a tape of the utterance would damage him irrevocably would be to forget the past three years. The president’s opponents, it seems, are condemned to be taught the same lesson over and over again.

The kind of epithets Mr Trump uses are nowhere near as shocking to many people as progressive Americans imagine. The Economist asked YouGov to do some polling on the use of the word “nigger”. The results came in this week, and they are that 35% of those who voted for the president report having used the word themselves. Perhaps more surprisingly, 24% of those who say they voted for Hillary Clinton have done so too. Subtract African-Americans, who have licence to use the N-word, from the Clinton numbers and the share drops, but only to 19%.

Using the N-word is hurtful for the same reason other casual insults are. When the president says that LeBron James, a basketball great, and the TV anchor interviewing him (both of them black) are stupid, or that Ms Manigualt Newman is a “dog”, or that Mexican migrants are “rapists”, he hints at a style of thought with a murderous past. Racism, said Martin Luther King, “is the arrogant assertion that one race is the centre of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission.” Yet in Mr Trump’s defence, the words he has used far too often are hints at something rather than the thing itself. They do not reach the threshold set by King’s definition.

This does not get the president off the hook, though, for the meaning of racism has shifted during his lifetime. It is no longer enough just to express admiration for civil-rights leaders, support for racially mixed education or a past opposition to the Ku Klux Klan for a politician to prove that he is on the right side of the line. Some proper sense of the violence perpetrated against African- and Native Americans for much of the past three centuries is required. An understanding of how that history still reverberates through American society, showing up in disparities in income, education, incarceration and welfare receipts is also necessary. Some familiarity with the copious literature on unconscious racial bias is a plus. All of which makes the new definition of racism much more subjective than the old one.

One way sociologists measure racist attitudes is by asking whites polling questions about whether black Americans are lazy. The share who say whites work harder than African-Americans fell from 65% in 1990 to 35% in 2015. Mixed-race marriage did not command the support of the majority of Americans until the mid-1990s. In the years since then, support has increased to nearly 90%. In 2010 the share of whites who say they feel equally close to blacks and other whites overtook the share who say they feel closer to whites. There is plenty more where this came from.

Some progressives, who find the idea that America has experienced racial progress over the past 50 years intolerable, have argued that what has really happened is that those cunning racists have just become better at concealing their prejudice. An alternative view, preferred by Barack Obama among others, is that America really has seen a lot of racial progress. If that is indeed the case, then what defines racism now?

At one extreme, white racism is considered to be ubiquitous and there is nothing that even well-informed, well-intentioned white people can do about it. John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at Columbia University, has likened this view to a secular religion in which enlightened whites are forever seeking penance for history. “White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness.” At the other extreme is the insouciance of the 77% of Trump voters who say that using the N-word and being a good president are compatible.

Say it loud

Between these poles is a usable definition. Later on in her book, Ms Manigault Newman describes an exchange with Stephen Bannon, then the chief strategist to the president, which helps to refine it. “I had an interesting conversation with Bannon and asked him if the rumours of him being a racist were true,” she writes. “He said no. He explained, ‘The same way you are a proud African-American woman, I am a proud white man. What’s the difference between my pride and your pride?’”

White pride is taboo in American politics: the smells of burning crosses and Zyklon B cling to it still. White pride is troubling because of its association with a violent fringe movement that the FBI tracks assiduously. But it is also troubling because demands made by political majorities on the basis of race are more threatening than those made by minorities. White pride is scary; Irish pride is celebrated with marching bands and by dyeing the Chicago River iridescent green. It is only when Irish-Americans join with other whites to make political demands that this way of doing politics becomes alarming, because this larger group might have the power to impose its will on everyone else.

As America becomes a more racially mixed society and the pre-eminence of whites fades, a point which is still decades away, that objection to white pride could one day fall away. That does not mean that white Americans cannot be proud of their country or its history in the meantime. It means that organising politically around the idea of whiteness is, well, racist.