Symptoms

The disturbing part about the illness is that the bone-ified racists can never admit that they are infected. In fact, one of the telltale signs of the condition is that, when asked, victims will always announce that they don’t have a racist bone in their body or some other assurance that they have not contracted the virus. However, all of the available research indicates that there has never been a case of a racist who was aware of their racism until the disease had metastasized into its incurable, late-stage form known as the “Trumpian Stage.”

In fact, it is virtually impossible for a bigot to self-identify his sickness because they aren’t the ones who are affected by acts of discrimination. Dumb people never think they are dumb, and racists never think they are racist. That’s just science.

Aside from the infected person’s insistence that they are prejudice-free, there are six common identifiers shared by most bone bigots:

The invisible black friend. In the early stages, the infected will insist that “one of their best friends is black.” It’s always just one friend, and you will never meet their imaginary negro comrade.

They voted for Obama: Scientists have just recognized this new symptom and note that white people will never tell you who they voted for unless it’s Barack Obama, despite the fact that whites voted overwhelmingly for Obama’s opponent in 2008 and 2012. And, in our research, we have never found an instance of anyone bragging to a white person: “I voted for Bush ... twice.”

The bootstrap delusion: In almost every test case, patients developed a narcissistic fantasy that everything they accomplished was due to their effort, intelligence, and high morals. Consequently, they begin to assume that non-white communities have been left behind because they don’t focus on education, family, hard work and Christian values. Eventually, the bone-headedness makes the person so visually impaired that they can’t see the effects of historical discrimination, institutional prejudice or white supremacy in general.

They did something for black people that has a lot of prepositional adverbs: They worked in the upper-tier of an inner-city after-school program that focused on underprivileged youth who are over-represented in the lower level of the school-to-prison pipeline.

They are allergic to talking about race: Sufferers often develop an acute allergic reaction to discussing slavery, reparations, Jim Crow, lynchings, the racial wealth gap or any form of systematic inequality. Bringing up these topics will induce a reflexive response of them asking why “everything has to be about race,” followed by the infected individual lamenting about people “playing the race card.” The only way they can alleviate this particular symptom is by insisting that they know what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted.

They know all the euphemisms for racism: They aren’t racist, they’re just a socially conservative, economically anxious, white, working-class, mainstream American patriot who respects traditional values, western culture, Southern heritage, law and order, small government, individual liberty, hard work, religious freedom, the Constitution, the troops and—most of all—the flag.