Moments after the crowd at President Trump’s Wednesday night rally chanted “Send Her Back!” at Somalia-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a guest on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight argued that the term “people of color” should be done away with because it gives people with dark skin “special virtue.”
While airing the president’s rally in the background, host Tucker Carlson invited conservative art critic and commentator Roger Kimball on to help decide whether or not America is a racist country.
“Is America more racist than it was five years ago? Ten years ago?” Carlson asked.
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“Clearly not,” Kimball replied, adding that both the country as a whole and college campuses are “less racist” than they ever have been. He then pivoted to taking aim at the four Democratic congresswomen of color that have recently been the target of racist attacks by Trump, calling them the “Juvenile Squad.”
Claiming that the young lawmakers—Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley—aren’t really legislators but instead “burnishing their own celebrity,” Kimball then issued a request.
“I wish they would give the phrase ‘people of color’ a rest,” he declared. “We need to retire that phrase because it is a racist phrase.”
“What does that mean?” Carlson asked.
“You are a nice color, Tucker,” Kimball said. “I think of myself as being sort of a pleasing pink. But everyone has a color.”
“It is a racist term because the idea is that somehow you are trapped by your skin color,” he continued. “That having dark skin imbues you with a special virtue, and having white skin imbues you with a special evil, or a liability, and that is a racist idea.”
Kimball went on to call for the media to stand up against the use of the term because, in his view, it is being “used as a bludgeon to criminalize policy differences and criminalize differences of opinion.”
Carlson, meanwhile, lamented that many people allow the use of the label to go unchallenged because they “are remarkably passive in the face of hyperaggressive racists like Ilhan Omar.”
The Fox News host has been hyperfocused on Omar of late, devoting large chunks of his program to extremely negative coverage of the Muslim congresswoman. Earlier this month, the anti-immigrant host accused Omar—a U.S. citizen who immigrated from Somalia—of despising America and described her as a “living fire alarm” for the country's immigration laws.
Following widespread outrage over his remarks, Carlson doubled down the following night, devoting the first 20 minutes of his show to blasting Omar and inviting a guest on who said the Minnesota lawmaker “would be a member of the KKK” if she weren’t in Congress.
