Pressley: Only ‘right’ voices welcome to speak
“If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” — Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)
Attention, people of color — Rep. Ayanna Pressley has a message for you: Stop being the wrong kind of “black.” Same to you Hispanic people, some of whom apparently don’t know the right way to be “brown.” Your elected representative in Congress says you’re not welcome at the political table — so sit down and shut up.
I, on the other hand, am more of an Alice Roosevelt Longworth American (“If you can’t say something nice, come sit by me.”). Being a person of pallor, I’m clueless what Rep. Pressley means by black people who don’t have a “black voice.” That guy who played Urkel, maybe?
I’ve got it: Ralph Northam — the Democratic governor of Virginia!
You know, the liberal politician who appeared in blackface and lied about it? Who says he has no idea why his nickname in college was “Coonman”? He had a black face, a white voice and — because he’s a Democrat — his job as governor of Virginia.
When I read a legal opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, or see Alveda King — Dr. Martin Luther King’s niece — on Fox News, or hear a speech by Sen. Marco Rubio, I don’t judge their blackness or brownness because, well, unlike Rep. Pressley, I’m not a racist.
But if I ever did go on national TV and make a statement even close to hers, I guarantee you’d read about it in the Boston Globe-Democrat. But Google Rep. Pressley’s offensive phrase and you’ll find — it never made the paper.
How do you bury a story like this about a local pol? And that’s exactly what the Globe-Democrat did.
The Globe website briefly linked a Washington Post story that featured Pressley’s offensive comments, before quickly replacing it with an AP story that left out the embarrassing details. Or rather, they tried to replace it, but screwed up and left the original web address (url) in place.
Then, in service to their motto (“Democracy Dies in Total Devotion to the Democratic Party”), the Globe followed up yesterday with a puff piece praising Rep. Pressley’s (I’m not making this up) “positive, loving tone.”
Just a reminder that Rep. “Positive and Loving” defended the overt anti-Semitism of her pal Rep. Ilhan Omar and demeaned people of color who work in border enforcement as mere “cogs” in the “machine of oppression.”
“This is Ayanna — she speaks with reason and heart and compassion, and Ayanna tells it like it is,” Attorney General Maura Healey told the paper.
So the notion that “some of you brown people should keep your mouths shut” is “reasonable” and “compassionate”? Whatever you say, enforcer of our state laws against racial bias.
As an utterly un-#Woke American, it doesn’t seem OK to me. In fact, it sounds like Pressley applying the same “get on board or get out” standard Trump used in his offensive tweets. I think Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is onto something when she says Pressley is “wrong to tell Americans that any individual seat at the table is only valuable, only legitimate if that person espouses some pre-approved set of beliefs deemed appropriate based on their religion, or their gender, or their race.”
“When they say that, that is racist,” Cheney said.
Whether you think Pressley’s comments are racist or not, can we all at least agree that they’re news?
Michael Graham is a regular contributor to the Boston Herald. Follow him on Twitter @IAmMGraham