Dem Lawmaker Puts His Ignorance on Display with Embarrassing Racial Attack on Clarence Thomas
The word “embarrassing” barely begins to describe it.
A Georgia Democrat who took the floor of the state Senate on Tuesday to attack a GOP proposal to honor Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with a statue on Capitol grounds in Atlanta ended up putting his own disgraceful ignorance on full display at the same time.
And it summed up about everything there is to know about the modern Democratic Party.
The politician was state Sen. Emmanuel Jones, who represents Decatur, according to The Associated Press.
Jones took a long way of getting to it, but he managed to brand Thomas an “Uncle Tom” — a racial slur used to denigrate black people who are perceived as being subservient to whites.
In the process, he admitted he didn’t even know the origin of the term, an almost stunning confession of ignorance by a man supposedly educated enough to win election as a state lawmaker.
“In the black community, we have an expression … when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to the days of slavery, and that person betraying his own community, we have a term in the black community,” Jones said.
“That term that we use is called ‘Uncle Tom.’ An Uncle Tom is either a fictional or nonfictional character — I don’t really know the origin of ‘Uncle Tom,’ but it talks about a person who, back during the days of slavery, sold his soul to the slave masters …”
“There’s a whole laundry list of famous quotes and positions that Justice Thomas has taken that I find offensive,” he said. “Sometimes, when I talk to the majority party, I just have to say, ‘Y’all just don’t get it. Y’all really just don’t get it.'”
Maybe that’s because there’s not a lot to get.
Obviously, American education standards aren’t what they should be — if they were, inane TV shows like “The View” wouldn’t get away with pretending to be well-informed — but any man or woman sitting in a position of power should at least have the fundamentals. And for understanding American history, at least knowing about the existence of a book called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and its basic storyline should be fundamental.
Since Jones is a black lawmaker from a Southern state who graduated from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania with a master’s from Columbia, according to his state Senate biography page, it’s almost impossible to believe he didn’t.
But if Jones knew, or knew more, about the book that was a catalyst for the abolitionist cause in the decade before the Civil War and built up the Northern anti-slavery sentiment that helped bring the war about, he might know that the title character was exactly the opposite of what he described.
The Uncle Tom of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic is indeed a humble man and a Christian (reason enough for the left to hate him), but he is no traitor to his race. In fact, he dies being beaten to death because he refuses to betray slave women who’ve escaped.
Thomas is likewise no traitor — to black Americans, to Americans as a whole, or to the ideas that make the country what it is. His career on the court has been a constant fight for the principles that built the United States and have maintained it since the Constitutional Convention.
Jones is a Democrat and can be expected to despise Thomas for his beliefs in the American way of life, his regard for individual rights and his rigorously intelligent approach to his job on the Supreme Court. The Democratic Party in its current incarnation respects none of that, unless the “individual right” under discussion involves destroying an infant in a mother’s womb.
But as a lawmaker, he should be expected to be at least glancingly familiar with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book that had a profound impact on the history of the country. (It’s an apocryphal, but telling, story that when President Abraham Lincoln met the author in 1862, the second grinding year of the Civil War that remade the nation, he said, “So, you’re the little lady who started this great war.”)
Among the contemporary left, “Uncle Tom” is a term hurled at any black individual brave enough to publicly disagree with the Democratic Party and the progressive movement as a whole.
Since there is no American — black or white, living or dead — who has disagreed as forcefully and as effectively with the left as Clarence Thomas, it’s not all that surprising that a Democrat like Jones would choose such a shallow, baseless line of attack, however wrongheaded it is.
With more than three decades on the court, Thomas has been a consistent conservative stalwart the entire time, supporting constitutionally guaranteed rights such as the Second Amendment right to bear arms, opposing “imagined” rights such as abortion and gay marriage, and generally providing an example of fidelity to the Constitution that should be followed by every man or woman who puts on the high court’s robes.
A Democrat legislator calls Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” because he’s conservative.
There’s nothing the left hates more than black Americans who don’t conform to their agenda.https://t.co/jKimGSTvsJ pic.twitter.com/pirzI6apMt
— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) February 15, 2023
So, of course, Democrats hate him — he’s a living rebuke to the liberal racism that mandates any human being with a hint of skin color must have politics ranging from socialist pink to communist red (accessorized with a rainbow of theatrically confused sexuality).
But what makes Jones’ attack on Thomas stand out is how it basically personifies the ignorant rage of the modern left and the Democratic Party that embodies it.
The progressive rioters who used the death of counterfeit-bill passer George Floyd as a pretext to wreak havoc across the country in 2020 tore down statues of American heroes such as Ulysses Grant in the apparent belief that one 19th-century Civil War general is indistinguishable from another 19th-century Civil War general.
Jones’ smug self-satisfaction while talking about a saying in “the black community,” as though daring any white lawmaker to object, perfectly suits the air of superiority progressives adopt in their push to pretend men are women or women are men, or that sexually grooming schoolchildren is a good idea.
So it was a smug, ignorant and vicious smear that Jones launched on Thomas on Tuesday.
And it was dead wrong.
Is there a better way to describe the modern Democratic Party than that?
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
