Why Are White Conservatives So Pressed About Jasmine Crockett’s Blackness?

In today’s episode of Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s Chocolate Milkshake Brings All The Barely-Closeted Klansmen To The Yard, another right-wing commenter has demonstrated how little white conservatives actually know about Black people by mistaking Crockett’s authentic Blackness for her attempt to persuade people that she’s from the “hood.”

“Jasmine Crockett wants you to think she’s from the hood – that she grew up on the streets. The exact opposite is true. She attended an exclusive day school where tuition was nearly $35,000 per year. She also attended Rhodes College, a private school where tuition is nearly $55,000 per year. She’s cosplaying a gangsta,” said Todd Starnes, a conservative commentator who is currently on Newsmax, which is essentially Temu Fox News, where anchors dedicate entire segments to demanding an apology to America for the Kendrick Lamar Superbowl Halftime Show.

First and foremost, Starnes — respectfully — shutcho white-a– up!

There are few forms of flagrant causality that I find more obnoxious than when white people presume to interpret and define Black identity.

Even if Crockett had ever claimed that she was from the “hood” or denied she came from an economically privileged background — which she absolutely has not — there’s nothing about her public persona that would indicate she’s trying to perpetrate herself as anything other than the person she is. There’s nothing in the way she speaks. There’s nothing about the way she behaves. There’s nothing about the way she dresses or her eyelashes or her use of strait-talk that reads as “hood”-coded — unless you’re just a racist-a– racist who associates all forms of authentic Blackness with poverty and lack of education.

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Jasmine Crockett is a Black woman who sounds like a Black woman when she speaks. On her worst day, Crockett doesn’t come anywhere near the vicinity of being as inarticulate as our sitting president, whose baffling misunderstanding of how diction and syntax work is only matched by his misuse of bigly-big vocabulary words like “interpose” and “cyber.”

The 43-year-old has never really been inarticulate at all. Sure, she’s light on the code-switching and that Texas drawl of hers be drawling sometimes, but nothing about her reads as “hood” or “gangsta,” and, at any rate, those words are clearly slurs coming out of the mouths of Starnes and his perpetually anti-Black ilk.

For the record, this story isn’t about Starnes — it’s about whiteness.

Whiteness is why MAGA America collectively called Crockett “ghetto” for responding to Republican legislators being dismissive of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene making inappropriate remarks about her personal appearance during a House session by calling Greene a “bleached-blonde bad-built butch body.”

They called Crockett “ghetto” again after she got Rep. Nancy Mace so flustered that Mace threatened physical violence on Crockett, saying they could “take it outside.” Whiteness is why the behavior of Greene and Mace gets downplayed or ignored altogether while Crockett’s not-even-remotely-out-of-pocket responses to bad behavior get panned as unprofessional and lacking in decorum and respect for the office she holds.

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Whiteness is why the MAGA world is currently trying its best to move the goalpost to explain why Rep. Al Green interrupting a Trump address in protest is any different than MTG and Rep. Lauren Boebert doing the exact same thing during President Joe Biden’s address, only more trailer park trashy. It’s why none of these racist hypocrites will even wince at Boebert characterizing Green’s cane, which the 77-year-old Black congressman needs to walk, as a “pimp cane,” while also whitesplaining how what she did to Biden was somehow different.

It’s also interesting how people like Starnes would accuse Crockett of pretending to be of the “hood” as if his party isn’t rife with millionaires and billionaires who are essentially turning America into an oligarchy while pretending to be rugged, blue-collar Americans and friends of the working class.

MAGA is truly the “ghetto” of American politics. Jasmine Crockett is just a Black woman.