Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s comments comparing Black people to criminals were “flat out racist, ignorant and utterly sickening,” the NAACP’s president said Monday.
“His words promote a centuries-old lie about Black those who throughout history has resulted in essentially the most dangerous policies and violent attacks on our community,” the organization’s president, Derrick Johnson, said in an announcement in regards to the Alabama lawmaker.
Tuberville is in hot water after claiming at a Saturday night rally in Nevada that Democrats support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people because “they think the those who do the crime are owed that” ― propelling a deeply racist and false stereotype about Black people.
“We’ve seen this before from the far-right, and we’ve seen what they’ll do once they take power,” Johnson’s statement continued. “Next time the Senator desires to speak about crime, he should speak about Donald Trump’s hate-fueled rally on January 6, 2021, and the attacks that followed. Perhaps the true criminals are in his orbit.”
Tuberville is among the many Republicans who said they might formally object to the certification of electoral votes confirming President Joe Biden had beat Trump within the 2020 presidential election. He also voted against creating an independent commission to analyze the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol throughout the certification process.
The Alabama lawmaker was one among the few senators who voted last 12 months against expanding the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which empowered the Justice Department to review hate crimes related to the pandemic and construct out a web-based database of those incidents amid a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes.
Marc Morial, the president of the civil rights group the National Urban League, identified Monday that Tuberville’s comments are especially disturbing due to what number of years he spent coaching college football, a sport with predominantly Black players.
His “racial views are much more heartbreaking in light of his many years of coaching Black athletes who entrusted their health, safety and futures to a person who clearly holds them in the bottom contempt,” Morial tweeted.
As of Monday afternoon, none of Tuberville’s Republican colleagues within the Senate have condemned his racist remarks.
