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In 2020, Condoleeza Rice wrote, “Our country has a birth defect: Africans and Europeans came to this country together—but one group was in chains.”

After President Joe Biden addressed the need to “confront” and “defeat” white nationalist terrorism during his inaugural speech, the former secretary of state’s admission is more relevant than ever. Rice’s analogy is among the more salient of the countless appealing but imperfect examples describing racism as a disorder or disease.

Rice’s racism as a “birth defect” analogy is profound, because it emphasizes that white nationalism is not an alien object but rather a building block of the American experiment. And the challenges it causes are ones that cannot be treated with an antibiotic or a vaccine: Racism is a part of the organism’s blueprint. Much like the effects of trisomy-21, say, racism might be managed but not fully repaired or excised.

Yet the analogy lacks some key features of how racist behavior, and especially white nationalism, works. While a birth defect typically remains local to an individual, racist ideology has grown in scope over the past few years and has percolated from the fringes of the dark web into the halls of the United States Capitol.

What about infectious diseases, then? Contagion analogies are often used broadly to describe the spread of dangerous ideas and misinformation. In the case of white nationalism, they capture the virulent nature of their ideals, how they can migrate from subpopulation to subpopulation and, in the span of a few years, corrupt whole corners of the republic.

Radicalization also involves converting individuals into white nationalists, not unlike how infectious pathogens spread from host to host. The infectious analogy also highlights the diversity of the white nationalist pathogens, sometimes cast as “strains.” For example, fringe conspiracies that are white nationalist–adjacent (e.g., QAnon) move like viruses, are highly contagious, and replicate quickly and clumsily.

Other versions of white nationalism function like parasitic infections (e.g., the disease caused by tapeworms), spreading less quickly, but involve machinery more intimately linked with human biology. The white nationalist “parasite” permeates everyday politics—hundreds of lawmakers’ indifference to (or support of) the Confederate flag or individuals running for national office who suggest that Muslims should not hold public office.

Despite these connections, the infectious disease analogy also suffers a critical limitation: It implies white nationalism is the product of a foreign agent that infects individuals’ minds or hearts. In this way, the infectious analogy is wrong specifically where the birth defects analogy is right—there is nothing foreign about white nationalism, and it didn’t need to “invade” America; it was always here.

Given that racism was always here, then what about a cancer analogy? After all, cancerous cells are our own cells, gone awry.

The analogy draws on some basics of the biology of cancer: a class of ailments defined by cells of the body that, due to the existence of mutations, undergo disregulated growth that interferes with the normal physiology of the body. This interference causes illness that can be fatal when left unchecked, and is most dangerous when it spreads from tissue to tissue throughout the body.

This analogy has been recently championed by How to Be An Antiracist author Ibram Kendi, who has spoken of “metastatic racism” to which antiracist efforts may serve as a potential cure. By extension, the notion that white nationalism is a “cancer” works well in many respects: The Capitol terrorists are homegrown Americans, not foreign nationals. They are radicalized and organized underground, and distribute their influence from internet chat rooms all the way to elected office.

Even more, white nationalism especially resembles the class of cancers caused by germline mutations, those that are passed down from parents to offspring. This is an important connection, because one might erroneously analogize white nationalism to cancers caused by somatic mutations. Germline cancers are the more meaningful analogy, because they’re related to what made Rice’s “birth defect” analogy useful—the seeds of white nationalism live in every cell of the American project.

Cancer analogies also have limits that oversimplify the blight of white nationalism. For one, cancer is driven by an undirected process driven by the laws of natural selection: Cancerous cells don’t know they’re disrupting anything. The 2021 strain of white nationalism, however, is engineered specifically for destruction. It is not a set of ideas that undermine the laws of the land by happenstance. Their purpose is to undermine them actively and directly.

These distinctions are more than just semantic: Too many narratives of white nationalism incorrectly depict its actors as exclusively low-class and uneducated. This trope says that the white nationalists aren’t really all that bad but are misguided, acting on ignorance, alienation, or economic anxiety.

