Artwork © Richard Spisak
The Welcome Mat Is White
It was a clean morning, with a sky like a hard egg cracked open above the land. The kind of sky they used to write about when they were building countries, before they began counting people by color. A wind came in off the Potomac, dry and blunt. The sun slapped the White House lawn like a warning. In the Oval Office, the President had made a decision. He had decided to rescue people who were not in danger.
The White Afrikaans were coming. Blonde, devout, Calvinist in the bones. The President said they were refugees. There had been no genocide. No mass graves. Just the ordinary discontent of democracy and some farmland changing hands. No one was rounding them up. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were white. And Christian. And afraid. He liked that. It polled well.
He called it a humanitarian act. Pundits called it bold. The numbers told a different story. They said the country was browning. They said whiteness was on a long decline, slow and quiet, like a glacier receding without a sound. Not today. Not next year. But one day. And it terrified the people who used to think time was on their side.
The President, a man of tactical hair and borrowed emotion, did not fight the trend with policy. He fought it with bodies. White bodies. Welcome mats for some. Barbed wire for the rest.
They called it a program. Said it was about protecting farmers in South Africa. But the data said white South Africans, who made up less than 8% of the population, still held nearly three-quarters of the farmland. It wasn’t exile. It was equity. But if you tilt the lens just right, equity can look like threat. If you squint, it becomes a crisis.
In Ohio, JD Vance smiled beneath a fleece vest and told women to have more children. He didn’t say white women. He didn’t need to. The subtext had its own zip code. He said America’s birthrate was falling. He offered no free childcare. No maternal leave. Just nostalgia and a moral obligation to breed for the flag. The solution was motherhood in a pickup truck.
They called it patriotism. But the fine print read: national fertility project, no benefits included.
They said the country’s identity was being erased. But they never mentioned which identities had already been erased. Languages burned. Names stolen. Histories lost beneath railways and plantations. Those identities were old business. This one was a headline.
They weren’t sending ships this time. Just planes. Visas. Quiet directives and forged urgency.
The President spoke of American heritage. It had once been Ellis Island and tenements and crooked English. Now it was a cul-de-sac with security gates. The melting pot had cooled. It was served in slices now.
They wanted the numbers back on their side. JD Vance said families were the key. He meant certain families. He did not mention the families separated at the border. He did not mention Gaza. He did not mention the working mother in Phoenix whose rent had climbed 40% while her wages stayed where Reagan left them.
The whole thing resembled a breeding program with a marketing budget. It was not new. It was just wearing khakis now.
In history, they had done this before. Stalin moved whole nations like furniture. Hitler measured skulls. The Belgians divided faces and called it order. America, once the loud child of democracy, now echoed its old colonial cousins with smoother grammar.
Census charts showed that by 2045, whites would no longer be the majority in America. This terrified a certain kind of man. The kind who owned boats but no books. Who said things like “real Americans” and meant their reflection in a bathroom mirror. They did not ask what kind of country they were building. They only asked what shade it would be.
But the world is not a spreadsheet. And whiteness is not an island. It is one shade in the global dust of history.
Still, they tried to legislate demographics. They called it immigration reform. It was a sieve, and the holes were shaped like the past.
Meanwhile, the real refugees waited. From Syria. From Sudan. From Honduras. They had names the anchors couldn’t pronounce. Their skin didn’t match the mold.
The satire of it all was so thick you could spread it on toast.
Back in Washington, the President signed the order. He said it was just. He said it was moral. But even the pen looked embarrassed.
Grady VanWright is a poet, author, and playwright whose work blends introspection, independence, and the surreal edges of the human condition. Based in Houston, Texas, he has been writing and reading poetry for over 25 years, drawing inspiration from a lifetime of experiences and historical fascinations. His work has been published in Washington Square Review (2025), The McNeese Review, and numerous online literary journals. With a distinctive voice that merges stream-of-consciousness with moderate surrealism, Grady continues to craft evocative narratives that challenge perception and invite contemplation.
Richard Spisak began his artistic career as a light artist in the Lumonics Studios of Mel Tanner, a legendary Light Artist. After serving under Jack Horkheimer as a planetarium operator at the Miami Space-Transit Planetarium, he left to begin traveling with Lumist Kenvin Lyman, whose show Dazzleland Studios traveled across America. Richard later worked as a Laserist with LASERIUM and Laser Productions, served as a technical producer for the festival company PACE Concerts, and later as operations Manager and Senior Producer at WWHP and WTCN-TV in Stuart Florida.
Richard writes for Theatre, TV, radio, and the web. He published two short story collections, Two Small Windows, in a Pair of Mirror Doors, and Between the Silences. Followed by his poetry collection 7370 Allen Drive and the recently released STONE POETRY. Richard also produces “POETS of the East,” a televised webcast featuring poets from across the globe.