Even if he’d been completely unaware of Duckworth’s ancestry prior to this debate he should have put that together from the statement he was responding to. So either he’s an idiot who was too racist to consider that an Asian-looking person could have American ancestry, or he did know and he was intentionally appealing to the racists in the crowd.
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You aren’t by any chance equating the term ‘American’ with the skin tone and features commonly attributed to Caucasians are you?
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Here, I’ve got a novel idea. Why not just assume that what she says about herself is so and try to compete on policy.
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It would be very very hard for me to believe that he didn’t. In the world we live in, in a hard fought Senate race, with the millions in funding and preparation and strategy and PR… I do not believe it would be possible for him to not know her background.
I think he was making a Trumpesque “funny”, playing to the low-end of his constituency. Someone like that doesn’t have a place in retail sales, much less representing a diverse urban electorate.
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I mean having family dating back to the Revolution. In other words, way more American than my family’s two generations in the States. What he thinks an American is is something you have to ask him
If the forum would have let me go, “huh?” I would have just gone, “huh?”
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Stop ever assuming sincerity, problem solved.
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Are you serious?
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I think maybe the point of contention here is the definition of “racism” and the definition of “slur.”
He’s not explicitly saying she’s less of a human being for her race, nor is he calling her a racial epithet or implying some derogatory stereotype, what he seems to be doing is calling her a liar based on a limited knowledge of her heritage. That is asinine and petty, but it is also a racist dog whistle-- he’s drawing attention to race when it shouldn’t matter.
If he did in fact know that one side of her family could trace their roots back to the American Revolution then that makes it undeniably racist: instead of accidentally bringing race into the debate thinking he caught her in a lie, he would be lying to appeal to the racism of his constituents. I don’t know enough about the guy to judge, but it does seem par for the course with the GOP.
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Again, he should have known that much based on the very statement he was responding to. He had literally no reason to doubt the veracity of her claim other than the fact she looks Asian. If she’d been born in Thailand to two white parents there is zero chance he’d have responded in this way.
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Well, he’s shown himself to be a liar, makes sense he would think everyone else is one by default.
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OK, guys, this is not Duckworth’s first foray into politics here. Or Kirk’s, for that matter. Kirk knows her family and military history VERY WELL. You should see some of his PAC’s anti-Duckworth TV ads; they’re all quite offensive.
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It’s the accidental racism that is the mark of the person who is racist to the bone.
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Because he wouldn’t have said it if she had a visable European ancestry.
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What? This is America, that’s not how we politic!
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It’s a racist assumption because, in addition to having a mother from Thailand, she also has a father who’s a white American with ancestors going back to the Revolutionary War. One drop of non-European blood apparently invalidates the possibility of Duckworth’s DAR status in Kirk’s view. He’s a scumbag who’s pandering to racists, as per GOP SOP.
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Actually, he wasn’t right. He never said, “Hey, you were born in Thailand.” He said, sarcastically, “I’d forgotten your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.”
Her parents are NOT from Thailand. He made an assumption about her parents that was incorrect and based on racist assumptions…
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I think @brainspore has the key to why it was racist (and not just incredibly stupid):
That’s apparently obvious to some of y’all, but I had to think about it, personally - I mean, it felt racist to me, but I had to stop and figure out why I felt that way.
On several levels. I predict considerable backlash - Republican voters are pretty strongly supportive of disabled vets, so racists may be the only people left voting for this clown now.
You can. But (in my opinion) only when you are specifically addressing or redressing pre-existing racially targeted phenomena. For example, I don’t have a problem with doctors not testing me for sickle-cell anemia and I don’t have a problem with them not testing my daughter for Tay-Sachs disease; if there is a limit to how many people we can afford to test for these specific things, “race” is a fair discriminator, and definitely not stupid.
I had it pointed out to me that when well meaning people want to unilaterally say all racism is bad, it ends up giving ammunition to less admirable people who want to discredit the good works of the NAACP, the ADL, and the SPLC. These organizations target existing racism, so they are necessarily at least somewhat racist in order to be effective. You can’t expect them to stumble around blindfolded hoping that they are helping the people they are chartered to support…
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My son has two great great uncles who died in the fall of Singapore. One from Malaya and the other from Australia. Welcome to the 21st century. We have cheap air transport and global communications. Many people change countries (especially when they are young) and mixed race people are now a significant part of the populations of many countries.
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No one said you are racist, but that what Kirk said was racist.
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