“There were men, women and CHILDREN! They hadn’t eaten anything since 6:00 am. What kind of depraved individual loads up 50 people onto a plane and dumps them in a strange place without even notifying anyone that they’re coming? These are ‘leaders’? These are ‘Christians’? I’ll tell you what this is. It’s a disgusting political stunt — at the expense of human beings just wanting to work and provide for their families. But you know what? On this island, we treated them with dignity, we fed them, we gave them medical attention and we will give them a warm and safe place to sleep…Because on Martha’s Vineyard, we won’t turn our backs on people in need who are being abused by extremist Republican governors for some cheap soundbite on Fox News.”

That’s a text from a resident of Martha’s Vineyard responding to the decision by the governors of Florida and Texas to fly a group of Venezuelans who are in the US legally waiting for decisions on their asylum requests. It’s gone viral, and for good reason. It’s one thing for politicians to disagree about US immigration policy. It’s quite another to toy sadistically with people’s lives.

Of course, for MAGA Republicans like Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott, the cruelty is the point. Demonstrating dominance is part of their political allure. But their new tactic of shipping refugees from Latin and South America to northern targets like New York City’s Port Authority Terminal and Chicago’s Union Station, which have seen hundreds arrive there in the last few weeks, and now this jab at Martha’s Vineyard, could well backfire. That’s because the overwhelming majority of Americans do not support cruelty. In the same way that Donald Trump’s deliberate policy of family separation triggered a massive counter-response — including from many longtime Republicans like George and Laura Bush — DeSantis and Abbott’s bullying is offering the rest of us an opportunity to show the America we actually want.

Of course, validating and whipping up hatred of dark-skinned people, whether they are immigrants or natives to this land is nothing new. In the 1950s and 1960s, one of the ways that Southern whites tried to counter the rising civil rights movement was by giving Black people one-way bus tickets to northern cities. The White Citizens Councils, an openly racist network that had similar goals but less violent means than the Ku Klux Klan, called this their “Reverse Freedom Rides,” hoping to turn the tables on liberals up north. It didn’t work. Far more Americans showed up to support the freedom movement, ultimately culminating in national civil rights legislation aimed at ending segregation.

That struggle was never finished. Today we are living through another wave of the kind of racist backlash politics that arose in the late 1960s and 1970s. Now it comes cloaked in different language but the underlying message is the same. DeSantis communications director Taryn Fenske tried to justify the Martha’s Vineyard flights this way: “States like Massachusetts, New York and California will better facilitate the care of these individuals who they have invited into our country by incentivizing illegal immigration through their designation as ‘sanctuary states’ and support for the Biden administration’s open border policies.” Hear the dog-whistles?

When political actors use racism to organize their power base, it presents those of us who want to end racism with a clear question: which side are you on?

I was impressed to see the John F. Kennedy Library wade into the Martha’s Vineyard controversy today by posting documents from its archives on the civil rights years showing how the White Citizens Council of Louisiana bused Black families up to Newark in a deliberate attempt to turn the table of the Kennedy Administration for having sent federal marshals to protect James Meredith in his effort to desegregate the University of Mississippi. The library shared a cable President Kennedy received from the mayor of Fall River (which is not far from Martha’s Vineyard) decrying the segregationists for their “cruel, merciless” behavior and declaring that “Massachusetts has always been a haven for the oppressed.”

Today, Massachusetts state senator Julian Cyr, who represents the area, made the same point. “Just like the reverse freedom rides in the 1960s, this endeavor is a cruel ruse that is manipulating families who are seeking a better life,” Senator Cyr told the Vineyard Gazette. “No one should be capitalizing on the difficult circumstances that these families are in and contorting that for the purposes of a ‘gotcha’ moment.”

Meanwhile, in Martha’s Vineyard, high school students taking AP Spanish have been summoned to help with translation and the local church has been so overwhelmed with food donations and offers of help that it has put out the word that it currently doesn’t need more. At New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, alongside city workers there are volunteers with aid groups like Masbia, a kosher food pantry , who are showing up daily, handing out hundreds of pairs of shoes to newcomers at a table with a three-foot model of the Statue of Liberty greeting them. These first responders, many of whom are themselves immigrants or descendants of immigrants, are demonstrating that the America DeSantis and Abbott want to create is not their America, but a better one.