by William Boardman / May 6th, 2021 “America is not a racist country,” Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said in his party’s official response to President Biden’s address to the nation on April 28. There are reasons that should have been a laugh line: Biden did not say America was a “racist country,” the Black senator was rebutting the president’s call for racial justice across all ethnicities, and the reality is that America was founded as a country in which owning and selling Black people was justified and legalized on the basis of the racist doctrine that they were part of an inferior race. Scott didn’t get a laugh. He wasn’t trying to be funny. He was being intellectually dishonest and uttering a coded racist call to the white supremacist cohort of the Republican party that he is tolerant of their different, racist point of view. That’s where denial takes you, into crazy-land. That’s where partisanship takes you, invoking unreality to pander to polarization.