In recent days, Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates have begun using an ugly racial slur to describe the children of Hispanic and Latino origin who are born in the United States to undocumented parents:

“Anchor babies.”

The phrase is like a zombie for American conservatives: It lingers, never dying, ready to reappear during the presidential election season as political red meat to feed the xenophobic and racially resentful Republican electorate.

Of course, such language alienates Hispanic and Latino voters, the fastest growing voting demographic in the United States, but the imagery of invading hordes of Spanish-speaking brown people — a group that conservatives imagine as a fundamental threat to “American values and culture” — is foundational to white identity politics in the post-civil right era.

Indeed, in the Age of Obama, racism and conservatism are one and the same. And the Republican Party is addicted. Like all addicts, it cannot stop using their cocktail of symbolic racism and nativism — even when such behavior imperils their long-term political health and safety.

The slur “anchor baby” is potent because it summons images of people coming to a country where they do not belong, imposing themselves on it by having children who can make some unfair claim on resources, and by doing so to deprive the “original” and “rightful” residents of the land, jobs and wealth that is their birthright.

In America, a country founded as a Herrenvolk racial state, where the color line determined one’s freedom, the language of “anchor baby” cannot possibly be separated from the nightmare of white supremacy, of a democracy where human rights and citizenship were based on a person’s melanin count and parentage.

Like most racial slurs, “anchor baby” masks and obscures more than it reveals. In reality, the people who would eventually become the first “Americans,” those white Europeans who, beginning in the 17th century, migrated to the colonies are the parents of this country’s first and true “anchor babies.”

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The United States, like other countries, has crafted a set of mythologies and national lies that help to socialize its citizens into a shared history, culture, and identity. One of the United States’ most powerful myths is a belief that the nation was founded as a country “of immigrants.”

This is untrue. Like Australia, South Africa, and Israel, the United States was a colonial state made up of white settlers. The distinction between a “settler” society and one comprised of “immigrants” is very important. Immigrants move to a new space and then adopt the values of the people already living there. By contrast, settlers move to a new space, claim it as their own, and then impose their values and beliefs on the people who were already living there.

The United States, in its treatment of First Nations, as well as other people of color around the world, is a typical example of the settler-based colonial society.

To wit: Benjamin Franklin himself evinced and reinforced a belief in the need for white people to spread across the continent, taking land, laying claim to it, and producing white “anchor babies” to secure the racial purity and prosperity of a white nation in the making.

In his 1751 short essay, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.,” Franklin wrote the following:

The number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small.

All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.