"Pattern Recognition" Is Just Racism With a Spreadsheet | Loomer, the EEOC, and the Ledger They Burned

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5 Key Takeaways

* “Pattern recognition” is an 1896 technology, not a 2026 one. Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies used post 1890 census data to turn the effects of racist law into a “fact” about Black people. Loomer’s line (”some people call it racism, I call it pattern recognition”) is that book in one sentence. The pattern is always built by the people citing it.

* Race is legible for injury and illegible for remedy. On July 21, 2026, Trump’s EEOC voted 2 to 1 to eliminate the EEO1 through EEO6 reports, the only routine federal count of race and sex in the workplace. Five weeks later a presidential advisor listed seven Black women by race and sex and called them ghetto b*****s. They know who to call Black b*****s. They just voted to stop counting who to pay.

* The outrage is not about antisemitism, it’s about 2024. A bipartisan resolution, a New York Times op ed, and a demand for a floor vote on Hasan Piker, a streamer in nobody’s administration. No statement from Josh Gottheimer on Laura Loomer. The resolution is Democratic resentment toward the pro Palestine left with a bill number.

* “Slavery predates capitalism” is fire predating the arsonist. Nobody said capitalism invented slavery. Marx (Capital ch. 31), Williams (1944), Du Bois (1935), and Robinson (1983) said capitalism turned African chattel slavery into the founding stone of a continental economy. Foster and Loomer did the same thing: detach the record from the concept, then declare the concept clean.

* Blame runs to the people with the power. No leftist set the campaign budget, canceled the primary, or refused the Palestinian speaker at the DNC. Either the leftists had the power to decide the election (so their position was popular) or they didn’t (so they aren’t to blame). It’s hot or it’s cold. It can’t be warm.

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Colorblind When You Ask for Justice, 20/20 Vision When They Want to Insult You

Hey, the Chop Up Show was just me and Domo this week, Toya getting her internet fixed, and y’all know when it’s the two of us we ain’t going nowhere fast. For the folks that’s not that familiar, me and Domo come from a policy debate background, we are very well polished in the policymaking process, and we happen to know a theory or ten when it comes to how the world works and how values get inscribed into it. So when the week give us Laura Loomer calling Black women ghetto b*****s, the Democratic Party still arguing about Hasan Piker, Kmele Foster telling Jemele Hill on CNN that slavery predates capitalism, and Abdul El Sayed on The Breakfast Club saying he a capitalist, we don’t get to just react. We got to read.

Now here’s what I want y’all to hold onto while you read, because it’s the throughline and it’s the title. On camera I said it plain: at the same time this administration is telling corporations they need to be colorblind and voting to get rid of the demographic data that we use to prove discrimination, one of their own advisors is going around calling people Black b*****s. They know who to call Black b*****s, though. Feel me? That’s not a contradiction. That’s the design. Race is legible when the state wants to injure you and illegible when you want a remedy. You can be seen well enough to be called ghetto and not seen well enough to be counted. Same eyes. Same week.

Then the second half of the show, the capitalism half, is the same move with a different costume. Kmele Foster told Jemele Hill that slavery is older than writing so it can’t be bound up with capitalism. The Democratic establishment tells you the leftists cost Kamala the election while the people who ran the campaign get to be an act of reason. Every one of these is the same technology: detach the record from the concept, keep the verdict, burn the ledger. Read the pattern, destroy the receipts. That’s the whole essay. Everything below is just the receipts they hoping you don’t pull.

What She Actually Said, With Dates

Let’s start with the clip, because a lot of folks heard about it and didn’t sit with it.

On Friday, August 28, 2026, Laura Loomer, a far right activist and a Trump ally who is widely described as an informal advisor, somebody who is documented, or alleged depending on who you ask, to show up at the White House and when she leave, decisions is made and people is fired, posted a video on X naming five Black women: Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon, Representatives Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, former Representative Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote that they were all “ghetto, entitled, race obsessed, destructive black B*****S who are completely unfit for the power they hold.” She used the slur five times in one post. In the clip we played on the show she went further down the line: Fani Willis, Jasmine Crockett, Candace Owens, Wes Moore, and then the line that’s the reason this essay exists. “Are you starting to see a pattern here? Some people call it racism. I call it pattern recognition. And guess what? Pattern recognition and profiling keeps you safe.”

