My first artifact is a political cartoon created by Clay Jones during the height of the Stop Asian-Hate movement. Asian Americans faced a significant amount of unwarranted hate and blame for the COVID pandemic since the beginning of 2020, and it only got worse as time went on. During Congressional debate about enacting laws to protect Asian Americans from hate crimes, several Republican representatives opposed the notion. The speaking congressman is referencing Chip Roy, a Texas House member who has said racist remarks against Asian Americans during an already dangerous time for minorities. The cartoon brings to light the racist agenda of several elected officials during a time of already extreme discrimination and hatred.

My second artifact is a tweet from Lauren Boebert, a far-right House member from Colorado. Her tweet calls Ilhan Omar, a Muslim House member, a terrorist sympathizer after debates of pulling out troops from Afghanistan. This is the third instance of Boebert saying Omar is terrorist-related as she continues to put out Islamophobic comments after major public backlash the first two times. 

Both have implied invitations to ‘call out’ elected officials, be educated on issues, and vote in elections. What I find astonishing is that both Chip Roy and Lauren Boebert are still in office after publicly saying/posting racist and hurtful comments. Their views are ignorant and atrocious, yet people continue to vote for them. Roy and Boebert are only two examples of questionable congress members. The sheer number of government officials who are continually reelected and have said discriminatory comments is deplorable. 

The artifacts have nuanced implications of the consequences to citizen political action and inaction. As elected officials, they represent not only their congressional districts, but the United States as well. Their impact on international views of the United States is embarrassing to say the least. 

My interest in this topic is questioning how these people were elected in the first place. How has American society become so normalized to derogatory comments from congressional candidates that we still elect them? How can elected officials continue to encourage hate crimes and violence and still be reelected time after time? Are racist views so widespread and frequent that this many racist officials are elected? There are several political systems in place that continue to empower extreme views. I think it would be interesting to uncover the systematic issues with voting and district lines that allow racists to stay in office. Analyzing the media, such as with the tweet from Boebert, would also be amusing to dive into as almost every elected official posts radical ideas to give red meat to their base.