The Slatest

Paul Ryan Posts a Selfie with a Whole Bunch of White Interns

U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) takes questions from reporters during his weekly news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on Thursday.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, a post about Speaker Paul Ryan putting up a selfie featuring what can only be described as a large quanity of overwhelmingly white Capitol Hill interns, but begin we must.

First, the selfie itself(ie):

On the one hand, he is not wrong. That probably does set a record for the most number of Capitol Hill (or #CapitolHill) interns in a single selfie.

On the other hand, the vast majority if not all of those interns are white. There are many reasons that internships in general and Hill internships in particular lack—and perpetuate lack of—racial diversity, and some of them are not unrelated to Speaker Paul Ryan’s own policies, a reality upon which the viewer of this selfie is almost invited to reflect.

Also this photo was posted 19 hours ago, which means it was uploaded on a Saturday.