One Police Plaza

Racism? Victim? Hoax? Other?

March 4, 2019

Here’s the latest from the racism-victim-hoax circuit, following the actor Jussie Smollett’s apparent lie that he was attacked by two men because he was black and gay. This one involves Candace Owens, a striving 29-year-old black commentator and Donald Trump supporter. Her story is more nuanced than Smollett’s. At a conservative convention in the Washington area last week, she issued the apparently startling revelation to some that “America Is not a racist country.”

“Stop selling us our own oppression,” she stated. “Stop taking away our self-confidence by telling us that we can’t because of racism, because of slavery. I’ve never been a slave in this country.”

Yet a decade ago, as a high school student in Stamford, Connecticut, Owens and her family accepted a $37,500 city settlement after she accused a group of teens — one of whom was the mayor’s son — of leaving her threatening, racist messages.

“One night as I sat watching a movie, a group of anonymous boys called my cell phone and left me a series of voicemails,” she explained in a letter to the Stamford Advocate in 2016. “Their words, to this very day, represent the most horrific that I have ever heard uttered against another human being.”

Needless to say, her remarks last week, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, drew some stabs on social media, including one from the Atlantic’s black sports journalist Jemele Hill. Like Owens, Hill is making a name for herself on the racism circuit. She left ESPN’s Sportscenter in September after tweeting that Trump “is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself with other white supremacists.” For good measure she added: “Trump is … a direct result of white supremacy. Period.”

Of Owens’s $37,500 settlement, Hill wrote: “So I guess when she sued — and won — a lawsuit after receiving racist threats then she must have been in some other country.”

Although Owens may not be the Far Right’s answer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not yet anyway, the media seems to be preparing her for prime time. Her picture appeared on page 19 of Sunday’s New York Times as the face of black Republicans supporting Trump under the full-page headline: “The Small and Divided World of Trump’s African American Supporters.” The Times made no mention of her $37,500 settlement.

So how to square Owens’s “American is not a racist country” with her accepting a $37,500 settlement, stemming from racism? What to make of this racial posturing whether by Owens, Hill, Smollett, or anyone else? There’s no easy answer. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris learned this hard way after she initially called Smollett’s so-called attack an “attempted modern day lynching.” Beware.