Few people are looking better right now than Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, one of two Black Democratic legislators who were reinstated to the state House days after Republican colleagues expelled him for standing with residents demanding gun control legislation. And few people are looking worse than those Tennessee Republicans who in their attempt to heap shame upon two young Black men brought shame upon themselves. Those Republicans also lost the ground they were trying to defend. Tuesday, Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed an executive order strengthening background checks in the state.
Instead of taking the L, the Republican attack brigade has launched a diversionary tactic.
Instead of taking the L, instead of acknowledging that the targeted legislators were brave and effective and that their Republican colleagues were full of hubris, the Republican attack brigade has launched a diversionary tactic.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, skilled at expressing multiple bigotries at once, likened Pearson to a transgender person on his show Wednesday night. Contrasting a video of Pearson campaigning for a student government position at Bowdoin College with video of him now using a Black preacher’s cadence, Carlson accused Pearson (whose father is a Black preacher) of having made a “transition” from a Bowdoin College student who “did a fantastic impression” of sounding like a white person to “the modern incarnation of Martin Luther King Jr. himself.”
All Democrats, to hear Carlson tell it, aspire to sound like King. They don’t aspire to sound like Malcolm X, he said, “because Malcolm X didn’t talk like a sharecropper. He spoke dignified, standard English.”
One of the best speeches in 20th century America was given by a sharecropper: Fannie Lou Hamer, a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Hamer said that if national Democrats rejected her…
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