Words matter and elections have consequences. Maybe that’s why what was once verboten is slowly coming back into vogue and it’s suddenly no longer racist to say it’s time “to take back our country.”
A couple years earlier, that phrase was considered a racist dog whistle used by Republicans to agitate against the Obama administration. Now that Republicans control Washington though, it is perfectly acceptable to mobilize a liberal base with that rallying call.
Take Andrew Gillum, the breakout progressive star who used the phrase yesterday as the subject of his fundraising email.
“I’m honored to be the Democratic candidate for governor in Florida,” Gillum wrote Thursday. “But now — right now, this instant — the real fight starts, and I’m FIRED UP to take back our country from extremist Republicans who are locking out our voices.”
Any sensible person reading that paragraph would conclude that Gillum and his supporters aren’t happy with the current direction of their country and, therefore, want to change the political leadership. He doesn’t sound like some sort of racist militant. He sounds more like every high school coach ever at halftime trying to rally back against a deficit during a home game.
Gillum will earn the second interpretation, no doubt, because of his party affiliation. But if he wasn’t a Democrat and if it was just three years ago, Gillum would be forced to answer some uncomfortable questions from hysterical journalists and indignant politicos going crazy over nothing.
Don Lemon of CNN accused then-candidate Donald Trump of racism for using this exact phrase during the Republican primaries in September 2015. Trump had said earlier that high turnout at his rallies was a testament to shifting political tides and the host went off:
Trump didn’t bite in that sound bite and probably for the best. Throughout the Obama years, the Left went to great lengths to make the mundane racist. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder argued that he and the president were treated differently because of their race. And anyone who wanted to send someone different to the White House must, therefore, be motivated by a racial animus.
During an interview with ABC’s Pierre Thomas in July of 2014, Holder argued that “there is a certain level of vehemence that seems to me [that] it’s directed at me directed at the president. You know. People ‘taking their country back.’”
Holder wasn’t shooting from the hip here though. Before the attorney general went on that Sunday show, a columnist with a Pulitzer Prize to his name detailed the supposed racism of the Tea Party. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post pointed to the phrase to paint the entire movement writing just a month earlier:
Spitting on someone because of their race is clearly racist (it is also assault). But using a phrase like “Take back our country” certainly is not. Byron York made exactly that point in these pages at the time, pointing out that every prominent Democrat from former Secretary of State John Kerry to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had fired up campaign crowds with the phrase.
