The Washington Post recently reported an incident concerning America’s most famous but most famously forbidden word (Dec. 10): “A high school principal has been put on leave after a Black student had [the] N-word scrawled on their desk — and their parents weren’t told about it for four days. System officials apologized for the delay.”

In Germany, “Nazi” is their own cursed N-word. An American blogger describes the country’s stupendous sensitivity toward that word: “In school almost every day, German kids are taught about the horrors of Hitler and Nazis. Every day. All over towns and cities are landmarks and memorials. In front of houses that Jews lived are placards of the names of the Jews that lived there and the Jews that were forced on the trains and killed. These are in the sidewalks in front of the houses. Germans find what Nazis did horrible.”

In Germany, it is illegal to say their N-word or use its symbols in political advocacy. In America, the N-word is so reviled that its public utterance is about as unforgivable as admitting cannibalism. In either country, no one wants to get caught — even in art and scholarship — speaking the cursed N-word.

Then, historically speaking, there is another event (and its verbal representation) in our past that’s considered beyond forgiving: the killing of Jesus, which is so bad that Jews are often blamed as “Christ killers” by antisemites. But in historical actuality, it was the Romans, not Jews, who killed Jesus: Pontius Pilot was the Roman governor who made the final decision to crucify Jesus of Nazareth.

His soldiers carried out the orders. The crucifixion was a largely Roman-directed and staged drama and Jews were just onlookers. It was the Romans who killed Jesus.

But interestingly, nobody holds Italians — descendants of the Romans — accountable as “Christ killers,” Italy’s equivalent of the German and American N-words. To Italians, the phrase has no particular meaning, much less a negative one. If we reminded them that they killed Jesus — the most awful thing you can say to Italians — they would be mildly amused by the historic irony and say: Didn’t we repent, by making Rome the center of all Christendom where the spirit of Jesus currently resides?

Compared to the Italians who are practically indifferent to their most horrid historic sin, Americans and Germans are so sensitive toward their own past sins that if you accused them of being “Nazis” or “racists,” respectively, you ought to expect a major incident. Today, neither Germans nor Americans can shrug off the irony of their own sins that took place many generations ago.

Why? Because neither event has become history yet: Neo-Nazism is very much alive in Germany as racism is in America now. In Germany, Nazism may come back as a strong political force and possibly retake Germany. The everyday anti-Nazi reminders are vital in keeping Nazism at bay.

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In America today, not only is racism (or alternately, white supremacy) alive and well, it is very much the focal point of unity among the right-wing crowd. (Notice how “white” Trump’s rallies are?). Still, it has puzzled many observers why the American majority has endured all of Donald Trump’s impossible flaws and still voted for him.

New York Times columnist Adam Nichols (Oct. 14) found the reason: “Trump voters don’t believe a word he says.” Anat Shenker-Osorio agrees (Dec. 23): “Well, Trump’s just saying things. He doesn’t really mean them.” So does Jennifer Rubin (Nov. 28), who thinks voters “disbelieve his grandiose promises.”

His followers ignored his public statements and policies because they all knew that racism, although largely unspoken or spoken in code, was their unifying theme. With everything Trump actually said thus ignored, the only thing they did not ignore was also the only thing that Trump never mentioned publicly, that is, racism, which united Trump and his supporters. (Whenever Trump-supporting white people gather at a right-wing rally, what else is there that’s on their hidden agenda?)

Yet, Democrats have been worse: Although they are discreet with their patented hypocrisy, racism among white Democrats is a deeply rooted subconscious albatross. If you are a white person in a racist society, even liberal, what else can you be other than a latent, even a “closet,” racist? Racism is in the air they breathe, in the water they drink, and in the thought they think. They feel it in their society and community, and see it in all the silent gestures and implied actions that reveal America’s unstated practices of racism, which is in America’s historic national character, not necessarily in specific individual actions or public utterances.

American racism is in its routine society and repetitious institutions, as much as in Blacks’ shameful national poverty as in the New York taxis ignoring cab-hailing Blacks. You can deny all you want, but if you are a white person born and raised, and living, in America, you are born, raised and live as a racist. In America, being white is a birthmark, a brand, as much as Black is a brand, and you cannot exorcise it without a life-altering social surgery.

Both Germany and America want their cursed N-words to go away quietly and painlessly although Germany is still full of Nazi sympathizers and white America is congenitally, therefore incurably and hopelessly, racist. All racists, like cannibals, are products of their society and only massive social change can eradicate the curse.

As Lincoln said, history allows no free rides: All nations must pay for their sins, past and present. As history’s two greatest ironies, the Christ-killing Roman Empire had to become a Christ-loving nation and the Jew-killing Nazi Reich was destroyed in World War II only to be reborn as Israel’s best friend who cannot do enough for Jews. What ironic twist awaits racist America?

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.