Stop giving racists the benefit of the doubt

Stop giving racists the benefit of the doubt

Opinion by 

Jennifer Rubin

Columnist

March 19, 2021 at 8:45 p.m. GMT+9

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) outside the Capitol on March 17. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

By the time we reached the late-night hour on Wednesday, network comedians such as Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert expressed what so many in the mainstream media would not during the day: When a murderer selects Asian women to kill, that is the essence of racism.

We should not take excuses from the man charged with those killings any more seriously than we do Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s denial of racism in his declaration that he was not afraid of marauding white supremacists but that he would have been if they had been Black Lives Matter protesters. Nor should we accept the word of a sheriff’s captain — who himself shared racist material on social media — that the slaying of six Asian women was not racially motivated. After parroting the suspect’s words that he was having “a bad day,” that captain needs to be reassigned.

There are lots of people who no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. When Georgia lawmakers seek to eliminate in-person early voting on Sundays, a direct threat to the “souls to the polls” voting initiative popular among churchgoing African Americans, we should not take their arguments that they are restoring election integrity seriously. (For one thing, this is in-person voting.) Nor should we take Republicans’ rationalizations that they are concerned about voting security seriously, because we know there was zero evidence of fraud in the 2020 election beyond a handful of discrete cases — which were caught. There is no other reason for the flood of legislation than to prevent as many non-White and poor voters from exercising their right to vote as possible.

AD

Likewise, we should stop accepting the excuses of lawmakers who willfully engaged in racist rhetoric this week and doubled down when caught. For example, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) attempted to hijack a hearing on anti-Asian racism by injecting his own xenophobic hysteria about the border. The Post reported:

As a House panel convened Thursday for the first hearing on anti-Asian discrimination in decades, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) argued that while he believed the session aimed to police free speech, “all Americans deserve protection” in the days after the Atlanta-area spa shootings. To make his point, Roy invoked “old sayings in Texas” that celebrated lynchings.

“We believe in justice. There’s old sayings in Texas about find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree,” he said before the House Judiciary Committee. “You know, we take justice very seriously, and we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys. That’s what we believe.”

Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) excoriated Roy. "Your president, your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other countries that you want, but you don’t have to do it by putting a bull’s eye on the back of Asian Americans across the country, on our grandparents, on our kids,” Meng said. “This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community to find solutions, and we will not let you take our voice away from us.”

It should not have been up to Meng to denounce him. When someone spews such bile, it is up to everyone on the panel to halt the hearing, denounce the comment, demand an apology and, if one is not forthcoming, present a bipartisan complaint to the House Ethics Committee.

AD

Racist language is becoming so common among Republican lawmakers that a legislator should be tasked with compiling the utterances on a weekly or monthly basis and then introducing a resolution to denounce them. As long as it is up to the victims of racist language to defend themselves, Congress is failing. It amounts to condoning a hostile workplace. (It took until Thursday evening for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to even address the Atlanta incident.)

We should not permit the false charge of “cancel culture” to be used as an excuse to deflect blame for racist speech and behavior. There have been nearly 3,800 anti-Asian American incidents (mostly against women) since the pandemic began. Hate crimes in general have been rising, and there is no doubt where the problem originates. The Anti-Defamation League reported last month: “Right-wing extremists were linked to at least 16 extremist-related murders in the United States in 2020 and have been responsible for 75 percent of such murders in the last ten years, according to new data from ADL.”

President Biden condemned racism directed at the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, even before the Atlanta killings. His voice is not enough. It is up to all members of Congress and elected officials at every level to denounce racist language and incidents when they occur. And the media needs to stop giving Republicans plausible deniability. It strains credulity to assume that racism is accidental in today’s GOP.

correction

An earlier version of this column stated that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had not addressed the Atlanta shooting. He made a statement on the mass shooting Thursday evening. This version has been updated.