Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) slammed American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Wednesday for her comparison of parental rights advocates to Jim Crow-era segregationists, claiming white liberals will cry racism to win a fight.
Scott said Weingarten has possibly done the most damage to students in poor communities recently, after she claimed school choice and parental rights advocates were similar to segregationists who opposed the historic Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation in public schools.
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"There might not be anyone that's done more damage recently than Randi Weingarten to the kids living in distressed communities ... especially like the ones where I grew up," Scott said. "It's so frustrating to hear these liberal lies, hearkening back to a day that no longer exists. Yet they're the ones with their teachers unions standing in the doorway of the schoolhouse trapping poor kids in as if the house is on fire, but they won't let a single soul out."
Weingarten claimed the same type of words that are used to describe modern parents who are seeking a more active role in the public education of their children were used by racist white people in the South during the 1950s.
"Those same words that you heard in terms of wanting segregation post-Brown v. Board of Education, those same words you hear today," Weingarten told the Burnes Center for Social Change on Tuesday. "I was kind of gobsmacked when I was talking with [the] Southern Poverty Law Center, and they showed me the same words – 'choice,' 'parental rights,' and attempts to divide parents versus teachers. At that point, it was white parents versus other parents. But it’s the same kind of words.”
Scott, who is running for the Republican nomination for president, rejected the comparison and blasted the union leader for crying "racism" on a topic that was not related to race.
"I'm so sick and tired of liberals — too many of them happen to be white — crying racism every single time they're losing an argument," Scott said. "I can't think of anything more actually racist than trapping poor black kids in the failing schools in these big blue cities dominated by a supermajority of radical progressives who are running the cities and destroying the schools."
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The senator claimed he would "break the backs" of the teachers unions if elected to the Oval Office next year, and vowed to provide "choice in education" for parents because they "deserve choices that they need so that their kids have a chance to succeed."
Weingarten had previously come under fire for drawing a similar comparison in 2017, when she claimed "the real pioneers of private school choice were the white politicians who resisted school integration" during a speech at a union convention. She also referred to school choice programs as being the "only slightly more polite cousins of segregation."