We live in an era that has unleashed all manner of odious, racist rhetoric. The bar for what retains the power to shock us is being raised daily. But some comments still cut deep. “Culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” said the Iowa state representative Steve King over the weekend. It is rare to encounter such blatant bigotry – even today.



“Somebody else’s babies” may be the clearest three-word expression, the most concentrated distillation of racism, that we have heard so far. It so obviously demonstrates the belief that people of some races are not equal to other human beings. Those three words explain so much of what has been happening in this country.

King had been tweeting his support for Geert Wilders, a far-right Dutch politician who is being closely watched in the Netherlands elections on Wednesday. Wilders calls Moroccan immigrants “scum” and has proposed banning the Qur’an, taxing hijabs and closing mosques throughout the Netherlands. Bigots embolden other bigots. Donald Trump has done this favor to racists across the globe – now others are doing the same.

During the controversy that greeted his tweet, King denied that his comment was about race but insisted that it was about “western civilization” – a term he’d clarified in July, on an MSNBC panel. Back then, he had questioned the contributions made by any “subgroup” to a culture rooted in “western Europe, eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of western civilization.”

But where would our civilization be without algebra (invented by the Arabs)? Or without Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, without Albert Einstein, without tacos and baklava, without Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, without Miles Davis, without blues and jazz? Where would our culture be without the countless inventions and innovations that immigrants and people of color have made to every aspect of our daily lives, to our health, our happiness, our welfare?



It’s maddening to have to list the contributions made by our non-white, non-US born communities. But it’s an argument we’ve been obliged to make before. Saul Bellow, among our most respected American novelists, asked, in an interview, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” and later complained: “We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.”

But King has shown no interest in clarifying or modifying his statement, as Bellow did. In fact, King took it farther. And it’s those three words – “someone else’s babies” – that appall those of us who might have hoped that public discourse could not possibly get much uglier. No matter how mindlessly King prattles on about western civilization, it’s clear whose babies he considers to be “someone else’s.”



Let us picture neonatal units in urban hospitals, where babies of every color are sleeping, stretching, being fed, adjusting to this chilly, noisy, bright new world. Is King suggesting that we deport the brown and black babies – who will do nothing to “restore” our civilization and who will dilute our “pure” gene pool – and only allow the white infants to develop into productive citizens?



I’ve heard people say that they don’t like babies, but most of us agree that we’re moved and entertained by them: by their innocence, their playfulness, their cuteness, their faces and personalities already hinting at the adults they will become. What did these babies do, on their short time on earth, to deserve such enmity, such heartlessness?

One of our most basic duties as human beings – as animals, in fact – is to protect our young, to nurture and help them survive. But Steve King (and his supporters) seem not to understand this; to him, the only babies we should welcome into this world are those who look like us, whose skin is white.

This is the kind of thinking we find at play in the recent wave of hate crimes. The men behind those attacks could not have believed that their victims had once been babies whose mothers loved them. The teenage girl who videotaped her father being arrested by Ice agents in Los Angeles was someone else’s baby – in fact, the baby of the dad who was being dragged away.



Conservatives against immigration say we can’t admit everyone who wants to enter our country. What about our national security? they ask. Lost in this debate is the fact that we are talking about human beings. Humans who wouldn’t have left their homes and everything they cared about unless they felt they had to, unless they had no choice but to leave in order to escape poverty and crime.



They love their parents and children. Their babies are precious, vulnerable, full of potential. They mourn their dead and are grief-stricken when their loved ones’ tombstones are defaced.



In Wild Swans, Jung Chang’s eloquent memoir about the lives of three generations of women in China, she quotes a saying of Confucius: “Imagine my heart was yours!” It’s as good a piece of advice as any I’ve heard, and it’s painful to realize that men like Steve King can’t see past the skin color – of a baby! – to imagine the heart (like his, like ours) softly beating within.