Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Democratic State Senator uses 'N' word


According to Radio Iowa Blog, a white Democrat Senator State Senator Jack Hatch Des Moines Democrat who used the "n" word last week in a conversation with a black legislator – went to the King of King's Church in Des Moines last night to meet with state and local leaders of the NAACP as well as the leaders of the Des Moines Black Ministerial Alliance.
Representative Ako Abdul-Samad, the black legislator who Hatch used the word in front of last week, and Representative Wayne Ford, the longest-serving black legislator, were there as well.

At 11 o'clock this morning, the group involved in last night's meeting held a news conference to talk about their conversation and what comes next. Abdul-Samad said Hatch had started a "snowball" with his comments. "We must draw a clear line," Abdul-Samad said, adding there was no way anyone should be tolerant of the use of the "n" word -- or jokes about blonds or Jews either.


Hatch spoke and said: the "n" word incident had exposed a character flaw in himself. "This is not just something that we can slip under the rug," Hatch said, adding he wants to "keep the dialogue going" about how to best use this incident as a "teaching moment."The news conference lasted half an hour. I will post the audio as soon as I've written Radio Iowa's noontime stories.


UPDATE: Reverend Keith Ratliff, president of the NAACP's Iowa/Nebraska chapter, opened the news conference with this reference to Hatch's statement yesterday on the senate floor: "For State Senator Jack Hatch or some lawmakers to suggest that because tensions were high that it in some way excuses this type of language and dialogue, the NAACP feels is ridiculous and blatantly wrong," Ratliff said.


Hatch a few moments later admitted the incident exposed a "character flaw" in himself. "This is not just something that we can slip under the rug," Hatch said. "There was a character deficit in me that came out that moment -- a moment that I have to share with my family and, well, just about everybody."

UPDATE II: Here is the Radio Iowa story. (A 28-minute-long mp3 of the entire news conference can be found on the bottom of that Radio Iowa page.)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Whites are usually promoted and seldom demoted for using derogatory terms for Blacks. Consider the steinfeld idiot, dog the bounty hunter, rush and others...after all most whites consider Blacks beneath them and never loose their jobs for calling blacks "niggers". From the God Father movie and a hundred others, Blacks are used as a passing insult. Most whites don't respect Blacks and we do so little about it so bring back Nigger so we can truly have freedom of speech and perhaps expose not only the character flaws in them but their true unchanging intention too.

Anonymous said...

Goes to show that all politicians (democratic or republican)may have racist tendencies.

Anonymous said...

So this idiot has a "character" flaw and his poor constituents have to NOW have a teaching moment? lovely, how about he takes his racist ass home because he does not deserve his job.....why I tell ya if he had an R after his name this would be all over the oldstream media but if I didn't check out your site I wouldn't have known!

JadedByPolitics