Washington, D.C. — “Put down your camera,” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee admonished me from her seat on the dais in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, literally looking down at me as I sat as a witness during a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties.
I had started filming because the Democratic lawmaker was using the last five minutes of a hearing on discrimination and civil rights to rebuke me and another witness, Devon Westhill, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity. Westhill was born to a Vietnamese-immigrant mother and a black American father, a complex biography similar to my own: born in India to a Muslim family and raised in West Virginia. But we were in Jackson’s crosshairs for daring to lay bare the racism being promoted today in the name of the divisive ideologies of “critical race theory” and “anti-racism.” I wanted to juxtapose her denials of the dangers — in fact, the very existence — of critical race theory in our public schools with the evidence that I’d brought to the hearing room.
Comments