Alabama GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville is under fire after suggesting that Democrats are soft on crime because they want to hand out reparations to the “people who do the crime,” seemingly referring to Black Americans, per The Hill.
“Senator Tuberville’s comments are flat-out racist, ignorant, and utterly sickening,” NAACP president Derrick Johnson said in a statement on Monday (October 10). “His words promote a centuries-old lie about Black people that throughout history has resulted in the most dangerous policies and violent attacks on our community.”
Tuberville made the remarks at a Trump Rally on Saturday (October 8) in Nevada, equating Black people to criminals.
“They want crime because they want to take over what you got,” Tuberville said. “They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) came to Tuberville’s defense on Sunday (October 9), saying his comments weren’t meant to be racist and that the country’s rising crime rate can’t be ignored, per NBC’s Meet the Press.
“We’ve seen this before from the far-right, and we’ve seen what they can do when they take power,” Johnson said in response to the GOP senator’s comments. “Next time the Senator wants to talk about crime, he should talk about Donald Trump’s hate-fueled rally on January 6, 2021, and the attacks that followed. Perhaps the real criminals are in his orbit.”
Johnson’s statement came after CNN political analyst Bakari Sellers said Tuberville’s remarks evoked racist tropes on the network’s State of the Union show Sunday.
“For him to give these racist tropes — I mean, it infuriates me,” Sellers said. “But this is a large swath of the Republican Party that they have to deal with that they have never done.”
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