Photo credit: Jep’s Twitter account
In an era when it’s easy to get labeled a bigot or a racist, it’s doubly difficult when you’re a redneck, bearded, gun-toting Christian like Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson.
The hardest part is that so much of what is assumed of Robertson is stereotyped. If you had a DeLorean that would take you back to Robertson’s childhood, you might think you overshot and landed in 1850s. Because although he grew up in the 1950s, they lived a hundred years behind. No bathtub. They did have a plow horse and milk cow, so, they never considered themselves poor.
Therein lies the rub.
When the controversy swirled around Phil Robertson’s GQ when he said,
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
Of course, that set off a left-wing feeding frenzy, claiming that what he meant by it was that there was no need for the civil rights movement. That there was no discrimination. All of which translated to Phil Robertson is a racist.
That was not what he was saying, if you look at his words. He said, they were all the same. He worked side-by-side with godly men.
Enter, Jep Robertson, Phil’s youngest son. He and his wife Jessica have a new series Jep & Jessica: Growing The Dynasty. The first episodes focused on their adoption of a newborn– a black baby boy. They named him after his newly adopted father, Jules Jeptha Robertson. The baby’s name is Jules Augustus Robertson, affectionately called “Gus” for short.
Gus is their fifth child. All of Jessica’s babies had to be born through cesarean. After their fourth child was born, the doctor advised them not to have anymore. With so much to offer a child, adoption seemed the right way to go.
So how did Phil Robertson, the “racist” accept his new grandson? With open arms. The family has joked about how misquoted and misunderstood the outspoken Patriarch of the Robertson family is. To Phil Robertson, their is only one race–it’s commonly called the human race.
