It’s your weekly dose of Republican racism.
By now, you’ve all probably heard about the Superbowl ad that Republican Pete Hoekstra ran in his home state of Michigan.
Hoekstra, running a campaign against Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow, used an ad of a “Chinese” actress, speaking broken english and invoking many of the stereotypes associated with the Chinese people. When asked about the obvious racial overtones in the ad, Hoekstra defended it, saying the ad contains nothing racial, and was meant to point out Mrs. Stabanie’s reckless spending.
“We knew we were taking an aggressive approach on this,” he said, “but this is a time where the people in Michigan and across the country are fed up with the spending, and we wanted to capture that frustration that they had with Washington, D.C. This ad … hits Debbie smack dab between the eyes on the issue where she is vulnerable with the voters of Michigan, and that is spending.”
Maybe Hoekstra is just ignorant to what is obvious to the rest of the nation, or maybe it was just poor judgment on his part. But thanks to the good folks over atTalking Points Memo, we now see that Hoekstra and his team knew the racial aspects of the ad, and they willingly contributed to it.
So what did Talking Points Memo find out?
It’s hidden in the programming language of the ad, a derogatory racial epithet used to describe Chinese people was found. The name “yellowgirl” was used to describe the “Chinese” actress Hoekstra used to deliver his message.
Coding from the ad.
img class=”yellowgirl” src=”https://s3…
Now again, Hoekstra could continue claiming this ad had nothing to do with race, but when you look at the coding in addition to the ad itself, it would seem that race is was the original intent, with messaging coming in second.
