Over the course of just a couple of tweets, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went from trying to defend a colleague’s racially charged remarks to defending her own.
The New York congresswoman, who has become affectionately known among the left as simply “AOC,” was criticized on Twitter over the weekend for making hypocritical remarks about alleged racism among the GOP.
“We don’t parade them around”
It all began on Friday when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) made an incendiary comment during a House Oversight Committee hearing suggesting that Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) is a racist. Why? Because he brought a black Trump administration official to the hearing, which Tlaib says was an attempt to counter the narrative that President Donald Trump is a racist.
“Just because someone has a person of color, a black person, working for them does not mean they aren’t racist,” Tlaib said. “The fact someone would actually use a prop, a black woman in this chamber, in this committee is alone racist in itself.”
Critics quickly seized on Tlaib’s remark, calling it racist. Meanwhile, Tlaib found an ally in another freshman congresswoman.
“Total bravery from @RashidaTlaib as she reminds the nation that tokenism *is* racism,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, praising her fellow freshman representative.
The Twitterverse soon erupted in accusations of racism by AOC. The social media rebuke continued until Saturday morning, when the 29-year-old former bartender confessed that she, like many on the left, is a hypocrite.
We have Black staff. We don’t parade them around to show the world how diverse our team is, and use that as some kind of evidence of the absence of racism. That’s what tokenism is. https://t.co/5qWMqy9522
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 2, 2019
“I need clearer rules”
But all Ocasio-Cortez’s follow-up tweet did was make matters worse. Hundreds of Twitter users, including TV personalities and conservative pundits, were quick to call out Ocasio-Cortez’s hypocrisy.
This woman just literally did the exact opposite of what she claims in her tweet and doesn’t realize it!” lamented former Married at First Sight star Derek Schwartz. “‘We have black staff. We don’t parade them around.’ (As she parades them on [T]witter). Lord help us all.”
Other users were more direct in their critiques.
Saying you have African Americans on your staff as a defense… Is in itself a form of tokenism. https://t.co/uq65EmQxEc
— Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D., M.S. (@Neoavatara) March 2, 2019
Still others pointed to what seems to be an ever-shifting definition of racism among the Democratic Party.
“So if someone doesn’t have any/enough black people on their staff, that’s racist,” tweeted Fox contributor Allie Beth Stuckey, who has made a name for herself as “The Conservative Millennial.” “But if someone does have black people on their staff and says that they do, that’s also racist. Thank you for making this perfectly clear.”
Author and WhenHub chief strategist Scott Adams perhaps said it best:
I need clearer rules. Can I tweet that my staff is diverse so long as I am not parading it around? And hypothetically, if I have a black friend — and I’m not saying I do, as I understand that would be racist tokenism — should I keep it to myself? https://t.co/teAqn01t6o
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 2, 2019
But all this criticism didn’t seem to affect the infallible Ocasio-Cortez. She responded by somewhat arrogantly sharing some reading material about “tokenism” and promptly moved on to other matters.
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