After the president of Lipscomb University apologized Friday for hosting black students in a house which had cotton decorations, one man took to social media to express his outrage at political correctness run amok.
Facebook user Frank Jones, a self proclaimed “old white dude,” posted a picture to his account on Sunday of a white family picking cotton in the southern United States.
The post, which is no longer available to the public, immediately went viral, garnering over 45,000 shares.
“This is for all those black college kids who were so offended by the cotton centerpiece. My guess is not a single one has ever been in a cotton field,” Jones wrote in the caption accompanying the photo.
“Well folks this is what it looks like to crop cotton,” he added. “Grew up doing this. Started picking cotton at age 6. Worked our farm and worked for neighbors farms. Did I mention some were black? Didn’t matter when you had to get the crop in. All by hand so we helped each other. Black and white we worked together, ate together and shared the same water jug.”
Jones used the second half of his post to express frustration with the current political climate of “people being offended by everything and protesting things they don’t even really have an understanding of.”
“Yes I am white. Yes I am a proud son of the South. Yes I grew up eating what those college kids called ‘black food’ as if they even knew ‘soul food’ is what everyone in the South ate,” Jones said.
“Tonight I’m having pork butts, mustard greens, black eye peas and cornbread. So how about shut the hell up and grow up!” he concluded.
Over 12,000 people commented on the photo, many of them saying they shared Jones’ sentiments.
“My mother agrees whole heartedly! She’s proud to say she was a share cropper,” one user wrote.
“Good little speech there! I agree the younger ones have not studied history,” another said.
Jones has a history of political diatribes on Facebook, as much of his timeline filled with humorous memes about the current political climate.
But on Tuesday, Jones announced he wouldn’t be publicly posting again for a while.
He said he was surprised by the overwhelming response he received on his cotton post, and apologized for not being able to respond to all those who had sent him a friend request.
Jones also defended his previous post.
“Couple of folks think I was off base with that post but most understood my intent,” he wrote. “No black person I grew up working with ever mentioned anything about cotton reminding them of slavery. And yes, we talked about the civil war and about the then policy of segregation.”
“It was the segregated South but not in the cotton fields or the one general store we had or in our conversations. We all had hope it would change one day,” he added.
(via: Western Journalism)
