A New Hampshire Republican lawmaker had the gall to defend President Donald Trump this week by claiming that slavery in America wasn’t racist, a white-washing of history that clearly seeks to justify the owning of other human beings.
As we all know, Trump attacked four Democratic congresswomen of color on Sunday by telling them to go back to the countries they came from even though all four are American citizens and three of them were born in the United States. Trump then followed up that racism by inciting racist chants at his North Carolina rally, resulting in fever-pitch nativism that has drawn comparisons to Nazi Germany.
In response to the outrage over Trump’s racism, former New Hampshire state Rep. Dan Hynes took to Facebook to argue that past presidents are more racist because they owned slaves.
“If Trump is the most racist president in American history, what does that say about all of the other presidents who owned slaves?” Hynes wrote in the since-deleted post.
Upon seeing the post, current New Hampshire GOP state Rep. Werner Horn commented by claiming that owning slaves isn’t racist.
“Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist,” he wrote. “Owning slaves wasn’t a decision predicated on race but on economics. It’s a business decision.”
Seriously, he’s literally repeating an argument often made by historical revisionists in the South.
And he went on to elaborate in remarks made to the New Hampshire Union Leader.
“Slavery later on in the American South was not about the color of the skin of the slaves but their value as workers on the plantations,” Horn said. “The U.S. had abolitionists since the start, people who felt slavery wasn’t moral but they weren’t enslaving black people because they were black. They were bringing in these folks because they were available.”
Let’s just make one thing clear. Southern whites considered people of color inferior to them and used that as justification to enslave them. That’s absolutely racist. Furthermore, these people had lives in Africa. They were no more “available” than white people to do plantation work. Slave-owners were lazy and did not want to pay a workforce so they kidnapped people from Africa and shipped them here in chains against their will to provide free labor. Even poor white immigrants were not enslaved, but would complete a time as indentured servants to pay their debts and could roam free and maintained their rights. Slaves had no rights and were certainly not allowed to roam free and were often treated with brutality.
The fact that people like Horn are openly spewing this bullsh*t about slavery not being racist is a clear consequence of Trump being in the White House. His racism and hate is resulting in the cockroaches of our society to reveal themselves and be proud of it.
Featured Image: Wikimedia