The trigger, for the record, was Nixon’s floor speech against resolutions honoring Charlie Kirk. Loomer called her a “ghetto black communist b***h,” mocked her speech as “Ebonics,” and said she needed her “leash” tugged. When the backlash came she doubled down on Sunday: “Is she ghetto? Yes. Is she black? Yes. Is she a communist? Yes. I spoke the truth.” By that week she had run the same exact sentence at Representative LaMonica McIver. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, said she “1000 percent” denounced it and called it racist. Ben Crump, Wes Moore, Ro Khanna, and Charlamagne’s Donkey of the Day all lined up. Nixon, who had just scored an upset win in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, answered on X: “When referring to me, it’s Representative Angie Nixon. However, after November 3rd, YOU CAN CALL ME SENATOR!”

So that’s the record. Now hold it next to the rest of what she said, because the framing is doing more work than the slur. Before she got to “ghetto black b*****s,” she said, and I’m quoting the clip: “If you are offended by stereotypes, then maybe, just maybe, you need to start policing your own community. If I don’t want people thinking that all Jews are a bunch of globalists, maybe I should be calling out the progressive Jews who are funding radical left causes. That’s what I do. I self police the Jewish community.” Then: “It’s time for other Black people to start policing the Black community.”

Every accusation is a confession, y’all. She told you exactly what she is. She is a police. She polices her own community for the benefit of the people who hate her community, and she is asking Black people to become deputies in the same department. That’s the ask. The slur is just the uniform.

Pattern Recognition Is the Oldest Word for Racism With a Spreadsheet

Most of y’all heard “pattern recognition” and heard a tech word, a 2026 word, something a Silicon Valley MF say about AI. Nah. That word is from 1896.

Apply Muhammad here. In The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces how, right after the 1890 census, the first census to sort prisoners by race in a way that let people build a national argument, a Prudential Insurance statistician named Frederick L. Hoffman published Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. Hoffman took arrest and mortality data, stripped it of every condition that produced it (convict leasing, vagrancy statutes, all white juries, no doctors, no sewers), and presented the raw number as a racial trait. Black people were not being arrested more because the law was built to arrest them. Black people were criminal, look at the pattern. Muhammad’s whole book is about how that statistical move became the common sense of the twentieth century, how Irish and Italian and Polish crime got explained by poverty and environment and got Progressive Era social work, while Black crime got explained by Blackness and got police. The number was the same kind of number. The interpretation split by race.

That is pattern recognition. That is what she meant. When Loomer lists seven Black women with wildly different politics, from Ayanna Pressley to Candace Owens, and says “do you see the pattern,” she is doing Hoffman. She is taking a category she constructed (Black women who talk in public) and presenting the category as the evidence. Like Domo said on air, she was not condemning stereotypes. She was saying this is why stereotypes exist. That’s Hoffman’s thesis. The stereotype is a data point. The data point is the Black person.

Then Fields and Fields give you the flip. Racecraft is when the action of racism gets converted into a fact about race. Somebody discriminates against you (verb, they did it) and it comes out the other end as a pattern about you (noun, you are it). “Some people call it racism, I call it pattern recognition” is racecraft with a name tag on. She is describing her own act of profiling and attributing the profile to the people she profiled.

Now let me give y’all the counterhistory, because Black folks have always known that the answer to a bad count is a better count, not no count. Ida B. Wells, 1892, Southern Horrors, and 1895, A Red Record. What did she do? She counted. She took the white press’s own lynching reports, tallied them, and showed that the “pattern” of Black men raping white women was a lie in the majority of cases and that the actual pattern was economic competition and political terror. Du Bois, 1899, The Philadelphia Negro, the first serious sociological survey in this country, done because the numbers being used against the Seventh Ward were produced by people who never walked it. Wells and Du Bois did not say stop counting. They said the ledger is rigged, so we keeping our own.

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The Onus of 2024

Which brings me to my beef I’m going to take to the grave. We never have the energy and the smoke for the people that had the most power to determine the end result of the election.

