“Black Americans really created democracy in this country,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said during an appearance on It’s Open with Ilana Glazer.
Ocasio-Cortez said there are “very few, like, real archetypes” of what “America is all about.” She then said she thinks about the Civil Rights movement and “voting rights movement and how black Americans really created democracy in this country.”
“That’s exactly right,” the host, Ilana Glazer, interjected.
“How they literally made something from nothing,” the Democrat congresswoman continued. “It is just beyond me.”
“I think about how, like native people have survived and preserved and treasured their culture. I think about, and I think many of us think about, immigrants, which, if you aren’t from one of those first two populations, you are certainly from largely the third, and so many of us like have our story of our parents, our grandparents, our great, great grandparents, and so on and so forth,” she continued.
“And who, like, come and make something from nothing. And I think that’s a big part of, also the most inspiring elements of what America is all about,” she continued:
Ocasio-Cortez went on to say that America was apartheid until the 1960s.
Glazer teed her up, stating:
I … mentioned genocidal frameworks before, like as growing up as a Jew as a minority, where I grew up, and going to Hebrew school and learning about the Holocaust, I was like … this is crazy. It wasn’t taught in school. I’m not sure the way it’s taught in school now. But you know, the way that I’ve come to understand this system is that, like, there’s a spectrum of true democracy – like you said, black people and black Americans in this country have been building since they were captured and brought here.
“We weren’t really a democracy, until 1963, 1965,” Ocasio-Cortez asserted.
“You know, voting rights and civil rights. We were apartheid before then,” the Democrat added, as Glazer agreed that this system is really only 70 or 80 years old.
Glazer went on to say that there is “true democracy” and fascism, and it is “just about the dials,” accusing the right of turning up the dials on men who believe they are women and illegal immigrants.
“These genocidal frameworks, and they’re just turning dials up on trans people. They’re turning the dial up on the genocidal framework on black people. And right now that the dial is being turned up on specifically Latino immigrants, but immigrants of color,” Glazer added.
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks follow news of heat on her campaign expenditures, with accusations that she “tapped nearly $19,000 from her campaign coffers last year to pay for a psychiatrist who specializes in ketamine therapy” and used $2,000 for a celebrity makeup artist.
