Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson has been invited to address the Republican Leadership Conference on Thursday that will also be addressed by the likes of RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
As I’m sure you recall, Phil Robertson made these comments during an interview with GQ which resulted in a brief suspension by A&E.
“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.”
Did black people complain while they were picking cotton? “Not once” he says. “They were happy” and “no one was singing the blues.”
Here’s what Cliven Bundy said more recently:
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
Were they better off “pre-entitlement” and “pre-welfare” as Robertson suggested? Bundy seems to think so.
I don’t see much daylight between the words of Cliven Bundy and the words of Phil Robertson. Both have suggested that black people may have been better off picking cotton.
Of course you could go a step further and connect the words of both men to the words of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan who recently took a page out of Charles Murray and said that generations of lazy inner city men (read: black) don’t value work because, obviously, government welfare made them that way.
Phil Robertson also shared his deep thoughts about gay sex during the same GQ interview. Those comments drew more attention that his comments on race at the time.