In a scathing attack aimed at Sen. Doug Jones (D-Mountain Brook), The Root columnist Michael Harriot criticized Alabama’s junior senator for his vote on a measure to roll back some provisions of the Obama-era Dodd-Frank law that imposed regulations on the financial sector.
The bill passed in the U.S. Senate by a 67-31 margin and was applauded for being a bipartisan effort.
However, Harriot interpreted the law as a betrayal of the African-American voters that supported Jones in the 2017 special election:
My grandmother, a slight woman whose values still trickle down through four generations, and who radiated love and wisdom as if she were our family’s own self-contained solar system, once showed me the scars on her legs from being bitten by a police dog and instructed me to “trust a white man as far as you can throw him.”
While that ancient African proverb now seems like a bit of reverse racism, Alabama’s black voters, in all their egalitarian forgiveness and goodwill, ignored it this past December when they cast their ballots for Doug Jones, sending him to the Senate chambers to represent them.
Harriot, who claims to have once been a college macroeconomics instructor, goes on to add Jones and the Democratic Party “have thrown black people to the wolves.” He argues the bipartisan effort passed by the Senate on Wednesday “strips away for some banks the requirement to report the race, ethnicity and gender of their mortgage customers.”
That according to Harriot will make it easier for lenders “to deny black customers without fear of repercussion or lawsuits.”
Harriot goes on to note Jones had overwhelming support by the African-American community in Alabama last December but hammers him for his voting record:
[W]hen it comes to Doug Jones, even though he received 93 percent of the black male vote and a whopping 98 percent of the black female vote, he has not demonstrated that he intends to do anything for black Alabama voters. Jones has supported Trump’s position on 60 percent of the issues since black voters sent him to the Senate.
In an op-ed posted to AL(dot)com on Thursday, Jones defended his vote on the bill. He called it “regulatory relief,” and said it would not enable Wall Street to make the same mistakes of the past. He also hailed it for restoring the role credit unions play in some communities.
“At the end of the day, this will help our Alabama banks focus on what they do best – making loans to Main Street, while letting federal regulators do what they do best – focus their limited resources on Wall Street,” Jones wrote.
Harriot’s publication The Root is described as “a top online destination for African-American news and commentary.” It initially launched in 2008 by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Donald Graham. Gates is known by some as the Harvard professor arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in 2009. That arrest led to then-President Barack Obama’s famous beer summit with Gates and the arresting officer, Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley.
Graham, chairman of Graham Holdings Company, is the son of long-time Washington Post publishers Katharine and Philip Graham.
In 2015, Univision purchased The Root.
(Image: Michael Harriot/Facebook & Wikimedia Commons)
Jeff Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and works as the editor of Breitbart TV. Follow Jeff on Twitter @jeff_poor.
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