The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

This Should Not Need to Be Said

Posted on | May 15, 2026 | No Comments

It has been remarked that the demand for racism now exceeds the genuine supply by such a great margin that there is an incentive to manufacture phony racism — thus explaining the frequent hoaxes wherein the alleged victims of oppression claim to be assaulted while, for example, going out to get a Subway sandwich in Chicago.

Such is the latest fake outrage involving a New York Democrat, a Virginia Republican and a Richmond radio talk show host. The New York Times:

“Racist Remark” — flatly asserted as a fact, as if Kiggans had dropped the N-word, and what, pray tell, was this most grievous insult?

A vulnerable Republican congresswoman in Virginia set off an uproar from Democrats after she agreed with remarks by a local radio host who said that Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader and a Black man, should keep his “cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.”
The dust-up surrounding the congresswoman, Representative Jen Kiggans, who is facing one of the country’s toughest re-election battles, is the latest chapter in Virginia’s redistricting saga. Ms. Kiggans was speaking with Rich Herrera, the host of a conservative morning talk show in Richmond, to discuss the fallout from the State Supreme Court’s ruling that invalidated a new congressional map that Virginia voters had approved in an April referendum.
During their conversation, Mr. Herrera lamented a discussion that Mr. Jeffries and Democratic members of the Virginia congressional delegation had on Saturday in which lawmakers discussed the idea of having the entire Virginia Supreme Court replaced in a long-shot effort to restore the voter-approved map.
“If Hakeem Jeffries wants to be involved in Virginia politics, then I suggest he does what a bunch of New Yorkers are doing — leave New York, move down here to Virginia, and run for office down here,” Mr. Herrera said. “If not, get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.”
Ms. Kiggans replied: “That’s right. I, ditto. Yes, yes to that.”
After a Democratic opposition research group, American Bridge, circulated a clip on social media of Ms. Kiggans’s response to Mr. Herrera’s remarks, Democrats denounced Ms. Kiggans, with some calling for her to step down from office.

So, Mr. Herrera — who I assume, from his surname, to be of Hispanic ancestry — used a common colloquialism to object to the New York Democrat’s interference in Virginia politics, a sentiment heartily assented to by Rep. Kiggans, a Navy veteran whose district includes Virginia Beach. According to the New York Times, the phrase “cotton-picking” is inherently racist, which is certainly news to me and every other Southerner who ever used it, among them a singer from Memphis:

Samson told Delilah
Loud and clear:
“Keep your cotton-picking fingers
Out my curly hair!”

That song, incidentally, was written by a black man, Claude Demetrius, who became wealthy overnight when “Hard-Headed Woman” hit No. 1 on the charts and was included in the soundtrack of King Creole.

WHITE PEOPLE PICKED COTTON, TOO!

To suggest or imply otherwise is counter-factual. My parents picked cotton in Alabama, as did my aunts and uncles and grandparents. Basically everybody who lived in the rural South prior to World War II picked cotton, and there is zero evidence that, historically, the adjectival phrase “cotton-picking” had any racial connotation.

Now, let me introduce you to Matt Osborne, whom longtime readers may remember as part of the Team Kimberlin crew back in the day (circa 2012) when myself, Aaron Walker, John Hoge and others were engaged in various courtroom entanglements with the pro se pipsqueak pipe bomber. Osborne was a leftist until, at a progressive conference in 2018, he had an unpleasant encounter with fanatical proponents of the transgender agenda. Osborne has since taken a right-hand turn and, at least privately, apologized for his misdeeds on behalf of Team Kimberlin. It is my habit to work in “file-it-and-forget-it” mode. There’s too much craziness in the world for me to commit neural resources to remembering past grievances, and I do not harbor too many grudges (a few cherished grudges will do). So it’s not as if I am in a position to make a grand gesture of magnanimously “forgiving” Matt Osborne; I’m just too busy (or too lazy) to bother Googling the reasons I should still hate him. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you want to keep hating him, don’t let me stop you. Meanwhile, however, here’s what Matt Osborne wrote about this bogus “cotton-picking” controversy:

