Often, you’ll hear politicians complaining about their ideological opposition not representing the interests of “regular Americans.” Regularly on Fox News, pundits like Greg Gutfeld gripe that President Joe Biden and the White House are “repulsed by regular Americans.”

In some instances, I understand this frustration. When Democrats pass a bill expanding oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, I think it’s reasonable to ask how this helps regular Americans.

The problem lies in social issues. It lies in Republican opposition to issues affecting minority populations, claiming it does nothing to help regular Americans. According to the right, who are regular Americans?

The answer, even if conservatives don’t want to admit it, is wealthy white people. Before those of you who fit this description disregard my argument, I don’t think you aren’t regular Americans. I have a problem with the assumption that this group of people is the norm and anything outside of this is abnormal.

There is no such thing as a regular American. Being American is not a singular experience, and it is reflected differently depending on one’s background, history, race and many other factors.

Unfortunately, opposition to many bills that “regular Americans” supposedly don’t support more often implies that wealthy, white Americans are “regular,” and history reflects this.

Beyond the obvious history of enslavement, Black Codes and Jim Crow laws explicitly making Black Americans second-class citizens, efforts to relieve the pain of Black Americans or simply to help poorer Americans — bills that often benefit minority populations with histories of economic discrimination — are deemed anti-American.

To see where this white normativity comes from, we should look at a few developments in the American right.

One of the most important factors in equating white with “regular” is in the “Southern Strategy,” a political scheme by Republicans following the passage of a series of civil rights laws in the 1960s to secure the conservative southern vote. Spearheaded by Lee Atwater and Richard Nixon, the plan intended to develop dog whistles like states’ rights, forced busing and other lines to indicate seemingly nonracial opposition to clearly race-remedying efforts.

The strategy was wildly successful. The white supremacists that made up the majority of the conservative voting bloc latched on almost immediately. Soon, conservatives who might not even consider themselves white supremacists were in full support of policies directly aimed at denying Black Americans their rights.

This normativity soon found even stronger legs under Ronald Reagan. Reagan nationalized two key myths surrounding the Black community: a rising crime rate and the presence of “welfare queens” dependent on government handouts.

The former line promoted a “hard on crime” stance that defines American policing to this day. The war on drugs, for example, targeted poor Black men who were — and still are — disproportionately targeted by police and more aggressively sentenced for a myriad of drug-related crimes compared to their white counterparts.

In the latter Reagan-era talking point, “welfare queens” often referred to Black women, specifically single Black mothers. Reagan used fringe examples of extreme fraud to make the argument that poor people are lazy, that Black women are sexually promiscuous and that these people use government welfare to support their ostentatious lifestyles at the behest of the American taxpayer.

While not every Republican makes explicitly racial excuses for opposing welfare, their opposition is based on a myth that undeserving people, especially Black people, abuse the system.

This racialized villainization of welfare has made it near impossible to help specific people who need it. For example, in Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill, one provision set aside $5.2 billion for Black farmers, a group of people historically excluded from previous farming aid bills and thus harder hit by the pandemic.

This didn’t stop pundits like Steven Crowder from objecting to this $1.9 trillion plan because of this specific provision; Crowder in particular employed racial epithets and caricatures to make his opposition clear.

The issue rests on this point: American identity is not like other identities. There is no single definitive way to be American beyond citizenship — even this point is challenging to argue.

As such, objections to bills because “regular Americans” oppose it are baseless. Maybe a majority of Americans oppose a bill, but that does not make them regular. Especially on matters of race, there is no such thing as a regular American.

It is intrinsically illogical to assert that, in an issue where two types of Americans are divided, one side can claim the mantle of regularity. Denying Black claims and asserting their “anti-American” nature is simply lazy and appeals to the standard of white normativity that has shrouded American history in darkness since its inception. We can and should do more to recognize the beautiful tapestry of American identity.