Marjorie Taylor Greene uses racial slur in Turning Point USA address

Remark came as congresswoman tried to espouse group’s commitment to diversity

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene used a racial slur to refer to Asian people while describing the attendees at Turning Point USA’s national conference during her speech over the weekend.

The Georgia Republican was speaking on Sunday at the conservative youth group’s four-day conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and remarked on the diversity she saw in the crowd while milling about with attendees at the event.

“[W]hen I walked in yesterday, I was like, 'What kind of people come here?’ So I'm walking around and seeing some good people and I see white people, Black people, brown people, yellow people,” said the congresswoman.

After noting that she “heard” the attendees were fans of former President Donald Trump, Ms Greene added: "And then I said 'Oh, oh, I know exactly what this is. The left calls this a white supremacist party’.”

Ms Greene did not single out Asian-Americans in her remarks and it’s unclear if she knew the term is offensive, however, it has a clearly-documented history as a racist term.

As one Asian American writer for NPR’s Code Switch blog wrote in 2018 for a piece titled “If We Called Ourselves Yellow”: “‘Yellow’ has long been considered noxious.”

Adding of its use, the writer, Kat Chow, said, “Though it's a slur – in fact, because it's a slur – it's the type of word that could force people to face its long, storied history of racism and resistance directly, every time they hear it.”

The Independent has reached out for comment from Ms Greene’s office.

Ms Greene has a history of remarks that have drawn accusations of racism. In the past few weeks, she has accused her Muslim-American colleagues in the US House of Representatives of being “Islamic terrorist sympathisers” and called one member in particular, Rep Ilhan Omar, “pro-Al Qaeda”, referring to the terrorist group that struck the US on 9/11. She has yet to face any discipline for her remarks after previously being stripped of her committee assignments for unrelated remarks endorsing violence against Democrats including Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

She has also made other xenophobic remarks about Chinese-Americans; earlier this year, she suggested that if she were president she would institute some kind of loyalty test for Chinese-Americans and deport any who Ms Greene deemed as insufficiently loyal to the United States.

“If I was in charge and I had my way I would come down on China so hard. I would put tariffs back in place and they would be more strict than President Trump’s because those tariffs work. I would kick out every single Chinese in this country that is loyal to the CCP. They would be gone. I do not care who they are,” she said in July.