Candace Amber Owens, American conservative commentator and political activist for the right, has decided that she wants to run for political office — and we hope that she changes her mind.
Owens became a household name when she announced her #BLexit campaign, urging young Black Democrats to leave the party and join the Republican party.
“Blexit is a Renaissance,” Owens said. “Blexit is the Black exit from the Democratic Party. It’s the black exit from permanent victimhood, the Black exit from the false idea that we are somehow separate from the rest of America.”
Somehow, Owens is one of the few Black people in America who believe in President Donald Trump’s tokenistic gestures of support for the Black community. Time and time again, Trump has proven that he has a total disregard for Black lives — encouraging police officers to ramp up their brutality as Black lives continued to perish in their custody.
Owens is a Trumper through and through, going as far as calling police brutality “a myth.”
In November 2019, Owens appeared as a guest on the Laura Ingraham Show, where she made the following remarks:
“Obama did a lot to tear this country apart. I do not remember, when I was growing up, having all of these race issues, okay? I really don’t remember it. And then suddenly towards the end of Obama we start hearing all of this rhetoric drummed up. It became white versus black all over again. And I say all over again.
Owens continued, “I shouldn’t even say that because when I was alive this was not an issue. It all became about race, and I really do think that they were laying down the ground work for Hillary [Clinton] to run because they had already pre-selected her to be the President of the United States, adding, “He backed up the myth of police brutality. He added gasoline to a fire that was simply untrue.”
Last years, more than four years after Congress required the Department of Justice to assemble information on Black people who have died in police custody, the agency has still not established a system for collecting that data or release any new details of how and why people die under the watch of law enforcement.
But we know that many Black people across the country have died in police custody either while they were being arrested or after being admitted to jail.
And we can’t forget about the time Owens attempted to defend Trump’s call for nationalism, by comparing his efforts to Adolf Hitler.
“When we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a national socialist.” she said at an event in London launching the British chapter of Turning Point USA. “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine,” Owens continued, while standing next to Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
Her comments were so inflammatory that shortly after the backlash, she was forced to resign from her position as director of communications.
Owens may be smart, reasonably successful and we do commend her drive and ambition, but what does she think that she can offer us after repeatedly minimizing the struggle of the community as a whole? Her refusal to acknowledge the facts is based simply on her claims that these struggles have not matched her own.
“Stop selling us our own oppression. 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,” she said last March at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
She may not have. But what about her ancestors?
Owens can only be running for office to help continue to push a white-washed reworking of not only the history but of the current state of Black America — and we are not here for it.
