by Washington – Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is under fire for racist comments he made this weekend, claiming Democrats are “pro-crime” and favor reparations for the descendants of enslaved people in the US because they believe “the people who do the crime due to this”.
Tuberville, a first-term senator, made the controversial comments during a rally hosted by former President Donald Trump in Minden, Nevada, on Saturday to support the state’s Republican candidates on the November ballot.
“They’re not kind to crime. They’re pro-crime. They want crime,” Tuberville said of Democrats. “They want crime because they want to control what you have. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people who do the crime owe that. Bulls**t. They don’t owe that.”
Republicans are trying to regain control of the House and Senate from Democrats in November’s midterm elections and are trying to portray Democrats as crime-savvy in their field to voters.
José Luis Villegas / AP
The FBI said last week that violent crime fell 1 percent in the U.S. in 2021, and the robbery rate fell 8.9 percent from 2020 to 2021. The U.S. homicide rate rose 4.3 percent. according to FBI datathough it is significantly lower than the 29.4% increase in the homicide rate from 2019 to 2020. The bureau warned that nearly half of law enforcement agencies did not submit data in 2021, resulting in an incomplete picture and gaps in coverage.
FBI data released in December, meanwhile, found that more than half of known offenders, 50.8 percent were White and 29.6 percent were Black or African-American.
Tuberville’s comments were quickly criticized.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson called Tamperville’s claims “totally racist, ignorant and completely appalling.”
“His words advance a century-old lie about Black people that throughout history has resulted in the most dangerous policies and most violent attacks on our community,” Johnson said in a statement. “We’ve seen this before from the far right and we’ve seen what they can do when they get into power. The next time the senator wants to talk about crime, he should talk about Donald Trump’s hate rally on January 6, 2021.” and the attacks that followed. Maybe the real criminals are on his trail.”
Representative Mondaire Jones, D-New York, referred to Tuberville in a tweet about Kanye West, whose Twitter and Instagram accounts were confined after making anti-Semitic posts.
“This defense of Kanye’s blatant anti-Semitism by the Indiana Attorney General, which follows deeply white supremacist comments from other high-ranking Republicans like Sen. Tommy Tuberville in recent days, tells you everything you need to know about the GOP 2022”. Jones he tweeted Sunday.
The Reverend Al Sharpton told MSNBC on Monday that Temperville’s comments are “actually wrong” and that people in Alabama “should be offended.”
Asked to respond to Tuberville’s comments, Rep. Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would be “kinder” and “that’s not the way I present things.”
“I wouldn’t put it the same way,” he said, adding that there is “a problem in our country with crime.”
The Democratic Party does not support reparations for African-Americans whose ancestors were slaves, but the issue has come up during the 2020 presidential campaign. Nearly all Democrats vying for the party’s presidential nomination, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, supported the study of the subject.
A bill introduced in the House by Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas to create a commission to study and develop compensation proposals has broad support from her fellow Democrats in the lower chamber and was approved by the House Judiciary Committee in April. 2021 with the support of its 25 democratic members. Republican members of the committee opposed the legislation.
