Rejecting White Nationalism and White Supremacy

Floor Speech

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, it has been an open secret for too long that Representative Steve King of Iowa has made his trade in saying and pushing fundamentally racist and unacceptable ideas. While I am glad that my colleagues on the other side are speaking out and have taken this important act of stripping Mr. King of his committees, let us be very clear that those of us who have served with Mr. King on the Judiciary Committee, those of us who are African American, Latino, immigrant, those of us who are Caucasian and steeped in our country's history of slavery and racism, we all know that the record of these kinds of comments is long.

In 2013, Mr. King said that, for every Dreamer who is a valedictorian, there are another 100 undocumented immigrants who have calves the size of cantaloupes because they are hauling 75 pounds of drugs across the border.

In 2017, he said that we couldn't restore civilization with ``somebody else's babies.'' Madam Speaker, how dare he. I was born in India. I am somebody else's baby, and I am a proud American.

Just last year, Mr. King met with a Nazi-linked party in Austria. He is a Member of Congress who continuously makes these comments that cause the deepest of harm to real people, physical harm in the form of hate crimes, and psychological harm.

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, all of us, whether African American, people of color, immigrants, we are not other categories of people. We are not somebody else. We are America, all of us.

The terrible truth is that racism and xenophobia escalates when racism and white supremacy are permitted here in Congress and all the way up to the White House to be issues with both sides. There are no both sides when it comes to white supremacy.

So, Madam Speaker, I hope that this is just the start of a definitive partywide turn away from racism for all of us on both sides.

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