Wit & Attitude Quote by Mo Udall

Udall’s line lands because it uses the clean symmetry of a joke to deliver a dirty truth: power doesn’t just govern, it costumes itself. In one clause he conjures two American images that pretend to be opposites but rhyme in their purpose. “Black robes” evokes the judiciary, the sober theatricality of judges whose authority is supposed to be neutral, rational, above intimidation. “White robes” points just as unmistakably to the Ku Klux Klan, whose cheap pageantry turns terror into ritual. Udall’s trick is to treat both as outfits designed to frighten, exposing how institutions and mobs can share a technique even when they claim different moral universes.

The subtext is sharper than a simple “both sides” equivalence. Udall isn’t saying the courts and the Klan are morally comparable; he’s saying fear is a recurring American tool, laundered through different wardrobes. Judges don’t burn crosses, but the state can still feel like an occupying force when its language is opaque, its rituals exclusionary, its decisions delivered from on high. Meanwhile, the Klan’s white hood is anti-law theater: it mimics sanctity to license violence.

As a politician, Udall is also signaling a skeptical Western liberalism that distrusts sanctimony wherever it appears. The joke lets him indict racial terror while also puncturing reverence for “respectable” authority. It’s comedy as scalpel: by making you laugh at the costumes, he makes it harder to unsee the intimidation beneath them.