Justice Clarence Thomas is the second black man to serve on the United States Supreme Court, yet only last week a Georgia state legislator used the racial slur “Uncle Tom” to refer to him, possibly because of his conservative leanings.
When voting along party lines to commemorate Georgia native and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with a statue on Capitol grounds, the Georgia State Senate uttered a racist slur on Tuesday, passing the measure 32 to 20. Democratic Senator Emmanuel Jones likened Senator Thomas to a slave who “sold his soul to the slave owner” in the days preceding the vote.
Justice Thomas has made “a whole laundry list of things that I find disrespectful,” as Jones phrased it.
I don’t want to utilize this term too extensively here because I’m just trying to tell you what we have in African American communities when we talk about someone of color, but we have an expression that harkens back to slavery and a person abandoning his community. That’s what they call it in the black community. We call him “Uncle Tom” since that’s the term often used in our society.
As Jones did not know where the name “Uncle Tom” originated, he decided to use it as a derogatory epithet for African-Americans who do not support the Democrat Party, which paradoxically backed slavery and Jim Crow. The name alludes to the protagonist of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a moral figure who played an important role in fostering abolitionist views during the Civil War.
Whoever coined the name “Uncle Tom” probably had his soul sold to the slave masters during the era of slavery, but I can’t say for sure. An “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” type of story.
Jones went on to imply that Thomas supports policies that hurt and persecute black people.
Breitbart News has reported frequently on the racist slur “Uncle Tom” being used against Clarence Thomas because of his conservative views.