Candace Owens Got Exactly What She Cosigned — When Anti-Blackness Turns On Its Favorite Mouthpiece [Op-Ed]

Laura Loomer, the far-right agitator for whom racism is a core personality trait, reportedly called Candace Owens a “nappy-headed Black b—h.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump shared a doctored TIME Magazine image of her labeling her a “vile person” and “extremely low-IQ individual.”

Yeah, all that is racist. And yes, it’s ugly. But this is also Candace Owens. So . . . a whole lot of Black folks are not feeling sorry for her. 

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When Loomer called Owens a “nappy-headed Black b—h,” it wasn’t creative. It wasn’t new or surprising. All I could hear was Don Imus back in 2007, calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed h–s” and igniting a national firestorm. It’s the same script and racial shorthand meant to degrade Black women by reducing us to hair, bodies, and something less than human.

This is tired, recycled racism that never really leaves. It just waits for a moment, a target, and an opening. But that’s the vocabulary of the world Candace Owens chose to move through.

What is telling is the reaction. While we recognize that language for exactly what it is, I was unmoved by it being applied to her. Not because I think it’s acceptable, but because the target matters.

Most media coverage on this dragging is falling into familiar lanes. Mainstream outlets are treating this as just another messy feud, noting the racism, calling it inappropriate, and moving on without asking why Black audiences are reacting differently. 

Conservative spaces are more concerned with optics and internal discipline and asking whether Trump or Loomer went “too far.” Owens is being reduced to a supporting character in a story about loyalty, not accountability. What’s missing is the deeper reckoning with how Owens helped shape the very response she’s now receiving.

Owens is skin folk, maybe, but certainly not kinfolk. And as our elders have long warned, when you lay down with dogs, you catch fleas. Which means we are not obligated to defend or empathize with a Black person simply because some white racists said ugly things about them, especially when that person has spent years aligning with, excusing, and amplifying the very forces now turning on her.

Owens has built an entire brand around contrarian takes on Black life and racism. She has dismissed systemic inequality as a matter of personal choice, insisted Black Americans are “in the driver’s seat” of their outcomes, and even claimed that our communities have been given “permission to be unbelievably racist.”

After George Floyd’s murder, she said he shouldn’t be held up as a hero and emphasized his past record in ways many people felt were dismissive and dehumanizing, especially in a moment of collective grief and protest. She said she did “not support” him as a martyr and that the very idea “sickens” her. 

On Black communities more broadly, she has claimed that Black Americans have been given “permission to be unbelievably racist in society.” In a country built on centuries of anti-Black violence, exclusion, and state-sanctioned harm, she flipped the script and cast the oppressed as the problem. Her rhetoric has been useful to the very people who want racism to disappear without ever being addressed. Because when a Black voice says it, it travels further, hits harder, and gets weaponized faster. It becomes proof, permission, and cover all at once. 

Owens has been openly hostile to Black political movements. She called Black Lives Matter divisive, harmful, rooted in “victim mentality,” and described activists as “a bunch of whiny toddlers pretending to be oppressed for attention.”

Think about those words. Sit with them.

Owens said those words during a moment when Black folks were being killed in ways that forced the entire country to look, whether it wanted to or not. Tamir Rice was a child, shot within seconds of police arriving at a playground. Trayvon Martin was stalked and killed for existing while Black in his own neighborhood. Michael Brown was shot and left in the street to bake in the hot sun for hours in front of his grieving family and community.

And in the face of all of that grief, protest, raw and unfiltered pain, Candace Owens had the gall to dismiss it. To mock and reduce it to whining. She told the world that the people crying out were not responding to injustice, but performing victimhood for attention. That’s pure contempt. It’s the kind of contempt that doesn’t disappear when the headlines fade. It lingers, shapes memory, and informs how people respond when the same person suddenly finds themselves on the receiving end of the very forces they once minimized.

The post Candace Owens Got Exactly What She Cosigned — When Anti-Blackness Turns On Its Favorite Mouthpiece [Op-Ed] appeared first on MadameNoire.