America is at a crossroads. It must choose whether to strive to become a truly multiracial democracy, or to plunge down the current trajectory towards a white supremacist and fascist state governed by slave master Christianity. None of the human rights violations our government is committing, and none of the atrocities taking place in our name will subside until Donald J. Trump is removed from office.

The migrant families of color caged like animals — the human zoo specimens a cold-hearted and stone-faced Vice President Mike Pence recently served up to please his base for the 2020 campaign — are the deliberate, intentional faces of racialized suffering under the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the “Squad,” the four black and brown freshman congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayana Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — represent the high-profile representatives of the anti-Trump resistance. That Trump told the four progressive lawmakers of color to “go back” home to their own “broken, crime-infested countries” is a reminder that he built his career on Birtherism, and evidence that his campaign to scapegoat undocumented immigrants serves to “otherize” all immigrants, naturalized citizens and native-born citizens who are nonwhite and not regarded as true Americans.

This White House is a white supremacist crime syndicate, a terror organization that trafficks children and locks families in cages and concentration camps in violation of human rights law, both for profit and for political gain. Trumpian policies reflect xenophobic, white nationalist hate groups such as FAIR that support and staff this White House, and the eugenicist and racist spirit of 1920s immigration laws designed to cap immigration, with extreme limits on “morally defective” Italians and Eastern European Jews, and a complete ban for Asians.

The endgame of white supremacy is genocide. Of the ten stages of genocide, the U.S. has arguably reached the seventh (preparation), eighth (persecution) and tenth (denial) stages through the Trump policy against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

Immigration is not the only example of white supremacist measures in the Trump GOP, which adheres to white genocide theory — the notion that white people are an endangered species threatened with replacement through nonwhite immigration, civil rights, abortion and contraception.

Republicans sought a change to the census to include a citizenship question solely to preserve white power. Red states, emboldened in the age of Trump, engage in voter suppression and racial gerrymandering to perpetuate white minority rule. Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a proclamation honoring the domestic terrorist Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, who presided over the Fort Pillow Massacre, killing 300 black Union soldiers after they had surrendered to the Confederate Army.

Emboldened by the rise of accused sexual assaulter Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, red states have enacted harsh abortion bans criminalizing women’s reproductive freedom rather than the men who commit rape and incest. “You need to realize that in this country right now we’ve got a whole lot of white folks are scared to death because they know that within 30 years, white people will have lost their numerical majority in the United States of America,” said anti-racism activist and educator Jane Elliott. “You need to know that the attempt to get rid of my right or any other woman’s right to have an abortion is not about religion, it is not about morality. It is about keeping white people in the numerical majority in this country, and you’d better realize that’s what’s happening.”

Democratic leadership — who are not caged migrants — lack a sense of urgency and proceed with the caution and moderation white skin privilege affords, even in the face of emergent fascism. Unwilling to impeach Trump and hoping to court his supporters, Democrats are misguided to place all their faith in voter turnout to overcome a Russian- and Republican-rigged 2020 election. Claiming they value voters of color — their energetic base — Dems marginalize four black and brown women lawmakers who already receive death threats. Amid calls for bold, audacious change, Democrats would tweak the edges of an inherently flawed system, stake out a dubious neoliberal “middle ground” between progressives and fascists, and return to the good ol’ days when white moderate lawmakers got along with their segregationist colleagues.

Although some insist we are better than this, that this is not who we are, racial violence is very American. America is the home of the plantation authoritarian state, the separation of enslaved black families, and the kidnapping of Native American children forced into boarding schools. The U.S. deported 1 million Mexican-Americans during the Great Depression, and sent Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War Two. Hitler studied Jim Crow segregation and took notes, and 20,000 American Nazis once filled Madison Square Garden.

However, we should aspire to be better. People of good will — woke and steeped in outrage — must ensure this nation changes direction and ends this racist madness. This is impossible while Trump remains in office, yet even after his departure, the hard work begins of draining the swamp of white supremacy, corruption and injustice that is the U.S. political system.

This commentary was originally published by Medium.com