Richmond – On Monday, Jen Kiggans was caught in a classic Republican position: nodding, laughing and happily agreeing with another person’s racist remarks. As reported by the New York Times, the Guardian and Reuters, as well as in the Virginia press, on Monday morning, Kiggans appeared on a Richmond-area conservative talk show to discuss redistricting. When the subject of Representative Hakeem Jeffries came up during the conversation, the host of the show, Rich Herrera, told Kiggans that Jeffries, who is Black, should keep his “cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.” Kiggans, who authored a bill during her time in the General Assembly to ban public schools from mentioning race and other so-called “divisive concepts”, laughed and said to the host, “That’s right. Ditto. Yes yes yes to that.” In a statement, Speaker Jeffries’s office said, “Extremists who endorse disgusting, vile and racist language are pathetic. Jen Kiggans has no interest in our nation’s progress toward a multi-racial democracy and apparently craves a return to the days of Jim Crow racial oppression in the South.”
“Jen Kiggans wants our community to believe she’s a moderate, but the truth is, she has done everything in her power to roll back progress for Black Virginians,” said Ashleigh Crocker, Interim Executive Director of Progress Virginia. “Her record is clear: she sponsored legislation to ban schools from teaching accurate history and the truth about racism in our country. She cheered when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. She has voted with Donald Trump 100% of the time on policies that disproportionally harm Black and Brown families. So when she went on the radio and heard a vile racial slur to attack the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, nobody should be surprised that Kiggans laughed and said “Yes yes yes.” This isn’t a slip of the tongue: it’s Jen Kiggans telling us who she actually is. You don’t get to spend your career trying to erase Black history, undermine Black voters, and rubber-stamping a president who has declared war on civil rights, and then claim you didn’t understand a racial slur. She has no business claiming she represents the views of our community, and the voters are ready to make that clear in November.”
Background on the phrase “cotton-picking”:
- The phrase “cotton-picking” has a specifically racist history that dates back to the 1850s
- “Cotton-picking”, as a phrase, is associated strongly with the American South, and even within a deracialized framework or when referring to white people is subtextually understood to be derogatory, because of the associations with Black labor and poverty [Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1972, s.v. cotton-picking, n. & adj.; 1893, cotton-picker, n.]
- Jen Kiggans was born in Florida and has lived her adult life in Virginia