Emmanuel Jones, a Democratic Georgia State senator, recently said that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was the same as a slave that "sold his soul to the slave master."
"There’s a whole laundry list of positions that Justice Thomas has taken that I find offensive," Jones said, adding:
In the black community, we have an expression, and I don’t want to use this label too deeply here because I’m just trying to tell you what we have in African American communities when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to days of slavery and that person betraying his own community. We have a term in the black community. That term that we use is called ‘Uncle Tom.’
History buffs will know that the term "Uncle Tom" refers to a character in the book Uncle Tom's Cabin whom Breitbart describes as a "noble character who helped raise abolitionist sentiments during the Civil War era."
Jones admitted he didn't know where the term came from. He said:
"An Uncle Tom is either a fictional or a non-fictional character, I don’t know the origin of Uncle Tom, but it talks about a person who, back during the days of slavery, sold his soul to the slave masters. That is the story of an Uncle Tom.