The “Ugly American” is a familiar character in international travel: The entitled, arrogant American who expects everyone to speak English, demands royal treatment, and treats people in other countries like personal servants. This tourist believes the world owes America—and Americans—something simply because of who they are.
But what if the Ugly American problem extends far beyond airports, hotels, and foreign tourist attractions? What if the same arrogance, entitlement, cruelty, and disregard for others that embarrass Americans overseas are woven into the fabric of American life itself?
From political campaigns built on fear and racial resentment to institutions that tolerate injustice, America has an ugly problem. And Blackfolks, in particular, have been living with it for generations.
When politics gets ugly
Consider the Ohio gubernatorial campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, whose political advertising has drawn criticism for exploiting deeply painful family circumstances involving his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.
Acton and her brother were sexually abused by their stepfather, who was charged with rape in 1978 before fleeing the state. Acton has said she had not seen her mother since the abuse occurred when she was 12.
Yet Ramaswamy’s campaign aired an ad featuring Acton’s mother, who accuses her daughter of lying and being unfit for public office. Acton has said her mother knew about the repeated abuse of her and her brother. Even some Republicans criticized the advertisement as crossing a line, but Ramaswamy and President Donald Trump doubled down on the ugly message.
Whatever one’s political affiliation, weaponizing a survivor’s childhood trauma for electoral advantage raises serious questions about character, decency, and the boundaries of political warfare. When winning becomes more important than human dignity, ugly behavior extends beyond a campaign tactic and becomes a governing principle.
Selective outrage and convenient morality
Another expression of American ugliness is the willingness to scapegoat people labeled “other”: Blackfolk, immigrants, Muslims, women, LGBTQ people, and anyone else who can be portrayed as a threat.
This strategy encourages people to fear their neighbors rather than respect their humanity. It turns difference into danger and prejudice into political currency.
The same hypocrisy emerges when politicians build campaigns around exposing international networks of sexual abuse and exploitation, energizing voters with promises of accountability, only for that outrage to disappear when allegations or information implicate prominent political figures and billionaires within their own circles.
If protecting children is a moral imperative, it’s ugly as hell to excuse people because they’re your political party mates, or individuals exalted because of wealth or fame.
Weaponized religion
The ugliness extends into religious spaces when white Christian nationalists promote racial hierarchy while wrapping their politics in the language of faith.
Some have openly argued that women’s voting rights were a historic mistake. Others have suggested Black pastors should be under the tutelage of white pastors or characterized the existence of a distinct Black Church as a sinful problem.
Such claims reveal the contradiction at the heart of religious nationalism: Preaching universal truth while demanding unequal treatment. Black churches have long served as institutions of spiritual nourishment, political organizing, mutual aid, and resistance to oppression. Their existence is not a theological problem requiring white supervision or sanction. To preach otherwise is beyond problematic.
Faith that demands another person’s subordination is a misguided, immoral power play.
Black pain, American indifference
Perhaps nowhere is American ugliness more consequential than in the unequal treatment of Black humanity. Black women experience disproportionately high maternal mortality and breast cancer burdens. In Houston, these disparities are especially troubling given the city boasts the world-renowned Texas Medical Center. Yet, Houston is considered the most dangerous city in America for a Black woman to give birth.
These disparities expose the ugly underbelly of medical research, insurance coverage, treatment access, institutional (mal)practices, and the ways Black patients’ concerns are dismissed.
The ugliness is compounded when communities raise these concerns and are met with denial, minimization, or explanations that shift the burden onto those suffering rather than on the systems responsible for addressing inequity.
A long American tradition
For Black Americans, none of this ugliness is new. The nation’s history includes slavery supported by churches, businesses, and individuals across white society, including white women who constituted 40% of slaveholders, according to some sources. It includes medical exploitation, from experiments conducted on enslaved women by J. Marion Sims to the Tuskegee syphilis study, and forced sterilization programs.
It includes the destruction of Black neighborhoods through highway construction, the denial of equal access to GI Bill benefits for many Black veterans, sundown towns, lynchings, and other white supremacist terrorism. It includes the crack-era devastation of Black communities and government-linked complicity in drug trafficking that emerged through Gary Webb’s reporting on the Iran-Contra affair.
These episodes differ in their circumstances and evidentiary histories. Together, however, they illustrate how individual prejudice can intersect with corporate interests, government policy, and institutional power.
And the ugliness does not always arrive wearing a hood or carrying a weapon. Sometimes it appears as a “race-neutral” discriminatory policy, a dismissive medical professional, a dishonest political advertisement, a biased hiring decision, or a public official gaslighting, insisting that documented disparities don’t exist.
The mirror America must face
The Ugly American is not merely the tourist who insults a waiter in Paris or demands English in Tokyo. The Ugly American is also the politician who exploits trauma, the institution that tolerates discrimination, the religious leader who preaches white nationalism, and the citizen who condemns injustice in theory but excuses it when it benefits their side.
Individual behavior matters. So do the policies, businesses, institutions, and cultural attitudes that normalize and reward it.
America can’t repair its international reputation while ignoring the conduct that damages lives within its own borders. Nor can it credibly champion freedom and equality abroad while treating those principles as negotiable at home.
For Blackfolks, the Ugly American has never been just a tourist problem. We’ve encountered that ugliness in schools, hospitals, churches, workplaces, courtrooms, voting booths, and neighborhoods.
The question for Blackfolk isn’t whether “America” will ever fess up to and fix its ugliness, but whether we love ourselves enough to build the beautiful existence we deserve, regardless of what other folk say or do.
