Column: The brilliance of ‘Bleach blond bad built butch body’

Hello and happy Tuesday. There are 167 days left until the election and today we’re talking B6 — not the vitamin, but the viral diss.

That’s “bleach blond bad built butch body,” if you don’t know.

And I’ll add a seventh B to that — brilliant.

But first, this week at the Trump trial. Michael Cohen had his last day on the stand with Trump’s lawyer meandering through his cross like it was Sunday at Walmart.

Then we got to this question: Who mad dogs a judge? The answer is defense witness Robert Costello, a lawyer who back-channeled between Cohen and the ex-president in 2018.

Costello was supposed to make Cohen look bad, but instead literally trolled Judge Juan Merchan — who cleared the courtroom to admonish Costello.

Honest analysis: Hot mess, little substance. It will go to the jury next week, then we’ll pay attention.

We have something much more fun to talk about anyway: U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and the power of the clapback.

Don’t mess with Texas

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) at the Capitol in Washington on May 1.

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Unless you are on some kind of social media cleanse, you heard that Crockett, a Texas Democrat, traded insults last week with fellow Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a late-night congressional hearing.

Like Kendrick Lamar and Drake, there was a clear winner. It was not MTG.

Greene, the super-MAGA bodybuilder from Georgia, started it by snarking at Crockett, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

This would seem to break a rule of decorum that legislators aren’t allowed to engage in personal attacks.

Crockett, a Black civil rights attorney who represents a largely Black area of South Dallas and who has lovely, long lashes, didn’t hesitate. Crockett addressed the chair of the committee, Kentucky native James Comer, on that point of order after he declined to boot MTG from the meeting.

Or as Crockett, a 43-year-old millennial, put it: “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blond bad built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

“A what now?” Comer answered, like a character from a “Dukes of Hazzard” rerun.

The off-the-cuff alliteration. The use of Robert’s Rules of Order to make her point. The absolute tear-down of MTG.

Within hours, Crockett’s comeback went viral and “bleach blond bad built butch body” became a meme.

There’s an adage in Black America, Chryl Laird told me: “Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing.”

She’s an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland who teaches a course on Black women and politics.

Greene “walked right into that mess,” said Laird, who likens it to a round of The Dozens, the game of trading insults until someone gives up.

Crockett gave “a smart response and one where even other people in the room had to laugh.”

But, Laird and others told me, there’s far more weight to this exchange than just a hard lesson for MTG on dissing a Black woman about her looks.

That was racist

There’s two reasons why this exchange is more than just entertainment.

First, Greene’s barb about the eyelashes was racist. It was meant, in my opinion, to make Crockett, a new congresswoman elected in 2022, feel embarrassed and out of place.

It also played to the MAGA crowd, which regularly degrades women of color with tropes about looks. I refer you to Michelle Obama, and the endless, nasty conspiracies she has endured about her appearance.

Though any woman of any color can get false eyelashes, Nadia E. Brown points out that it’s an aesthetic currently most popular in Black communities and communities of color — making Greene’s attack pointed.

Brown is a professor of government and chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She says this isn’t the first MAGA attempt to label the look of certain Black women as “ghetto.”

“That’s the part that Jasmine Crockett was really keying on,” said Brown — the attempt to use the eyelashes as a code for race and class.

Crockett went on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper to make that same point for herself. (Note: Tapper trying to understand the link between racism and eyelashes is funny in itself.)

“I absolutely believe she only did it to be racist toward me,” Crockett said.

“MAGA has historically been on social media doing the things where they’re saying, ‘Oh, she’s Black with lashes and nails and hair, and so she’s ghetto.’ ”

The clapback as strategy

The second part that makes this exchange worthy of your time is how successful Crockett’s response is.

Michelle Obama famously said that, “When they go low, we go high.” But that hasn’t exactly worked in the age of Trump, who has gone so low that climbing into the sewer would require a ladder.

Democrats simply can’t keep ignoring constant attacks without punching back, otherwise they are going to end up knocked out.

Crockett punched back. We should take note of how younger Democrats are starting to take a more aggressive approach to MAGA, and how young voters feel about it.

“It’s fire on TikTok,” Joan Donovan told me. She’s an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Boston University and an expert in misinformation and disinformation.

Donovan said Crockett’s tongue twister is so viral that the Lamar-Drake comparison is valid: “It’s being treated like that kind of beef.”

There are songs, beats, memes, commentary — everyone is jumping on.

My favorite is this AI-generated example pointed out by Donovan, in which MTG is doing JoJo Siwa’s Karma dance, itself made viral after the singer did a not-so-successful re-brand after a scandal. Donovan says it’s a commentary “mocking MTG for trying to come out as some kind of bad girl” and failing.

This is getting deep.

And that, said Brown, is something Democrats should pay attention to. Young voters aren’t disengaged. They’re just different.

“If the Biden team was smart, it would tap more into Jasmine Crockett,” said Brown, the politics professor.

“The high road worked for people of that generation, and the clapback works for people of my generation.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Trump’s immigration plans could deal a major blow to the job market.
The Of-course-he-did: A former leader of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang Joins Trump in Court
The L.A. Times Special: California’s first Black land trust fights climate change, makes the outdoors more inclusive.

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

P.S. My colleague Jessica Garrison got a rare look at the Sutter Buttes — a state park outside of Sacramento that doesn’t allow visitors.

You can read about her trip here.

Sun glistens off a lake inside Sutter Buttes State Park. For the last two decades, this has been a California state park that almost no one is allowed to visit.

(Brian Baer / California State Parks)

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