Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) made some wildly racist remarks at a town hall meeting on Wednesday night in response to a question about what the hell is going on with all the heroin use in Maine.

Apparently heroin is on the rise in white communities across the country, and Maine is no exception. This rise in drug use is causing white people a lot of consternation, much to the cynical eye-rolling of Black folks who have seen their communities decimated by drugs while law enforcement officials and policymakers either looked the other way or made everything worse by throwing everyone involved—dealers, addicts, casual users—in jail.

LePage explained to his constituents that he’s as concerned about heroin abuse in the state as the next person, but he doesn’t want to blame residents of Maine. (Mainenites? Maineans? Maineiacs?) It’s not their fault. They’re being plied with drugs imported into Maine from out-of-state drug dealers:

The traffickers—these aren’t people who take drugs. These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shift—these type of guys—they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue that we have to deal with down the road.

First of all D-Money, Smoothie, and Shifty are pretty stand-up dudes whose names are being unfairly maligned. Sure, their Run DMC cover band was a failure right out of the gate, but they never turned to a life of crime. D-Money is a bank teller, Shifty works the graveyard shift as a security guard at the mall, and Smoothie, oddly enough, runs a yogurt shop in Bangor, Maine. Weird, right? Seems like he should be the manager of a Jamba Juice franchise. But I digress.

The point is, these dudes aren’t trying to impregnate your white women, Gov. LePage, especially considering that the three hip-hop-monikered miscreants are mere products of your imagination.

LePage’s spokesman tried to do damage control following LePage’s remarks. “The governor is not making comments about race. Race is irrelevant,” he told the Portland Press Herald.

Sure, race is irrelevant—that’s why LePage specified that it’s young white girls who are being impregnated by these dastardly drug dealers.

And when asked about his remarks early Friday, Gov. LePage tried to walk them back. He wasn’t being racist, you see. He was just concerned about the virtue of Maine’s most precious resource—its white women.

“I made one slip-up,” LePage told reporters, according to CNN. “I may have made many slip-ups. I was going impromptu in my brain, didn’t catch up to my mouth,” he demurred.

“Instead of saying, ‘Maine women,’ I said, ‘White women.’ I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine you will see we are essentially 95 percent white.”

“I may have had a slip of the tongue, but my heart is to protect the Maine people,” he said.

Sure—to protect the Maine people from roving gangs of insatiable Black men.

He went on to deny that his choice of names like “Smoothie” was racist.

“What’re they, Black?” he said. “I don’t know if they’re White, Black, Asian, I don’t know,” he protested.

Except he probably does know. Just two months ago a Black man named “Smooth” was arrested in Connecticut on heroin charges, alongside four white dudes from Maine. It was the culmination of a six-month long investigation into Bangor’s heroin trade. That LePage was unaware of this drug bust stretches the bounds of credulity.

This wasn’t some slip of the tongue. LePage knew exactly what he was saying. His comments are part of a long history of “where the white women at” rhetoric: racist fearmongering about virile and savage Black men raping and impregnating white women.

And in fact, white people in Maine are making their own decisions to use and sell drugs. It has very little to do with Black people, or drug dealers in New York and Connecticut, as David Graham pointed out in the Atlantic:

Although the National Drug Intelligence Center has not conducted a report on Maine for nearly a decade, its 2003 report fingered mostly white dealers. “Caucasian criminal groups, local independent dealers, and abusers are the primary transporters of heroin to Maine,” getting their supply not from Connecticut or New York, but Massachusetts. In addition, “Caucasian criminal groups, local independent dealers, and abusers are the principal retail-level heroin distributors in Maine.” The state is more than 94 percent white, and most users in the current epidemic also seem to be white.

Also, LePage has a history of making racially questionable—if not outright racist—statements.

In 2011, he refused the NAACP’s invitation to attend Martin Luther King Day events the civil rights organization was hosting, calling the NAACP “a special interest group.” When the NAACP criticized LePage, he told the group to “kiss his butt.” And in 2013, he proclaimed that Obama hates white people.

I’m not particularly interested in whether or not Paul LePage is racist. But he definitely has a penchant for saying racist shit.

What I am interested in is calling out people for saying racist shit when they say racist shit because we’re too focused on whether or not people are “capital R” Racists, and not focused enough on the harm that racist comments like LePage’s cause.

To that end, I’m going to propose something novel. It might sound a little crazy, but hear me out.

When someone says something racist, let’s not hem and haw about it. Let’s not call the remarks “racially charged” or “racially motivated” as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the New York Times did.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a racist duck.