Criminals have a problem. Well, they have a lot of problems, but a basic one and one that causes them endless trouble is that they are basically—under all the crap—good people.

“Huh!?” I hear you say. It’s true. Why do criminals leave clues that help police figure out who committed a crime? So they can be stopped. What underlies the stupidity of criminals is their intimate knowledge that what they are doing is harmful.

There’s more. Criminals also hate the feelings of guilt and wrong-doing that committing crimes generate so they make up reasons “why” they committed their heinous acts in the first place. Making up these reasons or justifications involves making less of the people harmed. We can see examples of this everywhere we look.

The whining and complaining you hear daily in media reports from political characters charged with crimes is directly connected with these concepts. There’s not even a need to state the name. Let’s take this examination a bit further. What happens when this kind of denigration becomes a social or economic trend? Looking even briefly back in history gives us the answer: a lot can happen and none of it good.

For thousands of years early “civilizations” took prisoners in wars of conquest whom they turned into slaves. Of course it is innately stupid to take your enemy and press him into the service of your household, your family and your economy, but that was the deal.

As we came forward in time, enterprising psychotics (criminals) decided they really didn’t need wars to get slaves. It was cheaper to just go and steal them from their lives and transport them elsewhere. It made good “economic” sense, to them.

But of course this finally ran into the fact that the majority of mankind is not under the influence of the overwhelming aberrations that make oppressors want to enslave other men. Thus slavery was finally outlawed—even in that last holdout, the United States. By that time slavery had become a completely integrated aspect of the Southern states and the push to abolish it resulted in the Civil War—a war that is still being waged in the minds of some today.

The social justifications and rationalizations for slavery resulted in an array of pseudo-scientific garbage like eugenics—which claimed the superiority of the “white” race over all others. This cancerous concept became one of the tools used by Hltler’s minions and enablers to facilitate the genocide of the Holocaust. And eugenics—though completely debunked—is still pushed by white supremacists to this day.

This false concept of superiority is firmly epoxied to the minds of various Southern and at least one Northern politician, in particular. For decades it was masked by smiles and begrudging pretty words until the mask was ripped off by that particular politician who called Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.”

Those afflicted with the insanity of white supremacy have now morphed into a voting block, at least in the minds of wannabe Republican presidential candidates. One is particular, DeSantis, is trying to nurture his connection to those folks, who are still somehow aggrieved by the loss of a war over 160 years ago. And in going “Big Brother, à la 1984” with Florida’s education standards, he is trying to minimize a centuries-old and centuries-long crime against humanity.

It is an open question as to how one goes about remedying this deep-seated problem in American culture. Here we have a unique and vexing situation where a significant segment of our culture sees racism as a justification of oppression and slavery as totally okay and native to their thought pattern. This leads to the perpetuation of both crimes against humanity and their further justification.

A few clues do exist in the direction of what can be done. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa spearheaded by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu did much for that country to overcome the institutional bigotry that was built into the Apartheid government. (NB: Some of the Apartheid laws were derived from examples set by the United States—ably delineated in Trevor Noah’s book, Born a Crime.)

Another clue about how to break the cycle of white supremacy is the example set by musician Daryl Davis. Davis, a black musician, who has collected about 400 Klan robes given to him by members he has befriended in casual conversation causing them to quit the group.

Perhaps we just need a lot more people like Daryl Davis to engage white supremacists and get them to come forward in time to the reality that there is only one race, and it is human.