But as I sat with the video some more, it really dawned on me how incredible Jones’ resume is — and what it says about Black candidates for statewide office.
Consider that just five years after earning dual master's degrees in nuclear engineering and technology and policy from MIT, he was named the school’s
assistant dean for graduate students. He got his doctorate from MIT while managing a multimillion-dollar budget as executive director of Boston’s
Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. He was leading a nonprofit, the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, which as
the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette put it in a profile of Jones “promotes and encourages innovative ideas among, and creates opportunities for entrepreneurs, students and other makers” in the state until he resigned to run for governor.
He also checks all the boxes that we don’t say a Black man running for office needs to have — but they absolutely do. Jones is overly educated, far beyond the average white candidate. His wife, Dr. Jerrilyn Jones, and their daughters are featured prominently in the ad — no single, promiscuous African Americans here, just a wholesome upper middle-class family. His last role was all about jobs and businesses and other respectable capitalist ventures, not something confusing like “community organizer.” And the issues he focuses on — education, infrastructure, and “living out our values” — are solidly middle of the road, not too progressive — or too , well, Black — for Arkansas voters.
(Jerrilyn, I must add, is almost as freakishly well-credentialed as her husband is — she’s an Air Force veteran and graduate of Harvard Medical School who’s currently an ER doctor and serves as preparedness medical director at the Arkansas Department of Health. Together, their careers sound like what an eager kindergartner would say when asked what she wants to be when she grows up.)