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Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagicAva DuVernay is sharing a much needed history lesson to Candace Owens, the conservative pundit and avid Donald Trump supporter, who recently testified before a House Judiciary Committee that the GOP’s Southern Strategy “never happened.”
It all started when Owens was invited to testify during a hearing on the rise of white nationalism and the well documented Southern strategy, in which the Republican Party appealed white voters through raceism and disenfranchize black people.
“[Black conservatives are criticized for having] the audacity to think for themselves and become educated about our history and the myth of things like the Southern switch, the Southern strategy, which never happened,” she said during the hearing.
Black Twitter was quick to react to Owens’ ignorance, including filmmaker Ava DuVernay who shared a clip from her critically acclaimed documentary 13th, which looks at the decriminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison surge.
In the clip, Ronald Reagan adviser, Lee Atwater, laid out the evolution of the Southern Strategy, which he explains began as overt racism and later became actually policies where “blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Along with the clip, Duvernay offered an important message.
“Let me go ahead and leave this right here for folks confused about the uninformed mess that someone named Candace Owens is trying to pass off as truth,” she wrote. “In fact, it’s just white nationalist revisionist garbage. The Southern Strategy goes as follows. And the marathon continues.”
