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Thursday, February 10, 2011
News S.C. State Sen. Robert Ford: Blacks and whites don't work as hard as Mexicans
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 11:17 AM
- Thanks to CarolinaPoliticsOnline.com for this photo of Sen. Ford.
Oh, yes he did. But, that's not all ...
Here's a snippet from The Washington Post:
An African-American lawmaker in South Carolina said Tuesday that stricter illegal immigration laws would hurt the state because blacks and whites don't work as hard as Hispanics.State Sen. Robert Ford made his remarks during a Senate committee debate over an Arizona-style immigration law, eliciting a smattering of nervous laughter in the chamber after he said "brothers" don't work as hard as Mexicans. He continued that his "blue-eyed brothers" don't either.
Once his ancestors were freed from slavery, he said, they didn't want to do any more hard work, so they were replaced by Chinese and Japanese.
And then, later the same day, Sen. Ford defended his comments:
Sen. Ford told News Channel 7 Wednesday morning, "I said that, in most cases, about 99 percent of the time, the people who are doing the hard, hard, dirty work are Mexican immigrants. Because I said now as a black man, I'm not going to be doing what they do. I'm not going to be laying no foundation for no building, because I can't do that kind of work. I'm not going to get on top of no roof in 100-degree temperature. I don't do that kind of work. But they do it and now we should accept the fact that they've done more so than anybody else and make them citizens like everybody else that worked their way to American citizenship.""When the Pilgrims came here, they brought with them indentured servants--other Europeans who had to work their way to freedom. Right after that, we brought in, our country brought in, Africans who became slaves for 246 years. Right after that, we brought in the Chinese workers to build the railroad, up until 1890. And then right after 1890, we brought in for the Industrial Revolution, Eastern European workers," he says.
"I said I'm asking my black brothers, my European brothers, my Chinese brothers and my blue-eyed brothers to accept my Mexican brothers because now they're trying to work themself up into citizenship," he says.
Read the entire article, by Robert Kittle, here.
Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman is an independent journalist who contributes commentary on Creative Loafing's CLog blog four days a week in addition to writing for several other local media organizations. To learn more, click the links or follow Rhi on Twitter.
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