Lindsey Graham is no stranger to being wrong. As a fervent supporter of Donald Trump he’s had plenty of practice twisting words and logic to frame his worldview squarely against what’s actually happening in reality. And that certainly continued on Sunday when Graham tried to explain away inherent problems with race and racism America has grappled with from its inception.
On Fox News Sunday, the senator claimed that there isn’t any systemic racism in America, using a very curious reasoning to dismiss all the evidence of bias across all areas of American life in the process.
.@LindseyGrahamSC says there is no systemic racism in the U.S. in policing and other institutions. #FoxNewsSunday25
— Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) April 25, 2021
The Daily Beast has video of the moment, as well as what he actually said to wave away systemic racism in America. The biggest example he gave of racism not existing? The fact that Barack Obama was elected president, and most recently that Kamala Harris was elected vice president in November. The latter of which, of course, he doesn’t think happened anyway because he has supported Donald Trump’s lies that the election was stolen from him.
Wallace then brought up Biden’s remarks, asking the conservative lawmaker point-blank if he believes there is systemic racism in policing and other American institutions. Graham, meanwhile, leaned back on a common right-wing trope that racism simply doesn’t exist anymore because of Obama and Harris’ respective electoral successes.
“No, not in my opinion,” Graham declared. “We just elected a two-term African-American president; the vice president is of African-American and Indian descent. So our systems are not racist.”
He continued: “America is not a racist country. Within every society, you have bad actors. The Chauvin trial was a just result.”
The “bad actors” line is something often brought up by conservatives who refuse to address major problems or even admit that they’re there in the first place. Anything from gun control after mass shootings, police reform after instances of police brutality and economic reforms are waved away as simply “bad actors” or “apples” that are exception to the rule. But more to the point, the idea that one police officer who murdered a black man in broad daylight was actually convicted of a crime proves racism doesn’t exist is absurd to say the least.
Electing two people of color to higher office does not erase America’s long and horrible history of slavery, the vestiges of the Jim Crow south or the systemic biases against minorities in the housing market, the public (and private) education system and the very real, deadly consequences from racial bias in policing across the country. And it certainly doesn’t excuse more recent efforts to revive Jim Crow voting rules in places like Georgia. But Graham’s myopic view is the easy way out when it comes to equity in America, and shows how unwilling conservatives are to even acknowledge that the game has long been rigged to give certain people significant advantages over others.
That some of the men who’ve ostensibly won that game can’t admit those warped rules have impacted so much of American life shows how unwilling they are to make things even a little more fair for people that don’t look like them, and how far everyone else has to go in the struggle to make things better for the rest of the country.