There are moments in life when we feel a kind of fatigue settle in, a weariness that makes us want to turn the page, change the channel, focus on literally anything else. We’ve had plenty of practice at that over the last year. The controversies have blurred together. The outrages have stacked up. And now, it seems, the most self-preserving response is to disengage.

This past weekend was yet another of those moments.

President Trump’s amplification of a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes landed with a thud that was impossible to ignore. The White House’s chaotic response made clear that even an administration well-versed in riding out storms had misjudged this one.

For a brief moment, the familiar playbook didn’t work.

At first, the criticism was waved off as “fake outrage” over an internet meme. That framing has become a reflex: laugh it off, double down, move on. But it soon became evident that this controversy was different. Members of Trump’s own party began speaking out, starting with Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina – the only Black Republican in the Senate and one of the president’s closest allies – who called the clip “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Others followed. The chorus grew louder.

By midday, the post was gone. The White House blamed an unnamed “staffer.” By evening, Trump said he hadn’t realized the clip of the Obamas had been spliced into the video. When asked whether he condemned the racist depiction, he said, “Of course I do.” However, and importantly, he did not apologize. He said it wasn’t his mistake.

That distinction – condemnation without accountability – has become a defining feature of the Trump administration.

It’s undeniable that Trump has skated through controversies that would have ended any other political career. He continues to insist he won the 2020 election. A criminal conviction did not stop him from winning a second term. In recent weeks, his administration reportedly threatened to shut down a major infrastructure project if New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport didn’t bear his name.

And yet, with midterm elections looming in November, even Trump has been forced to backtrack. This episode was one of those moments. The deletion of the video amounted to a remarkable climbdown, even if it came without an apology and was carefully framed to deflect responsibility.

What struck us most, though, wasn’t just the political mechanics of the response. It was the way this incident rippled outward, beyond headlines and press briefings, into living rooms and conversations across the country, coming as it did during the first week of Black History Month.

We wanted to look away from all of it. But we couldn’t.

On Saturday morning, Adriana Diaz, an anchor on CBS Saturday Morning, became visibly emotional while discussing the clip on air. Her co-host, Vlad Duthiers, reached over to comfort her. It was a quiet, human moment that underscored how deeply this landed for many people, especially people of color who have spent their lives navigating the weight of such imagery.

That moment stayed with us.

It came up again and again over the weekend: around the dinner table, sitting by the campfire, during a visit with one of Jon’s colleagues and his wife (an old friend of Cliff’s). The conversations weren’t performative or dramatic. They were subdued, reflective, tinged with sadness and disbelief. Not outrage for outrage’s sake, but the kind that comes from recognizing something ugly and familiar being dragged back into the light.

Racist imagery is never accidental. It is always intentional. And it carries a history, one that doesn’t disappear just because it’s packaged as a joke, a meme, or a misunderstanding. When it’s amplified by the most powerful office in the world, even indirectly, it sends a signal. And people hear it, whether they want to or not.

This is what makes moments like this so hard to shrug off. They remind us that the stakes are not abstract. They’re personal. They show up in how people feel sitting in their own homes, watching the nightly news, wondering what kind of country we are becoming, or have revealed ourselves to be.

There is a temptation to treat each new controversy as just another entry in an endless list. To say, this too shall pass. Maybe it will. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

Some moments ask more of us than we want to give. They insist that we see what we’d rather not. But looking away doesn’t change anything. Looking away only makes the hardest truths easier to ignore. This weekend asked us to acknowledge that Donald Trump may be many things to many people, but he is also blatantly racist and utterly despicable.

Consider his record, going back to the 1973 Justice Department lawsuit accusing his real-estate company of refusing to rent to Black tenants. In 1989 he fueled outrage by taking out a full-page ad demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five (who were ultimately exonerated), which he never walked back. In the 1990s, his businesses faced additional accusations of discriminatory treatment of Black casino employees and running racially charged ads targeting a Native American tribe by suggesting their “dark skin” undermined their identity. As president, he referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” told four minority congresswomen to “go back” to other countries despite their U.S. citizenship, and characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. His decision to restore Confederate-linked names to military bases further signaled a willingness to elevate symbols long associated with racism and white supremacy, while his move to dismantle DEI programs, undermine museums dedicate to African American history, and override indigenous naming further chipped away at racial equity efforts and historical truth-telling.

Maybe that’s why this moment matters. Not because it was unprecedented, but because it was all-too-familiar. Because once again we had to confront what we already knew: that racism in this country is not a relic of the past but a reality of the present.

We may not be able to control the actions of the most powerful man in the world but we are not powerless. We can hold his “truths” up to the light, painful as they may be. We can name what we see, even when others prefer that we move on. We can attend to the humanity of the people who have been harmed, rather than the spectacle of the person causing the harm. And we can refuse to allow cynicism to convince us that it doesn’t matter.

Moments like this remind us that the work of building a more decent world doesn’t happen in headlines but in quiet conversations around dinner tables and campfires, in acts of loving kindness and courage, in the deliberate choice to stay engaged even when we’d rather look away.