The only thing weirder than the Washington Post questioning Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s blackness is the people who can’t fathom why Congress’s only African American Republican senator would find it offensive.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg is such a person.
Fact-checking a lawmaker’s personal story is not wrong, and Scott doesn’t get a free pass by virtue of the fact he’s black.
But the Washington Post does a lot more than just look into Scott’s accurate claim that he is the grandson of a poorly educated black man who, as a child, picked cotton. The fact check characterizes Scott’s version of events as “missing some nuance,” going as far as to suggest he misleads audiences whenever he neglects to mention his black ancestors once owned acres of land. The fact check reaches its “missing some nuance” conclusion despite also determining there isn’t really anything factually wrong with the senator’s story.
The biggest problem of all, however, is the Washington Post’s fact check never once mentions the term “Jim Crow” in its more than 2,000-plus-word investigation of Scott, whose office is now fundraising off the paper’s review of his family lore. Neglecting to mention the senator’s black forebears came into their own in the South during the Jim Crow era seems a big detail to omit from a fact check of the South Carolina lawmaker’s ancestral history. It meant that land ownership sometimes didn’t come close to negating hardship.
Steinberg doesn’t see it this way. In fact, he argues this week there’s little difference between when Scott recites his family history and when former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner highlighted the fact he worked several jobs as a teenager.
“Scott is like every other politician,” writes Steinberg, “pretending to have humbler roots than reality would indicate. Bruce Rauner talked about his teenage jobs far more than about his nine mansions. It’s what they do.”
Steinberg’s first problem is failing to contextualize the era in which Scott’s family lived. The senator is not merely embellishing or “pretending to have humbler roots.” His family did indeed live through tough, oppressive times, which makes the senator’s eventual ascent to Congress legitimately impressive.
Conservative author and radio host Erick Erickson argues the point well:
The Washington Post “attempted to tell the story of a black man in the South by looking at public records. That’s relevant because at that time,” he writes, “‘separate but equal’ was a legal standard. It was separate, but it was never equal. [The Washington Post] tries to tell the story of Scott’s family amassing land after the Civil War and can’t see the story of Southern whites fighting back.”
He adds, “By the time [Scott’s] grandfather is born, black families are having to abandon schooling in the South because it isn’t good, it isn’t equal, and it is very separate. They’ve got to go save their land.”
The Washington Post, however, didn’t look at Scott’s story from this perspective. Rather, it reviewed decades-old documents, omitting all crucial context regarding the Jim Crow laws of the time, to conclude the senator’s family was actually pretty well off, all things considered.
“This is actually what racism of white elite often looks like,” Erickson adds. “They don’t look at the story as lived, but as told by banks and legal records written at a time white society behaved one way and recorded things a different way.”
He adds, “None of us can deny that happened, but [the Washington Post] does [so] through indifference as a way to play gotcha with Scott.”
All of this has been lost on Steinberg, who sees Scott’s post-fact-check fundraising pitch as the most detestable aspect regarding this episode.
“Suggesting scrutiny is something reserved for Republicans is the kind of faux victimization the GOP excels at,” the columnist writes. “Yet they still expect accuracy.”
He concludes, turning, of course, to criticism of former President Donald Trump, writing, “Is undercutting the bedrock of democracy — kneecapping voting, slurring the press and constraining free speech — while living in an upside-down alternate reality of your own making now considered ‘conservative?’ I suppose it is.”
The Washington Post fact check is bad, but defending the indefensible, especially by irrelevantly changing the subject to Trump, may actually be worse.
