Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., for no discernible reason has claimed the maternal death rate in Louisiana isn’t as bad if you don’t count Black women. According to Cassidy, a medical doctor, the state’s high maternal death rates are more standard if you “correct for race.”
Cassidy, attempting to defend his insensitive remarks, then made them worse.
“Sometimes maternal mortality includes up to a year after birth and would include someone being killed by her boyfriend,” Cassidy said. “In my mind, it’s better to restrict your definition to that which is the perinatal, if you will — the time just before and in the subsequent period after she has delivered.”
“Someone being killed by her boyfriend” injects a racial bias that such a heinous act would be more likely committed by a Black boyfriend. The stereotypical portrayals of African American males never has changed since slavery.
Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, later wrote on X that his quotes were taken out of context. He said individuals are using his statements to “create a malicious and fake narrative,” adding that the discussion focused on his work addressing racial bias in health care, including the inequities facing Black mothers.
Who counts?
Even if we give Cassidy a little credit for his attempt at excusing his remarks as “a malicious and fake narrative,” the question remains as to why even make such a statement. Why would a U.S. senator want to dismiss the Black women of Louisiana?
What if this suggests a reintroduction of racism into our national dialogue? Public racism has picked up steam during the Age of Trump. Over the last nine years, MAGA adherents have returned racist expressions and actions to the public. This has been done by denying racism even exists in America, by accepting racist comments and actions by their own members, and by supporting racists for public office.
When one of our nation’s leaders suggests not “counting” Black women, he has opened a philosophical and political conundrum. If Black women don’t count, they are made invisible.
“If Black women don’t count, they are made invisible.”
Some years ago, gated community commuters from Connecticut complained about driving through an impoverished African American part of New York City. The white commuters didn’t like feeling bad about the scenes of poverty. So the city had a mural designed to obscure the reality of the neighborhood. The mural depicted a New England village complete with white-columned, red brick businesses, and nice white people walking on the streets. An African American woman told a reporter, “They want to make us invisible.”
For example, “to count” is a math exercise. By counting you determine the total number of people, objects or items. To count also means to be significant, to matter. Two of the most important factors in human life are a name and to count, to matter. In the second creation story, the poet says, “Whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.”
In Christian baptism, a person receives a new name. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story The River, there’s a baptismal scene. The preacher held him under while he said the words of baptism and then jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping child. Bevel’s eyes were dark and dilated. “You count now,” the preacher said. “You didn’t even count before.”
When it comes to people of color in America, there have been more years when they didn’t count than years when they did. I don’t trust conservative math. This remains America’s theological and political problem.
When the first notion of African Americans “counting” entered the minds of our white rulers, their weird calculus decided a Black person counted as three-fifths of a person.
White men had a hard time counting African Americans as legal. A national Civil War, an assassinated president, a long Reconstruction, the lynching era and the Civil Rights Movement all were about who counts in the USA.
Invisibility
In the human battles of “less than” and “more than,” our histories are written. And more often than not, they are histories of violence.
“Control the words and their definitions and you control meaning and reality.”
Now, the attempt is to make racism invisible.
There are additional tentacles to the octopus of invisibility. For example, denying the existence of racism is a denial of our nation’s lived experiences. Race functions as a way of organizing and meaningfully classifying the world.
The vast disagreement between progressives and conservatives has to do with the definition of racism. With conservatives, words and their definitions are always paramount. Control the words and their definitions and you control meaning and reality. White MAGA people think of racism as individual prejudice, but most people of color see racism as systemic or institutionalized.
White people can swear on a stack of King James Bibles they are not racist in the sense of personal prejudice. They treat the exercise of racial power as rare and accidental rather than as systemic.
White critical race scholar Robin DiAngelo: “As a product of my culture, my racial illiteracy has rested on a simplistic definition of a racist: an individual who consciously does not like people based on race and is intentionally hurtful to them. Based on this definition, racists are purposely mean. It follows that nice people with good intentions who are friendly to people of a different race cannot be racist. Not only does this definition hide the structural nature of racism, it also enables self-delusion.”
This is how an entire segment of American white people can swear they are not racist while carrying out a racist agenda.
The new racists claim it is all about “merit” to them. Legal scholar Richard Delgado says: “Merit sounds like white people’s affirmative action … a way of keeping their own deficiencies neatly hidden while assuring that only people like them get in.”
