Last Updated on June 22, 2020
Far-left icon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declared herself a black ‘Afro-Latina’ in an excerpt of an interview posted on Twitter by Grabien Media’s Tom Elliott.
“I’ll hear people say, okay, this is Black Lives Matter, what about Latinos?” Ocasio-Cortez stated in the interview. “I always say Latinos are black.”
“We are Afro-Latina, and we run an entire racial spectrum, and so we have to have conversations around colorism,” she continued.
The bizarre remarks come following polling showing that 57% of Hispanic Americans oppose Ocasio-Cortez’s ongoing effort to defund the police. This may explain her decision to attempt to present herself as a representative of the black community instead.
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This is not the first time Ocasio-Cortez has attempted to pass herself off as black.
In April 2019, Ocasio-Cortez caused controversy during an address to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network by speaking in ebonics and putting on a stereotypically African-American Southern drawl in a bizarre attempt to relate to her audience.
“I’m proud to be a bartender,” she said. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with dat! There’s nothin’ wrong with workin’ retail, foldin’ clothes for other people to buy.”
She has also previously argued for redefining the term ‘black’ to include a wider range of POCs while on a panel in March 2019.
“There are a lot of systems that we have to dismantle, but it also does get into this interesting area of where we are about identity, as a country,” she said. “Because, like what does it mean to be black? Who is black and who isn’t? Especially, as our country becomes more biracial and multiracial.”
At the time, she drew criticism from left-wing black commentators.
“Ocasio-Cortez managed to devolve Blackness in America as existing as slaves and three-fifths of a human being to encompassing an entire country of mixed races and ambiguity,” wrote BET’s DeMicia Iman.
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In December 2018, Ocasio-Cortez also declared she was Jewish, citing some distant ancestors of hers.
“One of the things that we discovered about ourselves is that a very very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews,” she said. “During the Spanish Inquisition… so many people were forced to convert on the exterior to Catholicism, but on the interior continued to practice their faith.”
