Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries Defended Anti-Semitic Uncle and Louis Farrakhan, Compared Black Conservatives to ‘House Negroes’ in College

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Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries has long claimed to have been far removed from and only barely aware of his uncle’s anti-semitic commentary, but new reporting from CNN reveals that Jeffries invited Leonard Jeffries to speak at Binghamton University and defended him in an op-ed shortly after the controversy erupted.

Leonard Jeffries delivered a speech in 1991 during which he claimed to have knowledge of “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood by people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani,” to portray African-Americans poorly in movies.

“Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a financial system of destruction of black people,” argued the elder Jeffries, who at various points referred to Jews as “dogs” and “skunks,” and was eventually relieved of his position as a professor at City University of New York as a result of his statements.

The younger Jeffries, who succeeded Nancy Pelosi as the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives earlier this year, previously said he had just a “vague recollection” of the controversy.

“When a lot of the controversy took place and my brother and I were away at school. There was no Internet during that era and I can’t even recall a daily newspaper in the Binghamton, N.Y., area but it wasn’t covering the things that the New York Post and Daily News were at the time,” explained Jeffries in 2013.

But CNN has discovered that Jeffries invited his uncle to speak on campus in 1992, and defended the decision in an op-ed after it provoked a backlash at Binghamton.

“Dr. Leonard Jeffries and Minister Louis Farrakhan have come under intense fire,” observed Jeffries in one paragraph about his uncle and the longtime leader of the Nation of Islam, who often uses the adjective “Satanic” to describe Jews and heaps praise on Adolf Hitler. “Where do you think their interests lie? Dr. Jeffries has challenged the existing white supremist educational system and long standing distortion of history. His reward has been a media lynching complete with character assassinations and inflammatory erroneous accusations.”

Elsewhere, Jeffries lambasted African-Americans with political views to the right of himself.

“There has been a recent trend in the Black political arena which I believe threatens to sustain the oppression of the Black masses. The phenomenon I refer to is the rise of the Black conservative,” asserted Jeffries before going on to compare the Black conservative to the “House Negro”:

During the period of African enslavement, our ancestors were given the duality of the Field Negro and the House Negro. The Field Negro labored from dawn ‘till dusk, had nothing but contempt for his white master, and most importantly, the majority of Black slaves, who were Field Negroes. In contemporary terms, what we would refer to as ‘the masses.’ The House Negroes didn’t labor in the field, they were domestic servants. The House Negro was dressed up and was led to believe that he or she was better than those in the field. Most importantly, the House Negro sought to emulate the white master. This emulation was not designed with the interests of the masses at heart. Rather, the motivating force was personal gain.

Perhaps this is the problem with the Black conservative politician of today. Their political agenda is not designed to contribute to the upliftment of their people. These right-wing opportunists espouse the political ideology of the power structure and, in return, they are elevated to positions historically reserved for whites.

“The House Negro of the slavery era and the Black conservative of today are both opportunists interested in securing some measure of happiness for themselves within the existing social order,” wrote Jeffries in a particularly incendiary passage.

Christiana Stephenson, a spokeswoman for Jeffries, told CNN that he “has consistently been clear that he does not share the controversial views espoused by his uncle over thirty years ago.”