When Sen. Eric Schmitt gave the keynote address at the 2025 National Conservatism Conference, he hung on America a discredited sign once found on all public bathrooms in the South, “Whites Only.”
In his speech, titled “What is an American?” the senator from Missouri declared America to be a white homeland.
His basic claim: America belongs to “us,” meaning white people and especially white men.
His speech is rooted in European settler history. This is deliberate because these white Americans will go to any length not to be considered “immigrants.”
Yet the “us” in the USA escapes Schmitt. His ode to white supremacy blasphemes the words of Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He tramples the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
“White Americans will go to any length not to be considered ‘immigrants.’”
Here are a few Schmitt quips:
- America is “not a universal nation.”
- “America doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to us.”
- “We can no longer apologize for who we are.”
- We “repelled wave after wave of Indian war band attacks.”
- “Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness. We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims who poured out onto the ocean’s shores.”
- “We’re not sorry. Why would we be sorry? America is the proudest and most magnificent heritage ever known to man.”
Schmitt follows in the wake of earlier comrades in racist rants. His Iowa neighbor, former Rep. Steve King, lamented “white nationalist” had become a pejorative term. He claimed our civilization can’t be restored with “somebody else’s babies.”
His neighboring senator from Arkansas, John Cotton, has claimed: “Some — too many — may have lost the civilizational self-confidence needed to celebrate the Pilgrims.”
Now, Schmitt endeavors to disinter an odious and discredited creed: the one known as “white supremacy.” He clothes it in fake robes of a righteousness feigning white benevolence.
Refuting Schmitt requires merely the negation of his opinions. America is a universal nation — diverse, different and multi-colored. There is no “them vs. us” in the United States of America. Apology is superfluous; what is required is accountability, reparations and repentance.
White people decimated and conquered Native Americans as they invaded their lands. The American “pilgrim story” has darker and more transgressive chapters than Schmitt allows. White people have a sorry record in the treatment of people of color. There should be shame instead of pride in what we have done.
In addition, there are two ways Schmitt is wrong that are more encompassing than his remarks.
Schmitt is wrong for covering genuine white shame with fake pride.
He offers “dignity” to white Americans. White Americans have felt shame as they were repudiated by a civil morality supporting civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. Instead of repentance, the true response to shame, many white Americans “hardened their hearts” and refused to change.
Communication scholar Donovan Schaefer helped us understand Trump’s appeal with his mastery of a circuit of shame and dignity, in which supporters who feel ashamed find, in his verbal and visual style, a repudiation of that shame.
White supremacy is the epicenter of Trump’s strategy. Racist dog whistles, suggestive Nazi phrases like “poisoning the blood,” declarations of “we don’t want them here” have a singular purpose: Feed the flame of white supremacy and nationalism.
Schmit is wrong for telling such big lies.
In a culture where lies pass for truth, a politician inclined to demagoguery has a free pass. America has a history of lying to people.
“White supremacy is riddled with lies.”
Our government told Native Americans more lies than Trump has told the American people. As the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright put it, “We lied to the Comanches. We lied to the Apaches, the Seminoles, the Arawak, the Susquehanna, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Hopi, and the Arapaho.”
White supremacy is riddled with lies. White Americans often believe God sent us to take this land from Native Americans, God ordained the rape and robbery (and near genocide) of an entire continent, God made Europeans superior to people of color, God approved of slavery, segregation and Apartheid.
The lies of a white homeland are an affront to God of whom Acts 17:26 declares, “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”
Schmitt is lying to the American people. America is not the Promised Land. White Americans are not God’s new chosen people. White Americans don’t have what it takes to be God’s chosen people across the centuries and endure the suffering, the shame, the exile, the genocide, the prejudice of the world.
White supremacy in all its truculent and sanctimonious power is the world’s enemy, the ideology of Satan. As theologian James H. Cone asked in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “How could any theologian explain the meaning of Christian identity in America and fail to engage white supremacy, its primary negation? I concluded that it was my responsibility to address the great contradiction white supremacy poses for Christianity in America.”
So it should be with us all.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.