Cindy McCain and her husband, the late Sen. John McCain, adopted a daughter from Bangladesh and weathered racist attacks on their family as a result. Nonetheless, when she recently saw a woman and toddler who didn’t share a skin tone, her thoughts went not to family but, Donald Trump-style, to human trafficking.
“I came in from a trip I’d been on and I spotted—it looked odd—it was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me,” McCain told a radio interviewer. “I went over to the police and told them what I saw, and they went over and questioned her, and, by God, she was trafficking that kid.”
According to McCain, the existence of a woman and child of different ethnicities traveling together didn’t just “look odd,” but officially panned out as trafficking, with the child in imminent harm. Police, though, said that they investigated and “there was no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment.” McCain has subsequently tweeted that “I apologize if anything else I have said on this matter distracts from ‘if you see something, say something.’”
How about apologizing for casting suspicion on every multiracial family in the country? How about apologizing to what Occam’s razor suggests was a mother and her child traveling together? People having children of a different ethnicity is a thing that happens, whether through adoption as McCain’s own experience should have reminded her or because in the year 2019—and the years 1999 and 1979 and 1959 and on back—interracial relationships are a thing that exists. McCain’s action was racism cloaked as concern for a child, subjecting a woman and child to police suspicion, and she was proud of it. She bragged about it on the radio. But that doesn’t change that it was racist.