Over the weekend, Religious Right activist E.W. Jackson, who is seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine in November, delivered what he billed as “a ground breaking speech on race in America.”
Contrary to Jackson’s bold assertion, the address didn’t contain anything groundbreaking and generally consisted of the standard misinformation and psuedo-history that has been peddled by the Religious Right for years, with Jackson at one point absurdly asserting that America has never been a racist country because the practice of slavery was originated by Muslims.
“We must reject the idea that America has ever been a racist country,” Jackson declared. “It has not.”
Admitting that while there have been racists and racism in America, Jackson insisted that “America has never been a racist country” because “it was actually Arab Muslims who were the first to enslave sub-Saharan Africans.”
“It was Arab Muslims who were the first to create racial ideology,” he added. “It was not Europeans who came up with racial ideology, it was Arab Muslims. It was not Europeans who started the African slave trade; the Portuguese were the first to engage in it—the first Europeans—but they learned it from them!”
