GOP Sen. Tim Scott from South Carolina is criticizing Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries from New York for comments he made over 30 years ago as a college student regarding black conservatives.
Scott, the sole black Republican senator, took issue with Jeffries’ description of black conservatives as “right-wing opportunists” and drew a comparison to the “House Negro” during the period of slavery in the US.
“You listen to those comments that, as inflammatory and disgusting as they really are, you’re talking about African Americans not being able to think for ourselves. When our leaders suggest that we cannot, that’s always heading in the wrong direction,” Scott, who has launched a 2024 presidential exploratory committee, told Fox News Digital on Thursday.
He emphasized that “one of the things that I hope we find along the way is that we’ll quit demonizing people who look like us who disagree with us.”
Jeffries wrote the comments in question when he was a 21-year-old student serving as an executive board member of the Black Student Union at Binghamton University in New York State. Per CNN, which first reported on them, he penned an editorial defending his uncle, black studies professor Leonard Jeffries, who had sparked controversy with his incendiary language about Jewish people after being invited to speak on campus by Hakeem.
In the editorial, the future Democratic congressional leader wrote: “There has been a recent trend in the Black political arena which I believe threatens to sustain the oppression of the Black masses. The phenomenon I refer to is the rise of the Black conservative.”
“During the period of African enslavement, our ancestors were given the duality of the Field Negro and the House Negro. The Field Negro labored from dawn ‘till dusk, had nothing but contempt for his white master, and most importantly, the majority of Black slaves, who were Field Negroes. In contemporary terms, what we would refer to as ‘the masses,'” Jeffries wrote.
“The House Negroes didn’t labor in the field, they were domestic servants. The House Negro was dressed up and was led to believe that he or she was better than those in the field. Most importantly, the House Negro sought to emulate the white master. This emulation was not designed with the interests of the masses at heart. Rather, the motivating force was personal gain,” he continued.
He also argued: “Perhaps this is the problem with the Black conservative politician of today. Their political agenda is not designed to contribute to the upliftment of their people. These right-wing opportunists espouse the political ideology of the power structure and, in return, they are elevated to positions historically reserved for whites.”
In the editorial, Jeffries made clear that he was”not trying to encourage the restriction of Black political thought to one particular ideology” but rather encouraging a critical examination of the phenomenon.
Jeffries cited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was then serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as prominent examples of black conservatives.
Scott, in his interview with Fox News, said that “voters are making decisions based on their future and too often now we’re seeing more and more African Americans making the decision to vote as independents or with the Republican Party.”
He argued that “it scares the dickens out of the left… their policies are so out of line and out of sync with commonsense that they see themselves losing their most important base.”
