American people as a collection of voting blocs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/26/pramila-jayapal-joe-manchin-build-back-better

Pramila Jayapal, like so many other politicians, thinks and writes about the American people as a collection of voting blocs.

In her op-ed in Sunday’s Wa-Po, she references various voter categories:

“People of color, women and young people,”
“immigrant women of color,”
“seniors, people of color, working and young people”.

I’m concerned that her language may indeed reflect how selectively she thinks about the people she supposedly represents in Congress – and I was one of those people when I lived in her district.

Does she represent all the people of her district or just the targeted groups she caters to, the people most likely to vote for Democratic candidates? Not men, unless they’re “seniors” or “people of color” or “working people” or “young people.” Not women, unless they’re “women of color” or some other subset of the population that Jayapal thinks is “underserved” or “disadvantaged.”

I know that politicians of both parties use this sort of targeted, exclusionary language, but we don’t have to accept it or put up with it. Seniors are not more important than juniors. Women are not more important than men. Immigrants are not more deserving than the native-born. People of color are not more virtuous than white people. We are all Americans – “We, the people of the United States” – in the words of the preamble to the Constitution. And our elected representatives should serve all of us.