Stop giving racists the benefit of the doubt - by Jennifer Rubin

[DonViejo]

March 19, 2021 at 7:45 a.m. EDT

By the time we reached the late-night hour on Wednesday, network comedians such as Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert expressed what so many in the mainstream media would not during the day: When a murderer selects Asian women to kill, that is the essence of racism.

We should not take excuses from the man charged with those killings any more seriously than we do Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s denial of racism in his declaration that he was not afraid of marauding white supremacists but that he would have been if they had been Black Lives Matter protesters. Nor should we accept the word of a sheriff’s captain — who himself shared racist material on social media — that the slaying of six Asian women was not racially motivated. After parroting the suspect’s words that he was having “a bad day,” that captain needs to be reassigned.

There are lots of people who no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. When Georgia lawmakers seek to eliminate in-person early voting on Sundays, a direct threat to the “souls to the polls” voting initiative popular among churchgoing African Americans, we should not take their arguments that they are restoring election integrity seriously. (For one thing, this is in-person voting.) Nor should we take Republicans’ rationalizations that they are concerned about voting security seriously, because we know there was zero evidence of fraud in the 2020 election beyond a handful of discrete cases — which were caught. There is no other reason for the flood of legislation than to prevent as many non-White and poor voters from exercising their right to vote as possible.

Likewise, we should stop accepting the excuses of lawmakers who willfully engaged in racist rhetoric this week and doubled down when caught. For example, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) attempted to hijack a hearing on anti-Asian racism by injecting his own xenophobic hysteria about the border. The Post reported:

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/19/stop-giving-racists-benefit-doubt

[dalton99a]

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