The North Carolina Republican party is facing backlash for calling a prominent local faith leader a “poverty pimp,” The Raleigh News & Observer reports.
The North Carolina GOP on Thursday made the insulting remark against Rev. William Barber II ahead of the religious leader’s scheduled visit to Durham with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for a “Rally to Raise the Wage” in support of hiking the federal minimum wage to $17 per hour.
“Socialist Bernie Sanders is teaming up with poverty pimp William Barber to hold a rally with NC Democrats in Durham today,” the North Carolina GOP tweeted Thursday.
“While @NCDemParty embraces Sanders’ push to make us more like his beloved USSR, Republicans work to protect the good old timeless values of the USA.”
Robert Reives, the state’s Democratic House Minority Leader, slammed the state’s GOP, saying “there are only a few terms they could have picked that would have been more demeaning.”
“It’s incredibly diminishing of his work. It’s amazing they could reduce all his work to one of the most diminishing terms that could be used for Black men in this country’s history.”
Reives likened the remark to a recent cringeworthy comment by another North Carolina Republican lawmaker that made national headlines.
Rep. Jeff McNeely during a floor debate earlier this month suggested that his Democratic colleague Abe Jones, who is a Black Harvard graduate, wouldn’t have been admitted to the prestigious school if he wasn’t a minority, video posted on Twitter by freelance journalist Bryan Anderson shows.
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“I understand that you went to public school and that you went to Harvard and Harvard Law, and the question I have is would you have been able to maybe achieve this if you were not an athlete or a minority, or any of these things,” McNeely said.
Said Reives: “I would say this is even worse than Jeff McNeely’s comments.”
