IF YOU’RE wondering where Jesse Jackson got the idea to cut off someone’s nuts, consider this theory:
It probably came from his wife.
No doubt Jacqueline Jackson had the same thought when she was hit with the news that her philandering husband had a daughter with a woman who wasn’t her.
It was in 2001 that word surfaced that the civil-rights leader had had an affair with a Rainbow PUSH Coalition staffer, a relationship that resulted in the birth of a baby girl.
Seven years later, a black politician from Chicago not named Jesse Jackson, who’s on the verge of making history by claiming the Democratic nomination, gets on a stage and talks about responsible fatherhood.
Well, he had to hit a nerve.
“If we are honest with ourselves,” Barack Obama said in a Father’s Day speech, “we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.
“You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled – doubled – since we were children.”
Obama followed this social observation with a proposal to expand President Bush’s faith-based initiative and with speeches at black churches about morality.
That’s apparently what made Jackson sharpen his scissors.
“See, Barack [has] been talking down to black people,” Jackson – who didn’t know his mike was open – whispered to a fellow guest before taping a Fox News Channel program. “I wanna cut his nuts out.”
If Jackson is so eager to start cutting anatomy, he might want to start with his own tongue.
Since when is it “talking down” to black people to give a speech about responsibility?
Since when is it bad for a black man to say black men should be good fathers?
Jackson rightly apologized for his nasty remarks (though after first pointing out that he’d made them in a private conversation).
But Jackson, who once had his own cable-TV show, should know better. What kind of private conversation was he expecting to have in a TV studio with a microphone clipped to his lapel?
But perhaps we’re overreacting. After all, it could have been worse – Jackson could have used the n-word.