Just a reminder that this bigoted nutjob was the Virginia GOP’s nominee for Lt. Governor in 2013, and a candidate for the Virginia GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in 2018, among other things. Also note that I can’t recall ever hearing Virginia Republicans denounce EW Jackson in any way, so what else can we conclude but that they have no problem with what he has to say. For instance, see below, as Jackson muses, “for those like me whose ancestors were slaves the question, I believe we should be asking is would our lives have been better if our forefathers and mothers never came to America,” concluding that:
“It’s time to stop deceiving ourselves and listening to the propaganda of leftist demagogues; we are far better off than we would have been if our ancestors had remained in Africa. The same can be said of every ethnic group, but it is especially true of Americans who descended from slaves.”
Yes, Jackson does make a brief, passing reference to the fact that “the slaves who came here for the first two and a half centuries paid a terrible price,” Of course, what Jackson could have said – but didn’t – is that the enslavement of Africans was one of the worst atrocities in human history. According to the Encyclopedia Virginia, for instance, of the 12.5 million enslaved Africans:
“…transported from Africa to the Americas between 1500 and 1866…about 15 percent of all Africans [about 1.8 million] who made the voyage died, most from the accumulation of brutal treatment and inadequate care from the time of their enslavement in the interior of Africa. Others suffocated in the tightly packed holds, while some committed suicide, refused to eat, or revolted. Crew members, meanwhile, died at even higher rates, also mostly from disease. The victims of violence meted out by their officers, sailors in turn dispensed their own brand of terror to the Africans. For Africans who survived, the Middle Passage began with the separation from family and community and ended with a lifetime of enslavement.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his brilliant, must-read essay, “The Case for Reparations,” there was – in addition to “Two hundred fifty years of slavery,” also “Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. 90 years of ‘Jim Crow’.” Oh, and let’s not forget:
“Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society.”
Part of that terrorism involved, horrifically, lynching:
“More than 4400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Millions more fled the South as refugees from racial terrorism, profoundly impacting the entire nation.”
We could go on all day with this, including racism costing black families “hundreds of billions in housing wealth“; the fact that “Fifty years after the Fair Housing Act was signed, America is nearly as segregated as when President Lyndon Johnson signed the law“; the fact that African-Americans to this day have significantly shorter life expectancies on average than most other racial and ethnic groups; and that “people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air.”
Finally, it’s important to note that Africa’s problems today are, in significant part, a result of centuries of brutal colonialism, including large-scale atrocities and massive exploitation – theft on an enormous scale, essentially – of the continent’s natural resources by Europeans. For instance, see the book, “King Leopold’s Ghost,” which describes how Belgian King Leopold II:
“…used his personal control to strip [the Congo Free State] of vast amounts of wealth, largely in the form of ivory and rubber. These labor-intensive industries were serviced by slave labor, and the local peoples were forced to work through various means, including torture, imprisonment, maiming and terror. Christian missionaries and a handful of human rights organizers internationally publicized these atrocities. Slowly, various nations, including Great Britain and the United States of America, began to object to Leopold’s tyranny with the result that the country’s administration was transferred to Belgium. Little changed inside the country, however, until the ivory and rubber were exhausted.”
Leopold’s reign of terror also resulted in the slashing of Congo’s population by ten million people – “a holocaust,” basically. But note how EW Jackson fails to mention any of that, instead bashing Africa and unfavorably/unfairly comparing it to the condition of African Americans.
Anyway, the bottom line is that EW Jackson either has no clue what he’s blathering about, and/or that he somewhat knows what he’s talking about but is lying anyway, and/or is completely unhinged, and/or…all of the above? And again, remember that this guy was the actual nominee – for statewide office, no less – of the Virginia Republican Party, and as far as I’m aware has never been denounced by said Republican Party for his constant stream of bigotry, extremism, etc. What, pray tell, does that say about the Republican Party of Virginia? Nothing good, obviously.
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
