Marilyn Davenport, a Tea Party supporter and member of the Orange County Republican Party Central Committee (does that sound Commie, or what?), recently sent out an email to some other GOP members with this picture and the comment “Now you know why - No birth certificate.”
Now that the predictable shit-storm has descended on her head, including from some Republican officials and former officials who aren’t racist douchebags, she has trotted out the standard I-didn’t-mean-anything-racist-and-I’m-sorry-if-anyone-was-offended-by-my-private-and-humorous-email defense.
Obviously knowing the right noises to make in the face of criticism, Davenport’s first refuge was religion, making a good old-fashioned American appeal to her Christianity. She also demonstrated a complete obliviousness about what constitutes satire, made a claim that it’s not racist if she didn’t have racism in her heart, and said that none of her black friends had complained about it.
Is this woman a real person, or is she some sort of Frankenstein created from all the left-over tropes of racist apologia?
The Chair of the OC Republican Party, Scott Baugh, called her email “despicable” and “dripping with racism,” and suggested that she resign. The chair of the California State GOP has echoed that call.
She has no intention of stepping down, saying that her constituents support her and have encouraged her to stay put. In a very tame and even sympathetic interview conducted by KTLA, Davenport made clear that, for her, the most distressing and problematic aspect of the whole incident is that someone within the GOP leaked her email to the media.
Awesome priorities there, Marilyn!
She can hardly claim to be unaware of the ways in which these racist stereotypes work. A couple of years ago, she was a staunch defender of the Mayor of Los Alamitos, who resigned after circulating a picture showing watermelons growing on the White House lawn and quipping that there would be no Easter Egg hunt this year. She also, as former state GOP Chair Michael Schroeder pointed out, supported “former Newport Beach City Councilman Dick Nichols, who stated that he was voting against putting in more grass at Corona del Mar’s beach because, he said, there were already ‘too many Mexicans on the beach.’”
I guess, in Orange County, a Republican and Tea Party stronghold where about 2% of the population is African American, she’s pretty confident of her audience.
I debated whether to put this in the Pit, or in MPSIMS. I’m not even especially angry about it; more like sad and resigned. I guess it’s also sort of RO, but i do think that shit like this needs to be called out whenever it happens. Maybe we should just have a single thread where we can add stuff like this as it appears; sort of a compendium thread devoted to clueless racism.