U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett of Knoxville spent the last week making public comments about Vice President Kamala Harris being a "DEI hire." The comments he made, as quoted in The Hill, were so needlessly mean that it kind of took my breath away:
“Biden said he’s gonna hire a Black female for vice president,” Burchett said. “What about white females? What about any other group? When you go down that route, you take mediocrity, and that’s what they have right now as a vice president.”
He told Newsmax (also quoted in The Hill's article): “She checks all the boxes. She’ll say she’s of Indian descent one day, then she’ll say she’s of Black descent. It’s just box-checking.”
This is literally the same shit they said about affirmative action and political correctness and whatever else we've said instead of saying, “You didn’t used to give people like this a chance, and now you’re going to.” We’ve been having this same argument for 40-plus years now, and all the points on both sides remain the same. Folks like Burchett claim elevating people based on race or gender leads to mediocrity; folks like me point out that Burchett, himself, came up in a system where he was elevated because of his race and gender, and that his long history suggests he’s pretty damn mediocre.
OK, wait. We have to talk about Burchett’s mediocrity a second. As reported by the Knoxville News Sentinel, in 2006 Burchett failed to report PAC contributions. In 2008, he was fined for failing to report PAC contributions. In 2012, there was more controversy with his campaign disclosure forms. In 2018, he failed to report income on his disclosure forms and the FBI had to question him about tax evasion. More than a decade of screwing up his financial disclosures and no charges? Y’all, if he’s not a criminal, he’s a dumbass. And all the publicly available evidence we have is that he’s not a criminal. Which only leaves ... well, I’m just saying, Tim Burchett should not be running around calling anybody else mediocre. It appears he can’t do basic paperwork.
Anyway, this fight where mediocre white guys argue that making sure anyone else is included in our political process (or educational systems or the job market) will surely lead to a rise in mediocrity goes nowhere. We’ve been having it for at least 40 years with these specific points being raised, and no one on either side has been persuaded by the other side’s points.
So I instead decided to try to understand what in the hell kind of life Tim Burchett had that would lead him to this place. Who were his parents? Why did they raise him to be like this?
Y’all, what I found has deeply troubled me. Burchett’s parents were awesome.
A Kansas man is suing the Tennessee congressman for a false social media post
Tim’s dad Charles, sometimes called Charlie, was an administrator at the University of Tennessee. In the Feb. 5, 1961, Knoxville News Sentinel there’s a picture of him at basketball practice getting ready for the annual student-faculty basketball game. He’s wearing Chuck Taylors, a white T-shirt and some kind of hat while dribbling the ball. He is also, and I am not even kidding, smoking a pipe. In the middle of running down court with the ball, he has a pipe in his mouth. This is delightful and charming.
Still, a man can exercise and smoke at the same time, especially in the 1960s, and not be awesome. Let’s look at the work he did as a Knoxville school board member, where he was a dedicated advocate for education. In March 1969, Charlie led the push to make sure that married high school students could still go to school. In April of that same year, he was advocating for expanding the number of special education classes in the school system and finding the money to fund them. In 1970, he was fighting with the mayor to try to ensure teachers were paid fairly.
Most importantly, he was a huge supporter of and advocate for Sarah Moore Greene, NAACP leader and first Black woman elected to public office in Knox County in 1969, when she served on the schoolboard. He was responsible for getting a school in Knoxville named after her in 1974. (Greene was a Republican, but her reasons for being so are really damning. She told the Knoxville News Sentinel in 1976, “Personally, Republicans keep their promises and Republican office-holders do not promise the moon.” Sounds like she’d rather know up front she wasn’t getting shit than getting her hopes up.) This time in his life was so significant that his family specifically mentioned it in his 2008 obituary: “He presided over the tumultuous years of school desegregation. Charlie Burchett helped guide Knoxville through that time, during which he became close to fellow board member and civil rights icon Sarah Moore Greene.”
This time seems to have deeply affected Tim Burchett. In 2008, he told the Knoxville News Sentinel: “I was a little boy. It was pretty hot times. I remember coming home from school when he was sitting outside the house with a 12-gauge shotgun across his lap. He told me to go in the house and play. It struck me as odd because we were outside kids.” To be clear, Tim Burchett is recounting how his father’s work on desegregating Knoxville schools led to him needing to guard his house with a shotgun.
Tim’s mom died in 2011, and her passing got a big write-up in the News Sentinel. Here’s a quote:
“Being a female at the time, that was about all women could do—teach,” Tim Burchett said. “But if Mama started out today, she could have been president of the United States. She had an incredible knack for understanding people. She understood them and knew what was going on in their hearts.”
Later in the article, Tim says his mother told him that his dad would want him “to look out for the underdog.”
A guy grows up in a house where, because his father supported a woman who, prior to 1969, could not get a fair shot to be on the school board, and because he supported desegregating school, he feared for the safety of his family. This same guy understands that his mother, who he clearly loved deeply, had her life’s possibilities curtailed just because she was a woman, and if the barriers had been removed earlier, she would have bettered the lives of even more people. He seems to fully understand that his mom got cheated and the rest of us got cheated because of how her life was curtailed because she was a woman.
He even knows that his mom and dad would both want him to watch out for the underdog. This is his family’s legacy. And it’s a solid one — one that anyone should be proud of.
And instead, this mean-ass mediocre man is complaining about a Black woman being a diversity hire. This is what Tim Burchett thinks his mom and dad meant by, "Look out for the underdog"?
If this weren’t real life, it would be some kind of Robert Penn Warren-esque tragedy — watching him talk like the guys his dad had to guard their house against.
