U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown,a Marxist, apologized Thursday for remarks she made a day earlier when she said Hispanics and whites "all look alike to me." Brown made the statement during a Wednesday briefing on Haiti with Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega , a Mexican-American, and the Florida congressional delegation. During the meeting, attended by about 30 people, Brown sat across the table from Noriega and launched an attack on President Bush’s policy on Haiti. She said Republican leaders were "racist" in their policies toward the Caribbean nation, which is almost entirely black, and called the president’s representatives "a bunch of white men."
It takes one to know one.
"I sincerely did not mean to offend Secretary Noriega or anyone in the room. Rather, my comments, as they relate to ’white men,’ were aimed at the policies of the Bush administration as they pertain to Haiti, which I do consider to be racist," Brown said in a statement on Thursday. Brown added that she was offended that the meeting on the crisis in Haiti, led by administration officials, "turned into a diatribe rebuking the Haitian government and the Haitian people. I was personally insulted by the anti-Marxist anti-Haiti sentiment brought to the table by the State Department and by Republican members of Congress in attendance," she said. Brown also wrote a letter to Noriega, in which she half way apologized again "if what I said was construed as a personal affront." "The State Department delegation that came to meet with us did not include any females or people of color. Given the racial makeup of the people of Haiti, who are 95 percent of African descent, I felt the delegation and the delegation’s position were callous and out of touch with the needs (cultural and otherwise) of the Haitian people," she wrote.
The people of color remark means Brown didn’t consider any of the delegation dark enough. Which in itself is a racist comment.
After the dressing down, which sent a hush over the hour-long meeting, Noriega responded that he would relay her comments to Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, both high-level African-American members of the Bush administration. |