Greene is playing “an old, racist playbook meant to demean, belittle and distract,” one civil rights attorney said.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) recently criticized Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) by seemingly questioning the authenticity of Crockett’s Black American experience.

During an appearance this week on former Fox News Host Megyn Kelly’s podcast, “The Megyn Kelly Show,” Greene reflected on her well-documented ongoing feud with Crockett by taking several jabs at her Democratic colleague. The Georgia Republican accused Crockett of mistreating her staff, which prompted Kelly to mention a New York Post article published earlier this month that detailed accusations from anonymous sources about Crockett showing “diva” behavior. (Crockett has since shut down the allegations, calling them “lies” and “nonsense.”)

Greene, who is white, then pivoted to a discussion about the “Black American struggle,” sharing her opinion about whether Crockett, who is Black, really understands it.

“She claims to be, you know, from her people. She puts on this image that she understands the Black American struggle,” Greene said. “But let’s face it, the girl went to private school, she went on to … I don’t know what college … and law school — she’s a complete fake.”

“She’s as fake as her eyelashes, she’s as fake as her hair, she’s as fake as her fingernails and she is such a massive fraud,” she continued.

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Crockett has since responded to the clip on X, formerly Twitter, though she did not name Greene in her response.

“It is funny that MAGA cultist want to challenge my blackness because of my education… Remember how they challenged Barack Obama & his roots? Remember how they claimed Kamala [Harris] ‘turned’ black,” she said. “Y’all are a joke. Walk a day in my shoes where your white supremacist friends send me hateful emails, death threats, DMs, & posts, and then you can tell me if I’m truly living the black experience in this country, UNTIL then mind your business.”

Crockett then emphasized that being Black has “nothing to do with education.”

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Crockett is often the target of right-wing, racist and anti-Black attacks. She’s routinely criticized for the way she speaks and her use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Conservatives have made a habit of accusing Crockett of being disingenuous because the way she speaks doesn’t align with their views of how someone who attended private school should speak.

Case in point: In April, Fox News host Laura Ingraham accused Crockett of sounding “very different” in the past. “And now she’s going very … street,” Ingraham said at the time, as she swayed her head side-to-side.

The congresswoman had addressed some of these accusations before.

“I don’t have an ‘accent’ … if anything, it’s Texan, maybe mixed with a little bit of St. Louis,” she said in a TikTok video in March. “And then determining that my ‘accent’ is fake because of the types of schools I went to … seriously, y’all?”

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And as it relates to Greene’s recent attacks on Crockett, Portia Allen-Kyle, a civil rights attorney and interim executive director at the racial justice organization Color Of Change, said that Greene “doesn’t understand the reality that Blackness is disrespected in this country no matter how many degrees you hold or how much money you make.”

Allen-Kyle told HuffPost that the Republican congresswoman showed her “own ignorance” during her appearance on Kelly’s podcast.

“She reduces the Black experience to some caricature of poverty and struggle— as if class alone defines Blackness,” she said. “That mindset exposes her bias. Greene thinks struggle is the only stamp of Blackness and she dresses up her ignorance as commentary.”

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Furthermore, Allen-Kyle emphasized that Greene’s digs about Crockett’s “fake” eyelashes, nails and hair were examples of macroaggressions — not microaggressions.

“When Greene fixates on a Black woman’s appearance instead of her words, she’s playing an old, racist playbook meant to demean, belittle and distract,” Allen-Kyle said. “Black women’s beauty and choices have always been politicized, and Greene leans right into that racist tradition.”

“It was a macroaggression, rather than a microaggression,” she continued. “When young Black girls think about what a congressperson looks like, Congresswoman Crockett shows Black girls nationwide that they could represent their community someday.”

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And there’s a lot more to unpack from Greene’s recent comments about Crockett and her ideas about the so-called “Black American struggle.”

Kayla Bartkowski via Getty Images

Rep. Jasmine Crockett and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene photographed during a hearing the hearing at the U.S. Capitol on May 7, 2025 in Washington, D.C.

‘There’s no amount of education [or] income that allows you to transcend Blackness,’ Allen-Kyle said.

Crockett was “absolutely right” in her response to Greene on X, Allen-Kyle said.

“There’s no amount of education [or] income that allows you to transcend Blackness — it’s made obvious every single day by the racist attacks aimed at us,” she continued. “Crockett’s very presence in Congress, and the fact that she’s constantly targeted, proves the point she made: Racism doesn’t care about your résumé. Anti-Blackness follows us into the boardroom, the courtroom, and even the halls of Congress.”

Deepak Sarma, inaugural distinguished scholar in the public humanities at Case Western Reserve University, said that Greene’s comments about Crockett are “consistent with the MAGA / Trump strategy to invent damaging unconfirmed allegations against prominent Black leaders and to question their intellect and capabilities.”

Sarma said that President Donald Trump and his “MAGA minions” continually malign others for “their nefarious gaslighting and fraudulent purposes.” They likened it to Trump’s attacks on Harris and her capabilities as a public speaker, or about her intelligence.

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“In the world of psychology, this is known as a Jungian projection, where one attributes one’s unacceptable character, feelings, and behavior to someone else,” they said.

And by Greene suggesting that Crockett’s success “in a capitalist democracy makes her a fraud or inauthentic,” she’s insinuating that the “real” experience of a Black person is being “impoverished and a failure,” Sarma said.

What’s more, Sarma thinks that conservatives feel discomfort when they hear Crockett speak, or when she uses AAVE because it “contradicts their misguided belief that America is a monoculture, a white Christian monoculture.”

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“The feeling that they are being left out and that they are not adept in the language justifies, in their mind, their rage and suspicion,” they said.

Sarma later emphasized that “Trumpisms are already becoming accepted in America” and that these recent incidents directed at Black people, like Greene’s remarks about Crockett, are “slowly becoming more normal.”

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Allen-Kyle thinks the right-wing attacks related to Crockett’s private school education are ironic.

“Conservatives trash and defund public schools every chance they get, but they seethe when a Black woman gets a private education. Why? Because it proves what they fear most: that Black women can be smarter, sharper, and more culturally fluent than they’ll ever be,” she said.

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“It exposes their real agenda — they don’t want Black people educated, period,” she continued. “They don’t hate Crockett’s accent or her education—they hate that she’s brilliant enough to beat them at both.”