Candidate for Alabama senate caught calling Native Americans and Asians "reds and yellows"

One of the Republican candidates for the Senate in Alabama is mired in a racist gaffe scandal

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published September 19, 2017 8:08AM (EDT)

 (AP/Rogelio Solis)
(AP/Rogelio Solis)

An Alabama Republican currently engaged in a competitive race for the United States Senate was caught in a racist gaffe.

In footage obtained by The Hill, Moore referred to Asian-Americans and Native Americans by the disparaging terms "red and yellows" while trying to make a larger point about the need for national unity.

"Now we have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting," Moore says in the footage. "What’s going to unite us? What’s going to bring us back together? A president? A Congress? No. It’s going to be God."

In a statement, Moore's campaign told The Hill that the remarks had been taken out of context and that they referred to the classic children's Christian song, "red, yellow, black and white they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world."

Moore's attempts to bring God into his Senate campaign have embarrassed him in the past. Last week he aroused controversy when a February video was uncovered by CNN in which he seemed to quote the Book of Isaiah to connect the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with a perceived decline in religiosity among Americans.

"Because you have despised His word and trust in perverseness and oppression, and say thereon . . . therefore this iniquity will be to you as a breach ready to fall, swell out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instance,'" Moore said. "Sounds a little bit like the Pentagon, whose breaking came suddenly at an instance, doesn't it?"

Moore added, "If you think that's coincidence, if you go to verse 25, 'there should be up on every high mountain and upon every hill rivers and streams of water in the day of the great slaughter when the towers will fall.' You know, we've suffered a lot in this country, maybe, just maybe, because we've distanced ourselves from the one that has it within his hands to heal this land."
Moore also used that speech to point to "sodomy" and abortion rights as things that might have caused God to become angry at America.

By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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African Americans Asian Americans Donald Trump Native Americans Racism Roy Moore