Now Say It Like You Mean It
Rep. Corrine Brown has apologized for saying that Whites and Hispanics “all looked alike to her,” though she was hardly gracious about it.
“I sincerely did not mean to offend Secretary Noriega or anyone in the room. Rather, my comments, as they relate to ‘white men,’ were aimed at the policies of the Bush administration as they pertain to Haiti, which I do consider to be racist,” Brown said in a statement on Thursday.
Brown added that she was offended that the meeting on the crisis in Haiti, led by administration officials, “turned into a diatribe rebuking the Haitian government and the Haitian people. I was personally insulted by the anti-Haiti sentiment brought to the table by the State Department and by Republican members of Congress in attendance,” she said.
Brown also wrote a letter to Noriega, in which she apologized again “if what I said was construed as a personal affront.”
“The State Department delegation that came to meet with us did not include any females or people of color. Given the racial makeup of the people of Haiti, who are 95 percent of African descent, I felt the delegation and the delegation’s position were callous and out of touch with the needs (cultural and otherwise) of the Haitian people,” she wrote.
That’s a nice principal to govern by: When discussing any issue where race might possibly be a factor, if evidence of affirmative action as defined by the issue at hand is not obvious to all present, then the group discussing it is by definition racist in composition.
To hell with judging people by the content of their character, in other words. By that logic a committee investigating National Socialism should include a representative number of Nazis in its makeup.