A top campaign aide for Republican Senate candidate for Virginia Corey Stewart came under fire Wednesday for repeatedly using the phrase “house negro” to describe the GOP establishment, as well for making disparaging remarks about civil rights icons Rosa Parks and John Lewis, according to a report.
Rick Shaftan, a consultant and spokesman for Stewart, employed the controversial term on three occasions on social media between 2014 and 2017, per CNN’s KFile.
“There are a lot of parallels between the ‘House Negro’ and the GOP Establishment,” Shaftan wrote on Twitter in October 2014.
“Notice how Obama calls the Speaker ‘John’, like he’s a plantation owner talking to Malcolm X’s House Negro,” he tweeted in September 2015.
Then in September 2015, Shaftan took to Facebook to write: “Black ‘leaders’ are working overtime to isolate ‘the community’ from everyone who isn’t Black. And almost no black people will say anything for fear of being labeled an #UncleTom #Oreo #HouseNegro.”
“House Negro” refers to an enslaved person who worked in their master’s home rather than outdoors, most likely in plantation fields. The implication, CNN reports, is that slaves who spent time in close proximity to their masters were more loyal to them as opposed to their fellow slaves.
In addition to downplaying Rosa Parks and John Lewis’ advocacy during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, Shaftan also belittled the Black Lives Matter campaign and questioned the legitimacy of former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate on social media.
Shaftan did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment. But he took to Facebook in the aftermath of a Daily Beast story, which reported his past description of three majority-black U.S. cities as “shitholes.” “I must have said something worse than that in all these years! They need to look harder,” he wrote, according to CNN.
Stewart’s campaign, however, lamented the state of political discourse, saying it was impossible to talk about issues regarding “how to improve prosperity for all people.”
“While far Left liberals and weak Republicans play the race card to shut down all debate, we can’t even have a conversation about how to improve prosperity for all people,” Noel Fritsch, Stewart’s campaign spokesman, wrote in a statement.
Stewart has frequently had to defend himself against allegations he is a racist given his association with Jason Kessler, the man behind the deadly 2017 white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Stewart faces incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., in the general election on Nov. 6.
