Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) denounced Republicans as “racist” at a film festival in Martha’s Vineyard last week, where Rev. Al Sharpton referred to the “diva” congresswoman as “Jasmine Campbell.”
Sharpton’s brutal gaffe came as he reminisced about working on Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 presidential campaign, four years after she became the first black woman elected to Congress, and he compared Crockett to the trailblazing congresswoman.
“I lived to see Shirley Chisholm morph into Barbara Jordan, morph into Maxine Waters, morph into Ayanna Pressley and Jasmine Campbell,” Sharpton said during the fireside chat at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival.
Crockett, who is reportedly so image obsessed she uses a headshot of herself as her iPhone lock screen, didn’t appear to react to the gaffe – and the reverend continued on without missing a beat.
“So, I lived to see 4 or 5 generations of black women that will stand up when black men were too afraid to stand up, and when black men were running around talking about [how] they like Trump’s swagger,” Sharpton added. “Well, you got enough swagger now?”
Crockett followed up by presenting her argument for why “most Black people are not Republicans.”
“I talk to black folk all the time as somebody that’s a child of a preacher,” the Texas Democrat told the crowd. “Listen, most Black people are not Republicans simply because we just is like, ‘Y’all racist. I can’t hang out with the KKK and them.’”
“That’s really what it is,” she asserted. “But when we think about who we are as black people, and we think about where we come from, most black people have very conservative values, right?”
“But the reality is that, like, we just can’t side with, like, the neo-Nazis and them. We like, ‘We not – we not dealing with y’all like that, right?’”
Crockett, who has positioned herself as an unfiltered critic of President Trump, later argued that the 47th president is trying “to make us feel as if the inevitable is that he is going to be the dictator of the United States.”
Crockett urged the artsy crowd to “find your role in this fight,” likening opposing Trump to the civil rights movement.
“I get it we are not a monolith as black people,” she argued, “but you got to understand, when they come for one of us they are coming for all of us.”
Read the full article here
