Bakari Sellers Rebukes Ron Johnson on CNN: ‘This Is Not About Somebody Calling You N*****,’ It’s About His Role in ‘Systemic Racism’
Former South Carolina state representative and CNN political analyst Bakari Sellers fired back at Sen. Ron Johnson’s incendiary comments that he would’ve feared for his safety had the Capitol riots been perpetrated by Black Lives Matter instead of Trump supporters.
Speaking with Anderson Cooper, Sellers offered his rebuttal to a shocking counterfactual Johnson offered up about the Jan. 6 insurrection a few days earlier. After his rhetoric ignited furious pushback and claims of racism, Johnson shifted in damage control mode on Monday, claiming there was “nothing racial” about what he said and then tried to shift the blame, saying: “the left is happy to use the race card.”
“Bakari, I’ll let you just speak on this,” Cooper noted, after playing a clip of Johnson’s defense of comments impugning BLM. “because I was just so surprised by — not surprised by, but just irritated by what he just said now to justify what he said previously, the idea that he sees the truth here in his comments and knows that there was nothing racist involved.”
“You know when people are making racist comments, the first thing they want to push back with is simply say you know, ‘You can’t play the race card,’ but it’s our job to call it out,” Sellers said. “Nothing about this is new. This is as American as American can be, but I’m troubled because this coming from the highest part of the land. This is coming from the United States Senate, the United States Congress.”
“Racism in this country is a power construct,” Sellers explained. “People like Ron Johnson have the power and the ability to implement racist policies even when they’re ignorant to the fact that what they are doing is racist. This is not about somebody calling you n*****. I get called that enough in my Twitter comments, I get called that in my messages when I leave CNN every single day. It’s not about that. It’s about something more than that. It’s about the systemic oppression, it’s about the systemic racism and people like Ron Johnson who play a role in it and are so ignorant to the fact to the role they play that they sit there and simply turn their back and say don’t play the race card.”
Sellers then said Johnson’s comments could only be explained one of two ways.
“Either you’re using racism as political currency, which is cowardice, or you so simply are ignorant and do not know the language you’re using is racist and hurtful.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
