Representative Eli Crane, R-Arizona. called black people ‘people of color’ Thursday during a floor debate on his proposed amendment to an annual defense policy bill, prompting a stern rebuke from the former Congressional speaker Black Caucus.
“My amendment has nothing to do with whether people of color or black people or anyone can serve,” said Crane, who is serving his first term. “It has nothing to do with any of this.”
Lawmakers were debating a series of GOP-backed amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, which the House aims to pass by the end of the week.
Crane said his amendment would prohibit the Department of Defense from considering race, gender, religion, political affiliations or “any other ideological concept” as the sole basis for decisions on recruitment, training, education, promotion or retention.
“The military was never designed to be, you know, inclusive. Its strength isn’t its diversity. Its strength is its standards,” said Crane, 43, a combat veteran.
“I’m going to tell you this now, you can: you can continue to play these games with diversity, fairness and inclusion. But there are real threats. And if we keep messing around and we keep lowering our standards, that’s not going to be good,” he said.
Immediately after Crane finished his remarks, Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, asked that the derogatory phrase he used be stricken from the record.
“I find it offensive and very inappropriate,” said Beatty, who was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus in the previous Congress. “I seek unanimous consent to remove words that refer to me or any of my colleagues as people of color.”
Crane chimed in, asking to change his comments to “people of color.” Beatty, however, insisted that the words be struck from the record. They were removed by unanimous consent.
Asked about his choice of words, Crane said he “misspoke”.
“During a heated debate over my amendment that would ban discrimination on skin color in the armed forces, I misspoke,” Crane said in a statement. “Each of us is made in the image of God and created equal.”
Beatty, 73, had criticized Crane’s amendment as trying to “undermine the freedoms for us to learn from each other, for us to engage with each other, for us to understand our cultures”.
The House passed Crane’s amendment Thursday night in a 214-210 vote.
In the Senate this week, Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., refused to acknowledge that white nationalism is fundamentally racist.
Asked to clarify comments he made in May that appeared to defend white nationalists serving in the military, Tuberville insisted in a Monday night interview on CNN that not all white nationalists are racist. Rather, he suggested they were just people “who have a few, probably different, beliefs.”
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com