Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday morning pushed back against the way in which Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) had framed the challenge of addressing systemic racism in his rebuttal speech to President Joe Biden’s address to Congress the night before.
Harris, who is the first Black person to serve as vice president, told “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos that she agreed with Scott, who is also Black, that America is “not a racist country.”
“But we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today,” she added.
The vice president said that the intelligence community’s warnings that white supremacist violence has become one of the country’s biggest national security threats is an issue “that we must confront.”
“It doesn’t help to heal our country, to unify us as a people, to ignore the realities of that,” Harris said.
And so “the idea is that we want to unify the country, but not without speaking truth and requiring accountability as appropriate,” she told Stephanopoulos.
During his speech on Wednesday night, Scott claimed that “people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to heal.”
“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country,” he said. “It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.”
“This is a speech delivered from a planet where facts don’t matter, which is where the current Republican Party resides,” said Wallace, who was communications director for President George W. Bush. “It’s really not his fault, but it is his responsibility to get his facts straight.”
“He said that Biden inherited a country that had already rounded the bend on COVID,” she said. “Four thousand people a day were dying in January, so I don’t know, again, on what planet we rounded the bend.”
She said Scott’s speech contained “a lot of disinformation” that felt “almost scripted” by someone close to Trump.
It’s outrageous to fight democracy with the same old types of discrimination.
It’s disgusting for a black man to fight against the destruction of racism and yet complain about being called an Uncle Tom.
True today, maybe, but if the crazies in the party that Scott represents got their way it would certainly turn more racist. It’s hard to justify that the GOP is NOT a racist organization. I get a national Democratic politician can’t go there, but it if looks like a duck…
Much as I like the VP, how can a country with our slavery and Jim Crow history and a current problem with white supremacy not be racist?
I guess you could maybe argue that a majority of individual Americans is not racist, at which point it becomes a matter of defining “country.” But this sounds a bit weird, to say the least.
When it comes to the topic of racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc, there. is. no. “debate”. It’s wrong and needs to stop. Stopping hate in all its forms isn’t a type of discrimination A/K/A cancel culture.
It’s decency and moral righteousness. Things that the Rethugs have no ability to experience.