July 16, 2026
Posted by Jay Livingston
Why is my blog post from four years ago (here) getting all these views this week?* That post was about a substitute teacher in Michigan who had told a student, “Get your cotton-picking hands off that.” The student was Black. And incredulous. “What did you say?” The teacher had thought her comment was innocent, an old idiom she had recalled. She had no idea that it might have been racially offensive.
Something similar happened recently. Jen Kiggans, a Republican congresswoman from Virginia was being interviewed on a Richmond station. The MAGA host, referring to the leader of the House Democrats said, “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, run for office down here, you can represent us.” Then he added,
“If not, get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.”
Kiggans laughed and said, “That’s right. Ditto. Yes. Yes to that.”
To my knowledge, Hakeem Jeffries’s hands have never picked cotton, cotton fields being rather scarce in his Brooklyn district. But he is Black, and the history of cotton-picking in the US is steeped in the exploitation of Blacks by Whites, as many people on the left immediately pointed out.
Kiggans did not exactly apologize. “The radio host should not have used that language and I do not – and did not – condone it.” Unlike the teacher in Michigan, she did not claim ignorance of the racial connotations of “cotton-picking.” Surely she knows that history. So does Chris Graham, a columnist at the Augusta Free Press (here) whose somewhat different take is worth quoting.)
| I’m a White male, I grew up in the South, and as I wrote above, I have to, sheepishly, concede that the racial connotations of the term “cotton-picking” had not occurred to me prior to this controversy. But now that I see it, I can’t unsee it. |
Jen Kiggans did not unsee those racial connotations. But she did ignore them in the interview. That’s obvious. But she also tried to unsee them in her later response to the criticism. She insisted that race was not the issue. In other words, in that moment, awareness of race was unimportant.
What I said in that 2022 post about the teacher applies here as well. If only she —and Kiggans -- had been .. . . What’s the word here? If only there were a word that means
- aware of racist aspects of US history
- aware of how privilege even today has a racial component
- sensitive to the ways those things might look to Black people.
- - - - - - - - -
* I’ve basically stopped blogging, but I do occasionally check the stats Google provides even though I doubt their accuracy.