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term ‘cotton-picking’ has been used as an intensifier since at least 1917. The entry also lists the word as “damned” due to its supposed racial connotations, but this is a modern projection on the past, because slavery had disappeared for two generations. By the time people said ‘cotton-picking’, two-thirds of sharecroppers were white. Old white people in the south still remember their cotton-picking family members.
Spare me your commentary on the Civil War and slavery, please, because sharecropping was a form of economic bondage that applied to blacks and whites in proportion to their share of the southern population for decades after it.
In T.S. Stribling’s The Forge (1931), which is set in north Alabama during and after the Civil War, Miltiades Vaiden and his sister harvest $2,000 worth of cotton themselves because no labor, free or slave, is available. Stribling based his book on a real family; the Scruggs & Vaden cotton gin still exists in Lauderdale County, though it is completely modern.
Despite many patents issued from the 1850s on, no one could produce a practical machine at scale to replace hand-picking of cotton until the 1940s. International Harvester was the first to do this. Even though the first fully-mechanized cotton field was in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the south was slower to adopt mechanized cotton picking than California, which passed the 50% mechanical tipping point in 1951. Hand-picking was not fully replaced in the south until the end of the 1960s.
‘Cotton-picking’ was a thing that poor white people did for almost a century and the phrase was always part of southern life. It was not exclusively or primarily used as a racial epithet, and it never referred to slavery. Rather, the ‘racial undertone’ only exists today in the minds of the recipients who want to hear it as racist.
Such people take umbrage because they wish to feel offended, not because the phrase was ever offensive. No one gets to skip over the parts of history that fail to conform to their priors. This is as true for the postwar sharecropping period as it is for the antebellum south.
So the reader will excuse me if I refuse to join in the tumult of stupidity over Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia agreeing with a radio show host that Democratic Rep. Hakim Jeffries should get his “cotton-picking hands off Virginia”. The NAACP is demanding that Kiggans apologize for saying “That’s right. Ditto” in response.
This is yet another fake affront from race-baiting activists. Kiggans was clearly agreeing with the sentiment that Jeffries should leave Virginia alone. Neither she nor Rich Herrera, who is Mexican-American, meant ‘cotton-picking’ as a racist epithet any more than Bugs Bunny did.
Rev. Cozy Bailey, President of the NAACP Virginia State Conference, made it very clear in his statement that politics are the actual purpose of the contrived backlash. Virginia Democrats broke the laws of the commonwealth to pass a redistricting plan that the state supreme court predictably overturned.
Bailey complained that “a large percentage” of the ‘Yes’ voters “are people of color, particularly Black people. And so we are very sensitive in this moment to anything that continues to be oppressive or suppressive to our thoughts.”
Translation: I am being overly-sensitive and feigning oppression because I am actually mad about something else. Literally no one is oppressing or suppressing Bailey’s thoughts, or Jeffries’s thoughts, or anyone else’s thoughts with the phrase ‘cotton-picking’. On the contrary, it is Bailey who wishes to oppress and suppress the spoken thoughts of other people.
Kiggans gave a statement to WDBJ7’s sister station in Richmond, WTVR, agreeing that Herreira “never should have used that language, and of course that’s not the sentiment I was agreeing to.” This was not good enough for Bailey, and we can hope Kiggans will ignore calls for further apologies, because America is exhausted with political actors playing the race card on the flimsiest of pretexts. Cotton is not racist. It is a plant. Picking cotton is not racist. It is agriculture.

Hear! Hear! My only addition to what Matt said is to note that it wasn’t just “sharecroppers” who picked cotton. This involves unfortunate stereotypes surrounding so-called “poor whites” in the South. My ancestors were land owners and respectable people. However, as the old saying had it, they were “land rich, but cash poor.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, and continuing for some 75 years thereafter, poverty was an almost universal condition of the rural South. As my beloved Aunt Pat Huber said, “We didn’t know we were poor — everybody was poor!”

While I could write many paragraphs in defense of the Southern yeomanry, my point is that the stigmatization of self-sufficient farmers, who earned their living by honest labor — including, among other arduous tasks, picking their own cotton — is an insult to people who certainly were not “white trash.” Professor Wayne Flynt’s prize-winning book Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites is highly recommended, for anyone who cares to educate themselves on this subject.

To see liberals engage in race-baiting by ignorantly inventing a racist “dog-whistle” connotation for a common phrase makes me angry. It’s so absurd it should not require an answer, and I regret the necessity of having answered at such length. Don’t provoke me again.



 

Category: Economics, History, Media Bias, New York Times, Racism

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