April 22, 2023

As one would expect, Hakeem Jeffries, the first Black minority Speaker of the House, denied his history as a racist. Like many blacks, he may believe he can’t be a racist because blacks don’t have the “power to effectuate their prejudices,” or when blacks slur whites, they aren’t slurs because they’re truisms to achieve equity. Jeffries’ position highlights why American anti-racism programs won’t be successful until they eliminate that mindset and, instead, encourage blacks to be honest about their racism.

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Black economist Walter Williams said: “Racial discrimination and racism in our country could have earned a well-deserved death, but it has been resurrected by race hustlers and poverty pimps as I call them, such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton… who make a living on the grievances of blacks.” If Williams were still alive, he would have a longer list of well-known race hustlers, like Hakeem and several other senior people in Washington.

In 2013, Hakeem was asked about his overtly racist and anti-Semitic Uncle Leonard Jeffries. He said he had only a vague recollection of Leonard’s controversial positions. “There was no internet during that era.”

Last week, articles surfaced that made a mockery of his answer. Hakeem had invited his uncle to speak at Hakeem’s college, Binghamton University. Jewish students objected, noting the recent controversy surrounding Leonard’s being asked to step down as the Chairman of Black Studies at the City College of New York after a speech in which he called the president of the college the “Head Jew” of the “kabala” of Jews running the college. He also said Jews financed the slave trade.

Image: Hakeem Jeffries. YouTube screen grab.

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Leonard was also infamous for his “Melanin” theory, which advances that blacks are the superior race with greater intelligence and spiritual qualities. He argued that African Americas are warm, humanistic sun people and European Americans are cold, materialistic, ice people.

Hakeem dismissed the Jewish students’ concerns about his uncle’s bizarre racist and antisemitic theories, stating in a press conference, “We have no intention of canceling a presentation that has factual information proven through scholarly documents and texts.” Instead, Hakeem asserted that characterizing his uncle as antisemitic was unfair and, in a 1992 op-ed in his college paper, defended his uncle’s controversial positions.

The problem with Leonard Jeffries’ manifestly racist Melanin theory, the one Hakeem vociferously supported and that Leonard defends on the grounds that it’s objectively true, is that Jeffries isn’t the only black academic asserting it.

While the Melanin “theory” is racist, Leonard claimed it was not, because he simply explains racial differences. Thirty years later, Ibram Kendi, whose book How to be an Anti-Racist is on the Navy’s recommended reading list and is one of the most important racial authorities on the left, asserts something similar. When he calls all whites racist, the word “racist is not a pejorative…. It is descriptive.”

Kendi’s book reads like an anti-white polemic, but he said he doesn’t hate white people. “How can you hate a group of people for who they are?” He also supports an idea promoted by Hakeem, that of good blacks and Uncle Toms. In his book, Kendi wrote: “I had imagined history as a battle: on one side Black folks, on the other a team of ‘them niggers’ and White folks.”

Most of Hakeem’s 1992 op-ed was spent denigrating black conservatives who he equated to “House Negroes.” He specifically mentioned Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Shelby Steele. Now that it’s come to light, black conservative congressman Byron Donalds has said he thinks Hakeem should apologize for his house negro comparison.