Paul Ryan Taking Heat For This Super White Selfie
Caucasian Living, with House Speaker Paul Ryan:
Jezebel — What does House Speaker Paul Ryan see when he looks at this photo? He sees his strong hairline. He sees his very straight teeth. He sees Windsor Knots and official congressional lanyards. He sees rows and rows of J. Crew.
Ryan posted this photo to Instagram on Saturday. Unless he regularly rounds up Hill interns on weekends (possible), the timing implies that he had plenty of time to study the image before uploading it.
What is strange about this photo? If you’re Paul Ryan, nothing. Not. One. Thing.
Couple things on this one. First off, fuck the Jezebel types who think this matters. Who think this is a big problem. Who think everything has to be perfectly diverse otherwise you’re racist. Who LOVE to get all snarky like, “Paul Ryan is OK with this picture OMG.” It’s a fucking picture. How many minorities do you think apply to be interns for Republicans? Basically zero. It’s not like Paul Ryan chose to give internships exclusively to white people. He would KILL to have a bunch of young, minority Republicans to groom into lifetime GOPers. But they scarcely exist.
(also before you get too excited Jezebel, there are a couple Asians!)
On the other hand, yes — this photo is white as fuck. White people everywhere. Nonwhite people basically invisible. For a political party whose adversaries constantly play the race card, probably not a good look. Just feeding the wolves for people to say dumbass shit like this:
Paul Ryan or whoever runs Paul Ryan’s insta has to be better. Way better. There’s no way you can look at that picture and not see how white it is. Missing it just screams that you don’t see what your enemies claim you don’t see. It doesn’t take much to fix this — just sneak out into the hallway, grab a couple standout minorities, retake the shot and boom, you’re fine. Nobody says a word.
Publishing this photo just welcomes unnecessary flak. It’s a sloppy mistake. But anyone who actually cares about this or uses it to point a finger is a moron. It’s just a picture and yes, Republicans are very white. Whites made up 72% of the GOP presidential vote in 2012 despite being just 62% of the total U.S. population. The GOP is white as fuck. I’m sure they’d love to change that. They’ve publicly acknowledged that they need to change that. They’ve publicly acknowledged that they’re trying to change that in order to improve as a party going forward. But for now they’re super white and their pictures are going to feature a bunch of white people. That’s just the way it is.