We talk about Jill Stein. We talk about Hasan Piker. We talk about people that said never Kamala. Y’all think that had more of an onus on that election than Kamala Harris and Joe Biden? No leftist dictated her campaign finance. No leftist picked whether we had a primary. No leftist was able to decide whether a Palestinian speaker got a slot at the DNC. That was the establishment. Then the same people who will construct a dozen reasons why the campaign had to run business as usual will turn around and blame the loss on people who never touched the business.

Domo and I went at it, and I want to represent his position honestly because he’s not wrong about the mechanism. His argument: American politics is run by how people vote. In 2024 the campaign believed the further left position was unelectable, and what changed is not the electorate’s values but the electorate’s experience. Trump 2016 was Russia and the courts. Trump 2025 was the version niggas needed to see to understand that the people spending the bread don’t have the same interests as them. Millennials are old enough now, enough Gen Z is in the base, and they not with the s***s. So Mamdani, Nixon, El Sayed are possible now because the pain got real, not because 2024 leftists were right in real time. Also, he added, a Palestinian speaker at the DNC might have gained pro Palestine voters and lost a chunk of moderates who cared about immigration and the economy, and there would have been a trade off.

My answer: it’s either hot or it’s cold, it can’t be warm. Y’all can’t say the leftists cost her the election and also say the leftists were wrong on the merits. If they had the power to decide the election, then their position was the popular one and the campaign ignored it. If their position was fringe, then they didn’t have the power and you’re blaming the wrong people. Which one is it? Does Democratic leadership have the ability to dictate the end result, or do online leftists? Domo said voters do. Okay. Then how do we not blame the people that’s supposed to spend the money to get the voters, and instead blame the people that said I ain’t voting for you? Y’all think the white voters in Pennsylvania and the ones in Michigan voted for Donald Trump because leftists said the genocide was bad? Is that really what y’all believe? So now y’all are blaming the actions of white supremacists voting for a white supremacist on who? Where is the smoke for the white supremacists at?

Then the receipts on what actually changed. Kamala Harris, in her book 107 Days, the one Domo called “the 170 day book” on air, wrote that people wanted her to break from Biden on Gaza and she didn’t. The people vehemently against sending bombs to Israel didn’t come out of nowhere in 2024. The first time I was ever in Rolling Stone was to say I would not support Joe Biden if he kept doing what he was doing, and that was before Kamala. This voting bloc already existed. The only difference between then and now is politicians believing they can talk to it. Mamdani, Nixon, El Sayed are proving in 2026 that everybody who got called a purist, a perfectionist, an authenticity tester in 2024 was describing a coalition that was already there. I’ll take Domo’s point that Trump’s second term made it louder. I won’t take the point that it wasn’t real.

Lastly, the part y’all won’t like. A lot of people have rewritten history for how Kamala Harris relates to this country. In the 2020 cycle she ran for president and dropped out in December 2019, before a single vote, because she had no support. On the show I said 2016 and I was wrong, she ran for Senate that year and won. The point stands. Kamala was never a darling. Biden gave her 107 days, and Domo’s right that he don’t get enough blame for that, but the 107 days did not create the problem, they exposed it. Right now she’s polling sixth or seventh for 2028 and flirting with not running. Voter suppression and disenfranchisement played a role, I’m not taking that off the table. Pointing the finger at leftists, though, really don’t do it, and we still have not had the real conversation as a society about what happened in 2024, and as a result there’s a lot of resentment in the dialogue in the streets, a lot of tension, a lot of hurt. The Hasan Piker resolution is that resentment with a bill number.

Domo also said one in seven federal judges is a Trump appointee. It’s worse than that. He appointed roughly 234 Article III judges in his first term, about a quarter of the active bench, and he’s still going. Niggas let him do that with the courts and then put him back in office after Biden. It can get worse. It got worse on they ass. Hold that when they tell you the next one is just about “getting back to normal.” Normal is the milk out the jug. You not putting it back.

The Victims She Named Were Men, the B*****s She Named Were Women

Go back to the clip and count. Who did Loomer name as the people being wronged? Byron Donalds. Tim Scott. Black conservative men being called Uncle Toms. Who did she name as the ones doing the wronging, the ghetto ones, the ones who need a leash? Angie Nixon. Fani Willis. Jasmine Crockett. Ayanna Pressley. Cori Bush. Ilhan Omar. Ketanji Brown Jackson. Even Candace Owens, her own side, went in the b***h column the minute she was beefing with her. The victims were men. The b*****s were women. That’s not an accident of who was in the news. That’s the image doing its job.

