Rev. Jesse Jackson says Duck Dynasty star’s comments more offensive than Rosa Parks’ bus driver
From Your BlackWorld
Just when it seemed that the controversy surrounding Duck Dynasty reality star Phil Robertson was dying down, Rev. Jesse Jackson has stepped in and added more fuel to the flame. According to Jackson, Robertson’s comments are not just racist and wrongheaded, they’re actually more offensive than the incident which sparked the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“These statements uttered by Robertson are more offensive than the bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 59 years ago,” Jackson said in a press release. “At least the bus driver, who ordered Rosa Parks to surrender her seat to a white person, was following state law. Robertson’s statements were uttered freely and openly without cover of the law, within a context of what he seemed to believe was ‘white privilege.’”
Robertson has been embroiled in controversy ever since he made homophobic and racial comments during a GQ interview. The reality TV star questioned why any man would want to be with another man, and he also diminished the struggle of African-Americans during the pre-civil rights era in the South:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any Black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The Blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the Blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one Black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were Godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
The network which broadcasts Duck Dynasty, A&E, has suspended Robertson.
