Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has fully embraced identity politics, claiming in an interview this week that poor, white people will eventually have to recognize that they benefit from the color of their skin.
Though this sort of language isn’t a first for her, as both gender and identity issues have been baked into her congressional career from the beginning, her appearance last week on the Intercept’s “Deconstructed” saw her going further into the weeds on both topics than she has in the past.
“It’s a really big step from where we were, but you’re right, it’s nowhere near enough,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And the solutions are so painful, frankly. I find it — I find the solutions for white communities to be very painful, because it’s very painful for a community to understand and have, go through this, like you can be, the idea that you can be poor and benefit from the color of your skin does not compute for a lot of people.”
She’s not wrong when she says the experiences of poor, white people in the United States differ from the experiences of poor minorities. But the congresswoman’s solution to combating racism seems not just toothless, but also weirdly scolding and useless.
Unless I’m misunderstanding Ocasio-Cortez, she suggests that racial reconciliation in this country can’t really move forward until white people — even the poor, broken down people dying at high rates from overdoes — start to recognize that they are privileged.
That brings us to the “weirdly scolding” part. Her comments seem to demand that even the most beaten down white people admit that, by comparison, they have it pretty good. I’m not sure the key to racial harmony involves demanding that the destitute, white opioid addict or white person laid off from his job because of federal clean energy policies concede that he is privileged by the color of his skin.
“And going through that realization is very painful or even just economically for people that are that were born with silver spoons, it’s very painful to admit that you had advantages and it’s just — ” the congresswoman started to say.
She spelled it out further:
And we can all — almost every single person this country can acknowledge some privilege of some type, you know? I’m a cisgender woman. You know, I will never know the trauma of feeling like I’m not born in the right body, and that that is a privilege that I have no matter how poor my family was when I was born. But it’s really hard for some people to admit. It’s part of this weird American dream mythology that we have, that for a lot of, in a lot of circumstances isn’t as true or isn’t as clearly communicated as we’d like for it to be, or we wish it were.
She’s a “cisgendered woman” — I’m sure the people of Appalachia feel her pain.
Her host, Ryan Grim, interjected at one point: “Look what happened to [Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh] when he was confronted. He melted down!”
Grim’s remarks are in reference to the angry, tear-filled statement Kavanaugh gave when he went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend himself from uncorroborated allegations of sexual misconduct.
“It literally,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “it literally is an identity meltdown.”
Of course, it couldn’t have been the fact that Kavanaugh had been accused, out of the blue and without any credible evidence, of being a sexual predator. Neither she nor Grim can admit to that possibility, and so therefore it must have been about having his white identity challenged. Naturally!
