A clash over racism between a freshman Democrat and a conservative Republican revealed as much about the divide within the Democratic Party as the chasm between Democrats and Republicans over race.
WASHINGTON — As the child of former sharecroppers, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland is no stranger to blunt conversations about race. But when a fiery freshman Democrat practically accused a conservative Republican of racism on Wednesday, the uneasy truce that Mr. Cummings brokered put him in the center of a raw debate over race and gender in a changing House.
The heated exchange came at the end of Wednesday’s explosive House Oversight Committee hearing featuring Michael D. Cohen. After Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina, brought in a black political appointee of President Trump’s in an effort to prove Mr. Trump is not racist, Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, called it racist to “actually use a prop, a black woman in this chamber, in this committee.”
Mr. Meadows, red-faced and near tears, demanded that Ms. Tlaib’s words be “taken down” — struck from the record as a violation of House rules — and Mr. Cummings asked Ms. Tlaib to explain herself. She apologized. Then the questions began.
“Whose emotions do we put first?” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a close ally of Ms. Tlaib’s who is on the oversight panel and witnessed the encounter. “We had to apologize for him getting hurt feelings over her saying and calling out a racist practice,” but Ms. Tlaib was also “hurt, and no apology was furnished to her.”
The Root, a website that focuses on race, went further: “Cummings’ handling of Tlaib yesterday is part of a larger problem the Democratic Party has with this new class of women of color: Democrats want women of color in Congress, but they can’t seem to handle their truth-telling,” wrote Terrell Jermaine Starr. He added, “He messed up and needs to apologize to Tlaib nonetheless — publicly. Otherwise, Republicans will take Meadows’ cue and cry a river of white tears each time a woman of color dares to call them out on their racism.”
The episode underscored who Mr. Cummings is and how he wants to run his committee. On Thursday, many of his colleagues — including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — came to his defense, saying he handled a difficult situation well by preventing an important and historic hearing from going off the rails.
But outside the Capitol, the reviews were less kind. Critics were furious that Mr. Cummings had called Mr. Meadows “one of my best friends,” and resurfaced several 2012 campaign videos showing Mr. Meadows saying he intended to send President Barack Obama “home to Kenya, or wherever it is.”
Beyond that contretemps, the Cohen hearing served to shine a national spotlight on a new generation of outspoken young Democrats, many of them women of color, who are forcing pointed conversations about race and abandoning the unwritten protocols of decorum in the way their elders — who often agree with them — have not.
