Mitch McConnell Just Proved a Key Premise of Critical Race Theory

Differentiating Black folks from Americans is pretty much Founding Fathers 101

Tim Wise
6 min readJan 30, 2022

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Image: Caricature of Mitch McConnell, DonkeyHotey, Flickr, Creative Commons License 2.0

By now, most everyone who pays attention to the news has heard about Mitch McConnell’s recent gaffe — or, if you prefer, political Freudian slip.

Last week, when explaining why new voting rights protections pushed by the Democratic Party are unnecessary, McConnell noted that “African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

You see what he did there, right?

He contrasted African Americans with Americans as if the former were not also the latter and implicitly suggested that the latter are white (or at least, anything but Black).

McConnell, naturally, insisted he had meant no such thing.

According to the Senator, he had intended to insert the word “all” before that final “Americans” to suggest that Black folks were voting as often as anyone else. Thus, there was no reason to worry about voter suppression or take steps to make voting easier, as preferred by the Dems.

But coming from a man who measures his words better than most anyone on Capitol Hill, the claim is hard to believe.

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Tim Wise

Anti-racism educator and author of 9 books, including White Like Me and, most recently, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020)