Over the weekend, Mississippi State Rep. Gene Alday (R) made some ridiculously racist comments that he now, of course, says were taken out of context, The Clarion-Ledger reported.
In an article about public education funding published in the Ledger on Sunday, Alday said that he came “from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what [he calls] ‘welfare crazy checks.’ They don’t work.” He also said that once when he went to the emergency room, he “liked to died. [He] laid in there for hours because they (blacks) were in there being treated for gunshots.”
Yesterday, Alday tried to backtrack on those comments, telling the Ledger,
“I’m not a bad person, and that makes me look like an evil person. I didn’t do anything wrong. The guy made me look like a fool.”
Alday also said that he didn’t know his comments would be published, and if he had, he wouldn’t have made them.
“It was late at night and [Jerry Mitchell, the original article’s author] called me,” said Alday. “He asked me a question back to when I was in law enforcement … I have a way of talking and saying, ‘take this off the record.’”
Mitchell, however, said he contacted Alday about public education funding and it was Alday who pushed the conversation towards the topic of race. According to Mitchell, the comments were reported accurately and in the context in which they occurred.
The “out of context” excuse is a favorite of politicians, especially Republicans, when they get caught expressing their true racist feelings. Whether he thought he was talking about public education or not, Alday still made ridiculously offensive comments.
Mississippi is unfortunately associated with racism and white supremacy, and no matter how far the GOP there tries to distance itself from those ideas, its members consistently pop up with comments like these. It’s hard to pretend the party isn’t racist when things like this happen so frequently there.
