A Korean-American Republican official is sharing bigoted comments she’s had to endure from members of her own party.
Jennifer Carnahan, chairwoman of the Republican Party of Minnesota, wrote in a Facebook post on Friday that she’s been subjected to racist comments and slurs from others in the GOP, including party leadership.
“Some (sadly) party leaders/executive committee members around this state have made racist comments about me and to me calling me ― ‘dragon lady. A ch*nk, a stupid Asian not even born in America’ and other awful racial slurs (not sure how these people still maintain their roles),” she said, not writing out the slur in full.
A screenshot of the post on Carnahan’s personal Facebook page appeared in the Star Tribune, but is not publicly visible on Facebook. She did not immediately reply to HuffPost’s request for comment about the post.
In her post, Carnahan, the first Asian-American to hold her position in Minnesota, also listed other insults she’s received, including from a man at a Trump rally who called her “disgusting” and a former high school classmate who’d sent a message saying she was a “nobody and a loser.” She added that she’d received emails saying that she is “doing a shit job, and should crawl back into a hole and stay there ― and that’s why my predecessors (all men) deserved to make more money than me and I don’t even deserve a penny.”
The state GOP leader acknowledged that the hate and slurs had started to get to her, but that her father had encouraged her to “always be polite and respectful to others, no matter what they say to me.” She called her dad “the biggest mentor in my life.”
Carnahan told the Star Tribune that she shared her experiences with hateful messages because she wanted to “highlight the admiration and respect I have for my father” and “bring a positive voice to the party and show the importance of working together.” And despite being insulted at last week’s Trump rally in Duluth, she told the outlet that she doesn’t feel that Trump himself is racist or that he’s “stoking racial divisions.”
Last year, Asian-American lawmaker Beth Fukumoto also shared racist comments she’s dealt with as an elected official. Fukumoto resigned last March from her leadership role in Hawaii’s GOP and became a Democrat after she saw “members of my party marginalizing and condemning minorities.” On the heels of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August, Fukumoto received a letter in the mail from a Trump supporter.
“Dear Bitch,” the note read. “Your poor grand parents got put into a camp in the USA? Boo hoo hoo ― you Japs murdered thousands of servicemen at Pearl Harbor ― did you forget that detail?”
Fukumoto said the letter was particularly upsetting in light of the violence in Charlottesville, where an alleged white supremacist killed a woman and injured 19 others.
“One of the reasons that I switched parties is that I felt the Republican Party was unwilling to confront racism,” Fukumoto previously told HuffPost. “Racism specifically in the party and racism as promoted by the nominee at the time, and now the president.”