Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion, and professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Follow her on Twitter: @ruthbenghiat. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Is this America's new face to the world? Ninety-one proud new White House interns face the camera, with their beaming new boss, President Donald Trump, in the center. These shining faces, shown in a photo the White House released Friday of the 2018 Spring cohort, are very much "his" interns: Startlingly, it appears that all but two of them are white.

Is it accidental or intentional that the young man and woman of color are posed at the group's edges, creating an unbroken show of racial homogeneity? And does the whiteness of the interns reflect willful culling or just self-selection, with black and brown potential candidates opting not to apply to work in this White House?

If the latter, the literal marginalization of people of color in this photo offers a visual explanation: It dovetails with the rhetoric and actions of the Trump administration.

From the retweeting of anti-black, anti-Semitic, and anti-Hispanic imagery used during the campaign, to the administration's efforts to keep immigrants out of America, to Trump's characterization of African countries as belonging to the cesspool of humanity, the President and advisers like Stephen Miller have made no secret of their interest in bolstering American whiteness in the face of demographic change that will put Caucasians in the minority by midcentury.

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In fact, as a representation of American millennials (the demographic that White House interns belong to), this photograph is a fantasy. According to a recent Brookings Institution study , that generation is now 44% minority and "the most diverse adult generation in American history." According to the 2015 census, whites were only 55.8% of the 18-34 age bracket, followed by Hispanic, black, Asian, and other groups.