The top photo is a picture of US House Speaker Paul Ryan with this year's Republican interns from the US House, and the bottom photo was taken in response by Rep. Eddie Vernice Johnson, Democrat from Texas, of the US House Democratic interns. What both photos say together is striking.
For the record, I don't believe both photos feature ALL of the respective party's interns. The photo with Speaker Ryan features a happy bunch of eager young people hoping to make a career in politics, but it also appears to be predominantly white people. I want to be careful with how phrase that. There are a few interns, three or four, who appear to represent minority groups, but how anyone identifies themselves is their own personal description. Regardless, the vast majority of Republican interns clearly are non-Hispanic whites.
The bottom photo is the complete opposite. It's features a very diverse group of interns, with representation from the majority of minority groups in this country. Sure there are Caucasians, but the Democrats reflect a true representation of who Americans currently are.
Frankly, the Republican photo looks like it was taken in 1960, the Democratic photo looks like it's 2016.
The minority percentage of the American people, in 2016, as a whole, is 38.4, nearly 40%. Births in America today show a near even split of whites and minority babies. If we extrapolate the current birth rate out a few decades, the population will be 50% minority before the babies born today turn 30. A reminder for paranoid white people; the largest individual group of Americans will still be non-Hispanic white. The 50/50 ratio would be in comparison to all minority groups combined, so Caucasians are still going to be number one, for at least a few more decades.
Look at the Republican photo. That's not 38.4% minority. It's not 30%, 20% or 10%. It appears to be more like 5%, and that's being generous! It looks like a satirical photo, a comedic take on what the Republican party thinks is ethnically diverse.
What the Republican photo shows is unacceptable. You are the majority party, representing ALL Americans, but you seem to be drawing your interns from only 60% of the population. I'm not making any personal judgments, as I'm sure the kids featured are top notch interns, but the kids in the photo represent who you're putting forward as the next generation of Republicans. They, in no way, fairly represent the American people of today, let alone the American people from a few decades away, the point when these fresh faced interns are going to be vying to be America's next representation. Your party did an "autopsy" after their 2012 failure, and the results showed a need to embrace minority groups. The Republicans still seem to be trying to only represent wealthy, white America. How do Republicans feel they can fairly govern for minority groups when they don't welcome them into their inner circles, in appropriate numbers?
When my oldest son was in 2nd grade, I had to go pick him up from school early one day. I found he was out back playing kickball with his classmates. What I saw made me happy. My son, who is Caucasian, from a Scottish/German heritage, playing with an ethnically diverse group of kids, representing numerous races and religions. Boy, girl, white, Latino, African American, African immigrant, Russian, Muslim, Asian; not in some inner city park, but out in the wealthy suburb of Minnetonka, in a wealthy school district. My son didn't see anything different about his friends, he just saw his friends. That's the America I want.
Republicans, you can try to keep your ranks as white as an Idaho private school, but by doing so, you're not representing America now, or in the future.
I guess one of my questions is:
ReplyDeleteRyan is evil, not stupid. He is going to try very hard not to appear to be racist, while likely being racist as hell. But neither he, nor anyone he talked about doing this with (because he is a political creature, he wasn't sending this out as just "Look, a cute photo", there was political calculation behind it, and there were meetings), noticed the high albedo of this photo and said "Holy Hannah, we're going to get brutalized if we send this out!"?
(And that does indicate institutional stupidity. Obviously the glut of poli sci majors on the market exists in part because at least one party isn't hiring them...)