Opinion: A white man takes umbrage, and everyone rushes to assuage his anger. What Mark Meadows’s anger at Rashida Tlaib says about our racial politics.
By Paul Waldman Paul Waldman Opinion writer covering politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer February 28 at 1:23 PM In all the drama around Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee yesterday, you may have missed a truly extraordinary incident, one that reveals a tremendous amount about how we talk about race in politics today, particularly how conservatives think about it.
Just to be clear, there's no doubt Lynne Patton was at that hearing to be a prop, no less than the giant poster with a picture of Michael Cohen and the words"Liar liar pants on fire" that Republicans on the committee displayed at one point . Patton wasn't testifying; she was there to be photographed, her blackness a supposed rebuke to the idea that Trump is a racist.
For many watching, the incident evoked the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, but with both race and gender at play instead of just gender. You'll recall that when Christine Blasey Ford testified, she was calm, controlled, deferential, and polite, because she knew that if she displayed any anger she'd be called a lunatic and her allegations dismissed out of hand.
Meadows’s rage at even the suggestion that he was capable of doing something racist happens in a context of a particular narrative about race and politics that has developed on the right in recent years. Conservatives have convinced themselves not only that racism is essentially a thing of the past but that someone being called racist is far worse than actual racism.
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