Source: Emily Elconin / Getty
One thing to know about white MAGA conservatives is that they can’t even explain that they’re not racist without being demonstrably racist.
Take, for example, a 63-year-old white grandmother who called into C-SPAN during Monday’s Washington Journal program so that she could share her unsolicited thoughts on Vice President Kamla Harris and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who she chided for calling MAGA supporters white supremacists — just before she implied that Black voters were responsible for white supremacy.
The woman, identified only as “Mary,” began her rant by claiming she doesn’t “have time to be racist.”
Oh, but she had time that day.
“I know that Kamala is a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” the woman told host Pedro Echevarria. “And I wanted to talk about Hakeem Jeffries. Whenever he gets on the television, he calls Trump supporters MAGA Republicans, white supremacy… just anything. and he’ll say it like five times within one minute.”
“I am a 63-year-old woman who has worked all her life,” she continued. “I don’t have time to be racist. I’ve been too busy working and trying to put a roof over my head and take care of my family.”
First of all, it’s not clear why this woman believes she would need to take time out of her day to be racist. Whatever she does for a living in order to “put a roof over my head and take care of my family,” she’s fully capable of doing it while indulging in the racist preconceived notions she has regarding Black people and people of color — which she displayed fully just after claiming she didn’t have time. (More on that in a second.) It’s not as if she’s only allowed to have or share racist thoughts when she’s on her lunch break. Sure, she might have to clock out before meeting with her noose-knitting KKKaren circle, but she doesn’t have to wait until her time card says she’s free to be a racist person.
Anyway, the woman went on to essentially explain that she’s passing down her racism and ignorance to her grandchildren while reading from the White Supremacists Guild To Whitesplaining Non-Existent Black History To Future Racists. (I should probably note that this is not actually a real book before the Florida Board of Education decides to implement it into K-12 curricula.)
“And I told my grandkids not to be guilty for anything they haven’t done,” she said. “Slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the Black people, the Black men voted in for the Jim Crow laws back in 1872. And that’s a history that Black people don’t want out there.”
Yeah — that’s also the history that doesn’t exist.
Listen, no one should need to explain that Black people did not vote in favor of their own oppression. They didn’t. However, white people — the same white people who, for whatever reason, think the fact that some Africans sold slaves absolves white America from its roughly two-and-a-half-century-long history of keeping generations of Black people in bondage — love nothing more than to revise history to protect white feelings.
So, since we’re here, it’s worth noting that while the 15th Amendment did technically give Black men the right to vote, they still couldn’t vote unencumbered — because white supremacy still wouldn’t allow it.
From the National Archives:
To former abolitionists and to the Radical Republicans in Congress who fashioned Reconstruction after the Civil War, the 15th Amendment, enacted in 1870, appeared to signify the fulfillment of all promises to African Americans. Set free by the 13th amendment, with citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, Black males were given the right to vote by the 15th Amendment. In retrospect, it can be seen that the 15th Amendment was in reality only another step in the struggle for equality that would continue for more than a century before African Americans could begin to participate fully in American public and civic life.
African Americans exercised the right to vote and held office in many Southern states through the 1880s, but in the early 1890s, steps were taken to ensure subsequent “white supremacy.” Literacy tests for the vote, “grandfather clauses” excluding from the franchise all whose ancestors had not voted in the 1860s, and other devices to disenfranchise African Americans were written into the laws of former Confederate states.
Social and economic segregation were added to Black America’s loss of political power. In 1896, the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson legalized “separate but equal” facilities for the races. For more than 50 years, the overwhelming majority of African American citizens were reduced to second-class citizenship under the “Jim Crow” segregation system.
It’s still unclear where the caller got it from that Black men voted in favor of Jim Crow, considering Black people voted Republican at the time and, as modern Republicans love to point out, Democrats represented the party of Jim Crow back then. Of course, as we’ve seen time and time again, white conservatives are not known for letting historical facts get in the way of a good self-serving, white nationalist-appeasing story.
Anyway, after demonstrating her seething resentment of Black people as well as her non-existent understanding of American history, the woman launched into a completely unrelated rant about how Black and brown migrants don’t belong in the country. Fortunately, before she could get too deep into that part of her unhinged diatribe, Echevarria cut her off and ended the call — likely because the network is called “C-SPAN,” not “See? Klan!”