Apply Collins here. In Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins argues that the old controlling images, the Mammy, the Jezebel, the Sapphire from Amos ‘n’ Andy, got updated after the civil rights movement into a new set, and she names one of them the “Black b***h”: loud, aggressive, materialistic, unfeminine, the woman who talks back, and, in the class inflected version, “ghetto.” The function of a controlling image is not to describe. It’s to make a form of domination look natural, to make it so that when a Black woman speaks on the floor of the Florida House, what you see is not a legislator, it’s the image, and so the response to the legislator can be the response you’d give the image: bark at her, tug her leash. Collins wrote that in 2004. Loomer performed it in 2026 and called it pattern recognition.

Then Harris Perry tells you the cost. In Sister Citizen she uses the crooked room: put a person in a room where the walls are tilted and some of them will tilt their bodies to match the walls. Black women in public life spend enormous energy standing straight in a room built crooked, and the energy is not free. It’s time not spent legislating. It’s the extra layer of security. It’s the Congressional staff hours spent on threat assessment. The Center for Democracy and Technology’s 2022 study of the midterms found that Black women candidates were the most targeted for online abuse of any group, and a 2023 Brookings analysis found the same for women of color in Congress: more threats, more sexualized abuse, more of the specific “unfit, unqualified, ghetto” register. So when Loomer says these women are “unfit for the power they hold,” she is not describing them, she is adding to the tax they pay to hold it.

Now the material part, because this is where the EEOC vote comes back and closes the loop. The EEO1 form crosstabulates race by sex. It is the only routine federal instrument that sees a Black woman as a Black woman rather than as a Black person in one column and a woman in another. That matters because of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), the case Crenshaw built intersectionality on, where Black women were told they had no claim because GM hired Black men and hired white women, so where’s the discrimination. The EEO1 was the answer to DeGraffenreid. It was the form that made the gap visible. On July 21 they voted to end it. On August 28 an advisor to the president listed seven women, no men, and said the pattern was real. They can see Black women as Black women when the purpose is to call them b*****s. They just voted to stop seeing them as Black women when the purpose is to pay them.

Two more things and then the counterweight. First, the conundrum for Black men that Domo and I named on air is real and it is intersectional too. The demand that we be measured in responding to a white woman who just degraded a Black woman is the image running the other way: the angry Black man who is dangerous to white women. So the same afternoon, Black women are being read through Sapphire and Black men are being read through Brute, and the only people who get to say whatever they want with no consequence are the white women who built both images and, as Blee and McRae documented, always have. Second, respectability. Domo said it and I’m cosigning: once y’all let this administration in, all of these unqualified, uncouth people, the gate is open, we getting everybody now. There is no more room for tone policing. If an advisor to the president can maintain all her legitimacy, all her institutional relationships, talking like this, then I’d be damned if somebody come to me or Domo, who is running for office, and say the standard is gone because we said “b***h” back. Y’all removed the standard. We noticed.

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Related Readings (Bibliography)

Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. University of California Press, 1991.

Clark, Kenneth B. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. Harper and Row, 1965.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. Routledge, 2004.

Cooper, Brittney C. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989. (On DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, 413 F. Supp. 142, E.D. Mo. 1976.)

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. University of Pennsylvania, 1899.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 to 1880. Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

Duneier, Mitchell. Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Ferguson, Ann Arnett. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2012.

Gilliam, Walter S., et al. “Do Early Educators’ Implicit Biases Regarding Sex and Race Relate to Behavior Expectations and Recommendations of Preschool Expulsions and Suspensions?” Yale Child Study Center, 2016.

Harris Perry, Melissa V. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Yale University Press, 2011.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hoffman, Frederick L. Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. American Economic Association, 1896.

Jones Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Yale University Press, 2019.

Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon, 2019.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I, chapter 31, “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist.” 1867.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter II, “Proletarians and Communists.” 1848.

McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Morris, Monique W. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. The New Press, 2016.

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Harvard University Press, 2010.