According to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), there’s simply no way that Republicans can be bigoted or racist because the GOP contains “yellow people” in its ranks.
Speaking at “AmericaFest,” a conference sponsored by the right-wing youth group Turning Point USA, according to HuffPost, Greene began her remarks by noting that she’d “never been” to a conference for young conservatives, adding:
“When I walked in yesterday, I was like, what kind of people come here? So I’m walking around and seeing some good people, and I see white people, Black people, brown people, yellow people.
“And then there’s talk of freedom and loving America and conservative principles, some crazy people in here were talking about how much they love this guy named Jesus. And I heard — someone I really like — I think I heard that a lot of people here like a guy named Donald J. Trump.
“And then I said, ‘Oh, oh, I know exactly what this is. The left calls this a white supremacist party.'”
Yellow people? Really? The GOP must indeed be a white supremacist party based on the “yellow people” remark from Greene, because it’s a long-used racist trope that’s been around for centuries in the United States:
“Yellow” has long been a charged term to describe Asian people and is widely perceived as a slur. “Yellow Peril,” for example, was used as far back as the nineteenth century to vilify Asian people and cast Asian nations as a danger to Western values.
This rhetoric led to xenophobia and hate toward Asian immigrants, which flared again during the pandemic, due in part to other racist language like the terms “Kung Flu” and “China Virus” coined by former President Donald Trump.
Greene was taken to task on Twitter for her disgusting remarks, with former “Star Trek” star George Takei noting:
“I honestly haven’t heard someone use ‘yellow people, for decades. Perhaps she meant ‘yellow bellied people’ because there are certainly lots in that crowd.”
Sophie Zhang echoed Takei’s tweet:
“I’ve recently been called a ‘Chink’, a ‘Jap’, a ‘gook’, and more. Racists don’t excel at distinguishing ethnic background. But ‘yellow people’ is something that I haven’t heard in a decade or two.
“What is this, the 1960s?”
Greene and her ilk probably wish this was the 1960s so all non-white people had to drink from different water fountains and could be lynched on a whim without any legal repercussions. That’s what Trump Republicans call “the good old days.”