A Michigan city council candidate said she wants to keep the city ‘a white community as much as possible’

Brian Wells/The Times Herald via Associated Press

A Michigan city council candidate said she wanted to keep the city "a white community" and later doubled down on her remarks.
The comment drew gasps and grimaces from other candidates at a political forum on Thursday.
Jean Cramer, 67, responded to a question about how to attract more immigrants to the community by saying, "no foreign people."
She also denounced interracial marriages and said people who love members of a different race should stay single.
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A city council candidate in Marysville, Michigan, said she wanted to keep the city "a white community as much as possible," stunning her fellow candidates and drawing widespread backlash.

Jean Cramer, 67, made the comment during a city candidates’ forum when she was asked about how to bring more foreign-born people to the community, according to the Port Huron Times Herald.

"Seriously. In other words, no foreign-born, no foreign people," she said. "In our past we’ve experienced it’s better to have simply American-born. Put it that way"

Cramer’s comments at the forum drew gasps and elicited shock from her political rivals.

A video of the form shows other candidates grimacing and murmuring. Kathy Hayman, Marysville’s mayor pro tempore, could be seen with her jaw dropped before she responded to Cramer’s remarks.

"My son-in-law is a black man and I have biracial grandchildren, and I take this very, very personally, what you’ve said," Hayman said. "I know there is nothing that I can say that’s going to change your mind. But we all have the same … We just need to have more kindness."

But Cramer later doubled down on her views in a follow-up interview with The Port Huron Times Herald, telling the newspaper that her opinion was based on the Bible.

"As far as I know, as long as we’ve been here, Marysville has been a white community, a white city," Cramer said. "If we have seen a black person here and there, whatever, we’re not bothered by it. I’m not bothered by it.

She also denounced interracial marriages, such as the one Hayman described, telling the Times Herald that she believed people should remain single rather than wed a person of a different race.

"For whatever reason, I’ve heard, they love each other, whatever, but there’s also such a thing as remaining single," she said. "People don’t necessarily have to get married, and, if they love somebody, love them single. There’s nothing wrong with that."

Marysville has a population of fewer than 10,000 people, nearly 95% of whom are white, according to census data.

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