Cori Bush reveals that when Democrats talk about race, they simply mean party
Timothy P. Carney
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Democratic Rep. Cori Bush (MO) wants you to know that Republican Rep. Byron Donalds (FL) does not count as black.
That’s the only interpretation of her comment. Donalds has been nominated to be speaker of the House. Regardless of the circumstances, and regardless of what you think of Donalds’s politics, that’s historic.
At least, this was the rule when Democrats were nominating their first black man or first woman to be president.
‘BLATANTLY OUTRAGEOUS’: BYRON DONALDS FIRES BACK AT CORI BUSH OVER RACE-BASED ATTACK
“Everybody ought to celebrate it, Republican or Democrat alike,” Democrat John Kerry proclaimed after Clinton won the nomination. “It’s a breakthrough.”
This was always a lie, I wrote after Giorgia Meloni and Rishi Sunak got no grand congratulations on their elections in Italy and the United Kingdom, respectively.
“When they said we should celebrate racial diversity and historic firsts, what they really meant was: ‘We should celebrate the Left’s wins and come up with excuses to call the Right racist or sexist.’”
We know for a fact that Democrats and liberals use the charge of racism dishonestly as a cudgel — as a way to shut up political enemies and increase the cost of opposing them.
Recall how liberals wrote in private emails they expected only their allies to see: “Take one of them … who cares — and call them racists.”
“What is necessary,” liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman explained, “is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [face] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear.”
Consider the story recently publicized about Coke’s lobbying methods on soda taxes and food stamp restrictions. Coke met with NAACP and other civil rights groups, saying, “We will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist.”
But we don’t need to posit dishonesty by Bush here. Let’s grant that she actually means and believes what she’s saying.
This tells us something else. This tells us that when Bush talks about race, she’s not talking about race the way most people do. To her, “black” isn’t about the color of a person’s skin, it’s not about the experience a person had growing up, and it’s not about a person being descended from slaves or being the victim of discrimination.
To Bush, being black means being a liberal Democrat.
This is an abuse of language, and it’s a particularly pernicious one.
Race carries extraordinary weight in American culture and politics for a good reason. America’s original sin was African slavery. We’ve never recovered from it. We fought a horrendous war over slavery. States and the federal government have institutionalized racism. The legacies of slavery and Jim Crow are visible every day.
African Americans were the victims of these offenses. Democrats or liberals were not. By redefining race to mean party, Cori Bush is trying to smuggle the moral weight of America’s racist history into something much more pedestrian — her own party and her own policy preferences.
This is harmful because it rightly makes neutral observers very skeptical anytime any Democrat speaks about race or racism — and we need to be able to speak clearly about race and racism. People like Bush make that impossible, and so people like Bush make race relations in America worse — which means people like Bush make life worse for other African Americans.
It’s not just Cori Bush who does this. You’ll recall this happens to every conservative who isn’t a white man.
Bush has every right to abuse language as much as she wants. But fair-minded observers have no duty ever to take her seriously anymore.
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