Elie Mystal: White Male Republicans in Southern States Act Like They Own Black People

MSNBC regular and The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal said Wednesday on “The ReidOut” that white Republicans in the Southern states are “doing now and what their ancestors did when they owned people” while discussing abortion laws.

Mystal said, “There are a lot of people who are center, center-left people, who think that, you know, it’s fine for the states to choose for themselves and that really, if I’m, you know, a northeastern liberal, you know, whatever. Who cares about Florida? Who cares about Mississippi? I live in New York. I live in California. I’m going to be fine. And there are a couple of real, deep problems with that. One of them is that most African Americans in this country still live in the states where their ancestors were enslaved.”

He continued, “If you look at the top states of African American population by population, you’ll see Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, those are the states. It ain’t California. It ain’t New York. It ain’t Minnesota. It’s these states. So, when these Republicans, as you saw — I don’t know if you saw Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday was just like, we just want a civil divorce from the rest of the country. When these white people in these states talk about leaving, they’re talking about leaving and taking their black people with them, just like before.”

Mystal added, “And I know that’s going to hurt Ron DeSantis’ fee-fees that I’m making this analogy or comparison between what they’re doing now and what their ancestors did when they owned people, but it’s the same thought process that these states, these policies exist–these policies exist for the benefit of the white, cis, hetero males in charge. And it’s not free for anybody else, not for the black people, not for the brown people, not for the women in these states. And so we can’t, as liberals, we can’t as left-of-center people just consign the south to its white supremacist fate because we cut off our left hand when we do that. We have to fight for these people, and that means that we have to fight the Supreme Court and fight their interpretations of federalism.”

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