This ragtag caricature of white nationalism evokes a cancerous cell blindly fomenting catastrophe through directionless meandering. The reality of white nationalism is closer to the opposite: It is a well-oiled machine, driven by nefarious actors with very specific goals in mind. And in this way, white nationalism isn’t much like cancer at all. There are no innocent, guileless actors, guilty only of being short-sighted. The purveyors of white nationalism live by a wicked creed that explicitly dehumanizes others.

If white nationalism isn’t a birth defect, a virus, or a cancer, should we dispense with disease analogies altogether? Why bother with explanatory vehicles at all?

The answer is that disease, in the abstract sense, does effectively capture the rot of white nationalism in important ways (many people even felt physically ill after seeing images of Charlottesville and the Capitol insurrection).

The challenge resides in identifying the right pathology. Finding one has no necessary allegiance to any existing class of disease—we’re free to cut and paste features of different diseases, even use our science-fiction mind to dream up one better fit to describe this unique blight.

The chimeric, hypothetical disease most like white nationalism resembles an infectious cancer—a rare class of diseases where malignant cells can be transmitted between people. The most famous of these is the devil tumour facial disease of Tasmanian devils. A grotesque illness typified by large tumors on the face that eventually spread throughout the body, killing the animal, the problem is so rampant it threatens the species with extinction.

Like an infectious cancer, white nationalism offers mutant, bastardized forms of American ideals and institutions like liberty, states’ rights, freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms. And they prey on and amplify existing white resentment, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia. And most frustratingly, these sentiments are allowed to grow and fester because of privilege: Law enforcement never treated white domestic terrorism as aggressively as it has Black radicals or international terrorists.

The American immune system doesn’t recognize the white nationalist tumors and allows them to flourish in plain sight. And like an infectious disease, it spreads from person to person at the speed at which a YouTube video can be uploaded and shared (with a basic reproductive number, a measure of contagion, that is off the charts). And unlike existing infectious cancers, this one operates via the conscious rules of seek and destroy rather than the capriciousness of survival of the fittest.

What, if any, solutions are offered by our new analogy? There are no current magic bullets or miracle cures. Like any virulent disease, white nationalism requires a concentrated campaign to understand and eliminate it. Its perpetrators operate on a vision of the world that resembles racist fan fiction more than reality. Consequently, it cannot be reasoned with, as it is based on a wholly warped, perverted, and dangerous calculus.

In the end, we should treat the conquest against white nationalism not unlike functional governments treat an emerging epidemic or especially burdensome disease. For example, one of Covid-19’s early success stories, Senegal, included a rigorous national testing program and effective public health messaging.

With regards to cancer, we can examine cases from our own past. The 1971 “war on cancer,” for example, secured an unprecedented level of resources in the hopes of finding a “cure.” Fifty years later, we can agree it produced no panacea. But it did raise the profile of cancer research and led to a dramatic increase in the amount of basic science research conducted on it.

Our chimeric infectious cancer analogy for white nationalism might require something related but more focused: a war on white nationalism that is much lower on empathy than we’ve ever treated it, and higher on an appreciation for how large and disruptive a menace it truly is. Such a war would include the same administrative and legislative heft that has been given to the wars on drugs and foreign terrorism. (The latter served as the motivation for an entirely new executive department.) It would involve an intersection of experts from the intelligence, legal, criminal justice, and scholarly communities. And these experts would be charged with identifying all of the places that the infectious cancer hides in society, addressing the vulnerabilities in the American immune system, and cutting off the communication channels that serve as a bloodstream (e.g., social media) for white nationalism to further propagate, causing disseminated destruction. The Biden administration has already outlined formal plans for improved surveillance of emerging infectious disease in response to Covid-19. A similar process to address domestic terrorism could just as easily be activated.

This necessary war on white nationalism may not involve the threat of violence but is a war nonetheless: It should be a mission-driven, tactical affair, aimed at defeating an actual foe. And while full eradication of this scourge may not be a realistic goal, we can aim for a healthier state, where treasonist flags never again fly in the hallways where laws are made, threatening the survival of this delicate democracy.

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