Both black members of the GOP’s House caucus are comparing Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse‘s membership in an allegedly all-white club to Jim Crow.
Reps. Burgess Owens and Byron Donalds slammed Whitehouse, using comparisons to Jim Crow (which several Democrats have invoked in their arguments against hundreds of voter identification bills in state legislatures across the country) to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy.
“Voter ID is Jim Crow, but all-white beach clubs are just “tradition”… Seem backwards to anyone else?” Owens tweeted Tuesday morning.
RHODE ISLAND SENATOR DEFENDS MEMBERSHIP TO ALL-WHITE CLUB, CITES ‘TRADITION’
Donalds took his criticism one step further, directly calling on President Joe Biden to recognize Whitehouse’s club membership as “Jim Crow 2.0.”
“You see, the Democrats like to use racially charged language like Jim Crow to divide the country and to distract you from the real racists in their party,” he continued.
Whitehouse quickly received criticism after it was widely reported that he belonged to Bailey’s Beach Club, an allegedly all-white private club, which he called a “long tradition in Rhode Island.”
“It’s a long tradition in Rhode Island, and there are many of them, and I think we just need to work our way through the issues,” he said, according to local outlet GoLocalProv.
Even groups on the Left, such as Black Lives Matter, have come out to condemn the Democratic senator.
“I am ashamed of Senator Whitehouse and his affiliation with this racist club,” Brother Gary Dantzler, the executive director of Black Lives Matter Rhode Island, said. “Him coming out and speaking about ending systemic racism while belonging to a ‘whites only’ private club is hypocrisy as it worst.”
The senator and his wife have belonged to the club for decades, though he transferred his shares in the club to his wife years ago. His wife is now one of the largest shareholders of the club.
When asked in 2017 about the club’s reportedly all-white status, he said, “I think it would be nice if they changed a little bit, but it’s not my position.”
As the only two black GOP congressmen, Donalds and Owens, along with Sen. Tim Scott (the sole black Republican senator), have frequently criticized what they view as the Democrats’ hypocrisy on racial issues.
Donalds particularly made headlines in recent weeks for his battle to join the Congressional Black Caucus, which has reportedly rejected his membership.
“Congressman Donalds has expressed interest in joining the CBC since becoming a member of the 117th Congress and has mentioned that directly to Congresswoman Joyce Beatty and several other CBC members early on,” Donalds’s Communications Director Harrison Fields said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Our staff has also reached out on multiple occasions, and we have yet to get a response. Consideration of membership seems not to have included freshman member Congressman Donalds but juxtaposed to the six newly inducted Democrats.”
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While some longtime CBC members, including former Chairman G.K. Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat, denied that Donalds’s requests to join have been rejected, other caucus members have implied Donalds would not be welcome.
“Why does he want to be there?” Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, told the Washington Examiner. “Why? He disagrees with everything we stand for. Why does he want to be there?”
