The overtly racist ad from U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, who is running for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat, is both shocking and not.
Shocking for its in-your-face racism — while he smiles, such a great big smile — in a little 30 second ad. Not shocking in that Barr and his team appear to have decided that, to have a chance of winning a three-way Republican primary, he must be as President Trump-adjacent as possible.
And the Trumpism and the racism are as tightly coiled as a pile of mating snakes.
As the now-tired saying goes, you don’t have to be an out-and-out racist to vote for Trump — and now Barr — but like buying a box of sugar cereal with a known-prize near the bottom, you know what you’re getting. It’s a fun little secret, included in the price at checkout.
Of course, you needn’t to go all the way to the White House or Barr’s bid for McConnell’s seat to get your dose of racism amongst the powerful here in the commonwealth; you need only to have witnessed the Feb. 25 meeting of the Senate Committee on Health Services in which they discussed Senate Bill 137, an act relating to a provisional license to practice medicine.
Kentucky has a doctor shortage, and SB 137 is meant to address how easy or difficult it is to integrate foreign doctors — let’s just say it outright: Black and brown doctors — in Kentucky’s predominantly white communities.
The comments in committee were not as brief and blunt as the vile 30-second Barr ad but they were just as telling.
“I have some concerns with this bill,” said Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, the lone no vote and leader in the Kentucky Senate of anti-DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) efforts. Tichenor said she was bringing a different perspective as she had lived for four years in a developing third world country. She did not name the country but said she’d had a baby while there, delivered by a German woman doctor. Was that doctor white? She (ahem) did not say.
Tichenor then said she’d had some dental work done by “nationals” which resulted in her needing surgery back in the U.S. Were the dentists black? She (ahem) did not say.
When Sen. Danny Carroll made his statement in support of the bill, he shared a recent personal experience. His daughter, he said, had had an urgent medical issue and he’d rushed home to be with her. “When I heard it was a doctor from India,” Carroll said, “I had concerns, and that young man won me over quickly.”
Would Carroll have had “concerns” if the doctor had been white?
While personal experiences are helpful, they need not be the primary driver to vote for or against legislation. For example, lawmakers need not have had a good personal experience with a brown or black-skinned doctor to acknowledge people of color as good doctors, the same way you need not be a man with daughters to know that women and girls are human beings with rights.
In her essay collection titled “Thick,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, “The evidence in healthcare is some of the most dire, but examples of racialized, gendered competence abound because we rely on organizations to allocate the resources that govern our human rights. Healthcare is a lot like education, in that it is primarily delivered through bureaucracy. People in the bureaucracies make decisions, but many of the decisions are made for people by the rules attached to every role and every routine interaction. All of those rules are assumptions, derived from cultural beliefs about people, illness, and health.”
Following the national anti-DEI initiatives shoved down our throats by the Trump administration and our GOP supermajority in Frankfort, must Kentuckians who desperately need good local doctors wait until those doctors can be lily-white graduates of our own lily-white (thanks to anti-DEI initiatives) medical schools?
“The physician shortage in Kentucky is severe,” Dr. Charles “Chipper” Griffith III, the acting dean for the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, said in 2023. “There are counties without a single physician, and even in parts of Lexington and Louisville, there are areas that are underserved.”
The racism in our institutions is — in a literal sense — putting lives at risk.
According to WalletHub, Kentucky ranks as the worst place to retire in the United States: Out of 50 states, Kentucky is 47th in life expectancy, 19th in health care facilities per capita, 42nd for quality of life and 47th in health care.
“Whiteness,” writes Professor Cottom, “the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne.”
While the Barr campaign suffocates us with smiling hatefulness and we waste our time, yet again this year, tolerating the overt racism that makes politicians and bureaucrats in our Capitol Annex more comfortable, Kentuckians desperately need local doctors and more doctors.
Kentucky is already 81% white. Is that not white enough?
The sooner we stop wasting energy on a nonexistent DEI problem to both assuage the tender feelings of white lawmakers and help them curl up like mating snakes with the proudly racist Trump administration, the sooner we can solve real problems, like recruiting and keeping enough doctors to make our citizens healthier and to make Kentucky a better place to live.
This article appears in Feb 14-28, 2026.