But given what he's done and what he's said, I think most of the rest of the world (our part of the world, anyway) would say that he's racist. So I'm not going to waste time arguing about the definition of the word, or explaining that my friend doesn't actually hate people of other races. The fact is that my friend did something that most decent people with any awareness of our country's history would find abhorrent: He donated money to the campaign of David Duke, one-time head of the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

For the benefit of anyone who doesn't fully understand what the KKK is or was: The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the 1860s, and used violence to pursue the agenda of white supremacy. This included the extra-judicial hunting down, torture, and murder of thousands of black Americans between the 1870s and 1950s.