Quote:
Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
This is an excellent example of the theme I've been pounding on for weeks.
Meadows brings a black woman who worked for Trump in as evidence that Trump is not racist. Tlaib points out that it is racist and offensive to use her as a prop. Meadows' musters all of his white fragility and manages to flip the whole thing back so that everyone involved has to reassure him that he is not racist. He fucking trades on his friendship with Cummings as well as using his family members of color* to defend himself and assuage his feelings. He manages to get Tlaib to retract and insist that she wasn't calling him a racist. This is what it is like to confront almost every white person with their racism. Every single program on race I have ever been involved in is crafted to take this into account. Because once it happens, we can no longer talk about the underlying racist action. We spend every single moment comforting the person who made the statement.
And Meadows, on a number of occasions, pushed the Obama birther bullshit and stated publicly that we should send him back to Kenya. He's a fucking racist. And the fact that he doesn't think he's a racist is exactly what I'm talking about.
TM
*See: White Fragility, Dr. Robin DiAngelo
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I've a British phrase for this: Bollocks.
The exchange between Tlaib and Meadows was silly because the entire discussion of racism in the context of a hearing over the buffoonish behavior of a fool like Michael Cohen is so utterly misplaced -- so obviously shoehorned into the hearing for political points -- that it degraded everyone in the room.
Tlaib asked Cohen an absurd hypothetical about what he viewed as racism. Michael Cohen is an idiot. Asking him about his views of what does and doesn't constitute racism is like asking him what he thinks of quantum mechanics. It was silly grandstanding for Tlaib or anyone else to ask his opinion on that. And it was silly grandstanding, and downright stupid, for Meadows to bring out a black person as proof Trump is not racist.
This was a hearing about whether Trump is a crooked con man. AOC asked perfect questions aimed at furthering inquiry in that regard. The speeches given by congresspeople regarding Trump's character undercut the search for facts. The man has no character. Beating that horse publicly made the Ds who did it look foolish. And the Rs who fought it look foolish for taking the bait. There is no winning a political show hearing, and when this hearing went beyond factual inquiries into hypothetical views on what Cohen thinks (about anything), that's what it was: A pandering show hearing.
That Cohen teed it up by offering to answer hypotheticals doesn't make it any better.
"Michael Cohen, you would agree with me that [insert hypothetical]..." is a sentence that need never be spoken. Why not ask a street corner wino for his answer to such hypotheticals.
This isn't white fragility. This is me calling something stupid. Asking an imbecile a hypothetical on a complex issue is just plain stupid. Even politically, where stupid is often smart.
