Controversial Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas is in trouble again, and as usual, it’s her rather sizeable mouth that caused the problem. You’d think being a member of Congress, which is supposed to be an honor, would cause her to treat her position with care and respect, but for some reason, she refuses to engage in the time-honored traditions of decorum that have defined House and Senate members since the founding of our country.
Crockett, to many critics appeared to call on black Americans to commit acts of violence against their opponents. She made the eyebrow-raising remark while delivering the commencement address at Tougaloo College, a historically Black university in Jackson, Mississippi. For roughly 20 minutes, she urged graduates to learn how to “use a chair” in public life—though not in the traditional sense of simply sitting still.
“There are going to be people that tell you that you don’t belong, and I am here to tell you over and over and over that you absolutely belong,” Crockett said in a video of her remarks posted online. “There are people that are gonna tell you that there is not a table in which there is a seat for you, but I am here to remind you of Montgomery and those folding chairs. Let me tell you that we know how to use a chair, whether we’re pulling it up or we’re doing something else with it. Let me be the first one to tell you that I know that y’all are ready to put your boots on the ground.”
The reference seemed to allude to a widely publicized 2023 altercation in Montgomery, Alabama, involving black and white men at a boating dock. While authorities said the incident wasn’t racially motivated, it gained national attention due to its optics—particularly a viral video showing a black man using a folding chair to strike another individual.
Elsewhere in her speech, Crockett criticized Republicans in Washington and members of the media for using the term “DEI hire” to justify dismissals within the federal government—a label she condemned as racially charged and discriminatory. “Instead of publicly calling us the n-word, they use racist epithets and suggest that we’re ghetto or unqualified or diversity hires, even though we’re all more, oftentimes than not, more educated and qualified than they are,” Crockett said, according to the Daily Caller. “I have news for you: These attacks are not new, because Jim Crow never died. He just lied in wait.”
Crockett is right that ‘DEI hires’ are racially tinged. That’s the whole point of DEI. But you see what she did there: She claimed that whites and others use the term as a substitute for the ‘n’ word, which is insane and divisive, but we’re not supposed to notice that the advent of DEI was to enable black men and woman “a seat at the table” not because of their qualifications or talent but strictly because of their skin color. Isn’t that racism too? Of course it is.
Remember when black Americans used to be offended by that, circa the days of Martin Luther King Jr.? And how come divisive black lawmakers like Jasmine Crockett are afraid to let black men and women compete on their own merits? Is she afraid they can’t? Because it sure sounds like it. And if that doesn’t work, well heck, ‘grab a chair.’