Conservatives on Twitter slammed Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she made the claim that “Reaganism in the ’80’s” had fuelled tensions between “white working class Americans” and “brown and black working class Americans.”
The twitterstorm came after Ocasio-Cortez made her statements to The Intercept’s Briahna Gray on Saturday at the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals in Austin, Texas.
“A perfect example of how special interests and the powerful have pitted white working class Americans against brown and black working-class Americans is Reaganism in the ’80s when he started talking about welfare queens,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “So you think about this image of welfare queens and what he was really trying to talk about was this like really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing, that were ‘sucks’ on our country. That’s not explicit racism but still rooted in a racist caricature.”
Her words were met with an immediate reaction from conservatives and supporters of the Republican Party, who countered the claims of the young Democrat – sometimes, as in the case of actor James Woods, with the 40th US President’s own words.