One of Sesame Street’s most famous segments was called “One Of These Things (Is Not Like The Other),” where there’d be a grouping of, say, three shoes and a boot, or a mitten next to ice cream, an apple and a burger. The goal was simple: Point out which item obviously stood out.

The White House disinvited two people from a pair of events held during the National Governors Association. One of them is Colorado’s Jared Polis, the nation’s only gay governor. The other? Our very own Wes Moore. Everybody else is straight or white.

Two of things are not like the other, and they’re the ones that are excluded.

Why? You know why.

“As the nation’s only Black governor, I can’t ignore that being singled out for exclusion from this bipartisan tradition carries an added weight — whether that was the intent or not," Moore wrote in a statement.

Trump rescinded the invitations of all Democrats from a planned White House meeting with governors. The National Governors Association said Tuesday afternoon that they were canceling that event (by Wednesday evening it was unclear whether Democrats were invited to the meeting or not). But Moore and Polis are the only two governors off the list for a separate dinner that evening.

While several Democratic governors sent a letter saying they were boycotting the dinner, the insult is already deafening, and the intent is as jarring as the presence of a boot in a room full of shoes. Given his statement, Moore seems to have an idea. The fact that it’s so hard for other people to name a thing, a thing is such tiresome gaslighting.

“The White House hasn’t said, ‘We made a mistake in disinviting him,’” said Tiffany Carlock, a political advocate from Odenton who goes by the handle CandidlyTiff on social media. “They wanted to send a message that ‘We don’t want Wes Moore in the White House.’ It’s pretty obvious to those of us with eyes and ears that he did not include [Polis and Moore] because of their sexual orientation and race. Look at it on its face value. Why is everyone else being included?”

Why, indeed? Again, you know why. So why can’t people just admit it?

“People will have to admit their own biases,” Carlock said. “That’s why they make excuses about why the president would be mad at them, rather than the one that’s staring them right in the face.”

Elizabeth Booker Houston, a Silver Spring lawyer and political commentator, thinks the discomfort goes across the ideological spectrum.

On the right, such seemingly obvious tactics might be rebuffed as “playing the race card,” and on the left, dismissed as “identity politics.” At the end of the day “they’re the same thing,” Booker Houston said. “Just because you’re on the left doesn’t mean that you’re any more immune to racism or bias. It looks different, and it’s hard for people to confront.”

Some won’t confront it, not because it’s hard, but because they just don’t want to. Rep. Andy Harris, Maryland’s lone Republican in Congress, told FOX45 that any suggestion of bias was “to pull the racism card.” The real reason for Moore’s snubbing, Harris said, was “the governor spending overtime criticizing the president on national media.”

Yeah, no, Booker Houston said, noting that the president has major beef with a lot of people, including Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who were both invited to the White House dinner.

They’re some of Trump’s biggest opponents. “If anyone were to be treated this way for personal reasons, the list is a lot longer,” she said. “It’s very obvious bigotry.”

And Trump has taken issue with Moore repeatedly over the past year, Booker Houston said, including by accusing the governor of considering gender and race improperly in Key Bridge contracts.

But that’s in keeping with “pretty much every way in which he speaks to Black electeds. It’s par for the course for him,” she said.

Even though the obvious trait that Black elected officials have in common is being Black, there’s still what Booker Houston calls “an odd push for color blindness, which we know does not work. That makes it so difficult to accept the truth of what is occurring.”

I don’t know why it’s so hard to admit that racism is a factor in the halls of government when someone with access to the president’s Truth Social account can post a video with an animated depiction of President and Mrs. Obama as apes.

The tossed-off explanation was that this clip, which stayed up for 12 hours, was just part of a longer video with other politicians as jungle animals. But that excuse doesn’t explain away the hideous history of Black people being compared to monkeys, or that there aren’t any apes in “The Lion King.”

“What we saw was that the same time that he disinvited me from the White House dinner, that he put together a meme of the former first family likening them to apes,” Moore told reporters Tuesday.

Comparing Black people to monkeys is racist. Just say it’s racist. We know already.

The people who posted that video, or the former network TV newswoman who had an embarrassing meltdown over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show, aren’t “doing anything to not look bigoted. They rely on their base not caring,” Booker Houston said. “They’re always pointing their fingers in another direction, causing chaos and confusion, then waiting for it to blow over before the next crazy thing comes along.”

And there’s always the next crazy thing.

“If you have the audacity to post a picture of the Obamas looking like monkeys, what line is there not to cross?” Carlock said. “They are at the bottom. It kind of speaks to where we are in this country. There are no guardrails now. It’s whatever they want.”