Larry Elder Called The ‘Black Face Of White Supremacy’ By Critics

Los Angeles Times writer Erika D. Smith wrote that Elder’s candidacy in the California governor recall race “feels personal. Like an insult to Blackness,” in a column for the publication titled “Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.”

“I won’t lie,” Smith lamented. “Few things infuriate me more than watching a Black person use willful blindness and cherry-picked facts to make overly simplistic arguments that whitewash the complex problems that come along with being Black in America.”

With polls indicating that Newsom’s likelihood of remaining in office is grim for the Democrats, Elder is the frontrunner to take up the mantle, and ignoring him is “no longer a viable strategy.”

“It’s not just that Elder would be a Trump fanboy Republican trying to run a state dominated by Democrats,” she skewered. “Or that he has zero experience in elected office and clearly doesn’t have the temperament for governance.”

She believes that Elder’s “insatiable need for attention” drives him to oppose “every single public policy idea that’s supported by Black people to help Black people. This has been true for decades, but it’s particularly problematic given the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd.”

Smith attacked elder for his stance on racial profiling – “he keeps trotting out statistics that purport to show that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another,” and tore into him for mocking critical race theory – “though I’m not sure he understands what it actually is.”

“That doesn’t bode well for ethnic studies in California,” she continued. “If he’s elected, the task force studying reparations for Black Californians would be toast.”     

His promise to repeal mask and vaccine mandates “before I have my first cup of coffee — and I don’t drink coffee,” if elected clearly disturbed Smith, but her liberal fear of how “the Republican Party would use Elder, governor of the bluest state in the U.S.,” seemed to be the real motivator of the piece. 

“Anytime you put a Black face on white supremacy, which is what Larry Elder is, there are people who will utilize that as an opportunity to deny white supremacy. They say, ‘How could this be white supremacy? This is a Black man.’ But everything that he’s pushing, everything that he stands for, he is advancing white supremacy,” she quoted Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Los Angeles Black Lives Matter 

And while she acknowledges Newsom “hasn’t been perfect,” based on her assessment of his track record of bumbling state unemployment and an equitable vaccine rollout, Smith likens Elder to a monster.  

“Black people know better than anyone how dangerous Elder is,” she concluded. “He is the O.G. troll that no one was supposed to feed. But here we are.“

Marie Finn