“This is how an entire segment of American white people can swear they are not racist while carrying out a racist agenda.”
What to do?
What are we going to do? A starting point is the realization that battles we thought were won over racism must be refought again in our time. The simplest answer is to become “antiracist.”
There are several variations on the invisibility con job of whites. There’s the “I’m not racist” plea, the “That’s not racist” argument, and color blindness.
Ibram X Kendi argues: “The language of color blindness is a mask to hide racism.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan argued in Plessy v. Ferguson: “Our Constitution is color-blind.” Ironically, this case legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. According to Harlan, “The white race deems itself to [be] the dominant race in this country,” and in his view, “will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.” A color-blind Constitution for a white supremacist America.
Racism now hides in plain sight under different guises, derisively labeled as “wokenesss,” DEI and CRT.
Kendi: “The construct of race neutrality actually feeds white nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans toward equity is ‘reverse discrimination.’”
Such is the insidious nature of the anti-DEI movement in MAGA.
If America wishes to be antiracist, we must advance a powerful collection of antiracist ideas and policies that lead to racial equity. In other words, DEI is not a devil term. Diversity, equity and inclusion are terms definitional of a thriving democracy.
“Our fight must also be carried on at racism’s intersections with other bigotries.”
Our task is the rebuttal of racism in all its forms based on biology, ethnicity, body, culture, behavior, color, space and class. Here we realize our fight must also be carried on at racism’s intersections with other bigotries. This brings women, gays, lesbians, immigrants, bisexuals and transgender people into the circle of civil rights.
We are facing a public and blatant attempt to reinscribe redlining that excludes people of color. Despite cacophonous cries of denial, America has a race problem. What I didn’t see coming was the organized attempt to push back on what, until the age of Trump, were taken-for-granted civil rights for minorities.
Normalizing racism
MAGA has managed to normalize hateful and racist rhetoric as a First Amendment right. If a person is fired for racist remarks, MAGA insists the person’s rights are being violated.
The examples multiply within MAGA from the president to the everyday supporters. As MAGA insinuates racism back into the public, there are protests for singing the Black National Anthem at the Super Bowl, defenses of openly racist emails by an employee of Elon Musk, and pretend outrage by the vice president at journalists for daring to publish those offensive emails.
President Trump’s executive order aimed at rooting out DEI from the government was immediately carried out in racist ways. For example, the Air Force immediately removed training courses with videos of its storied Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs — the female World War II pilots who were vital in ferrying warplanes for the military.
The anti-DEI movement is racist. Anyone opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion is racist.
This move by the Air Force was reversed within a matter of days, but the damage was done. A people inclined toward racism only need an executive order, the pretense of law, to be public racists.
“A people inclined toward racism only need an executive order, the pretense of law, to be public racists.”
The National Cryptologic Museum papered over history in response to Trump’s DEI executive order. The NCM taped sheets of paper over plaques that celebrate women and people of color who had served the National Security Agency, which intercepts overseas conversations and breaks foreign government codes. The honorees are described as “Trailblazers in U.S. Cryptologic History,” and the plaques hang in the museum’s Hall of Honor. This move also was reversed.
Trump initially blamed DEI for the collision of the military helicopter and the passenger jet in Washington, D.C. He claimed it was “common sense” that hiring practices seeking to prioritize diversity would backfire.
Asked why he singled out DEI as a cause of the crash when an investigation was just getting under way, Trump said: “Because I have common sense, OK? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level.”
The equation of racist policies with “common sense” is an even more insidious move. The form of such sentiments would have seemed plain bizarre as late as 2012, and to those Americans not enthralled with anti-wokeness and ant-DEI it still does. But it is a sentiment that can seem close to common sense in more and more of the country: even though it threatens to undo the progress we have made to prevent racism, discrimination and other existential threats to our collective survival.
“Common sense” is not a word that should be allowed in the same room with efforts to blame an aviation disaster on DEI.
Sen. Cassidy’s comments about “correcting for race” are of a single thread with an entire white MAGA movement to make racism publicly acceptable. They seem determined to return us to the 1950s. After all, in that era, people went to church, civil rights were not inscribed in law, and white people were in charge of everything.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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