A Georgia State Senator referred to Justice Clarence Thomas, the second black man to serve on the United States Supreme Court, by the racial slur “Uncle Tom” this week, presumably over his conservative leanings.
The racist comment occurred on Tuesday as the Georgia State Senate voted 32-20 along party lines to create a statue on Capitol grounds dedicated to Justice Clarence Thomas, a native of the Peach State. In the leadup to the vote, Sen. Emmanuel Jones (D) likened Thomas to a slave that “sold his soul to the slave master.”
“There’s a whole laundry list of positions that Justice Thomas has taken that I find offensive,” Jones said, adding:
In the black community, we have an expression, and I don’t want to use this label too deeply here because I’m just trying to tell you what we have in African American communities when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to days of slavery and that person betraying his own community. We have a term in the black community. That term that we use is called ‘Uncle Tom.’
The term “Uncle Tom” refers to the character in the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a noble character who helped raise abolitionist sentiments during the Civil War era, but Jones admitted that he did not know the origins of “Uncle Tom,” settling only on its use as a pejorative against black Americans who oppose the Democrat Party, which ironically supported slavery and Jim Crow.
“An Uncle Tom is either a fictional or a non-fictional character, I don’t 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. That is the story of an Uncle Tom.”
Jones further asserted that Clarence Thomas has supported policies meant to hurt and subjugate black Americans.
As Breitbart News has reported on numerous occasions, opponents of Clarence Thomas have often resorted to calling him by the racial slur “Uncle Tom” due to his conservative leanings.