New Hampshire lawmaker deletes post, clarifies after saying 'owning slaves doesn't make you racist'
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/453932-new-hampshire-lawmaker-deletes-post-clarifies-after-saying
A Republican state representative from New Hampshire, is under fire for a since-deleted post in which he wrote that “owning slaves doesn’t make you racist.”
Werner Horn had made the comment on Facebook in response to a post shared by former state Rep. Dan Hynes (R) in which he bashed HuffPost for a story about a historian who said President Trump is tied with former President Andrew Johnson as the “most racist president in American history.”
“LOL. This is why no one believe the media (huffpo),” Hynes wrote. “Trump is the most racist president in American history, what does that say about all of the other presidents who owned slaves.”
Horn wrote in a since-deleted response: “Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist…”
Horn later told HuffPost in an interview released on Thursday that he was being sarcastic in his response and said that his comment is by no means to be construed as “support for either slavery or racism.”
But in a follow-up statement, Horn said that although it is “never OK to own another person,” he feels that labelling the institution of slavery “is a false narrative.”
Horn argued in the interview that slave owners were making a “an economic decision” when purchasing slaves — a decision, he told the publication, that race did not play a deciding factor in.
“Unless you’re going to try to tell me those plantation owners were so in the dark ages that they delighted in being also sexist and ageist — practicing age discrimination and sex discrimination when they bought slaves — I don’t see how you can say they’re being racist because they bought black slaves,” he continued.
“My comment specifically was aimed at a period of time when that was how you survived, that’s how you fed your family,” the lawmaker went on. “It wasn’t ‘I want to own a black person today.’ It was, ‘I need to feed my family; I need five guys who can work stupidly long hours in the sun without killing themselves.' ”
During the interview, Horn was also pressed about his thoughts on a recent controversy ensnarling the president after he told four Democratic congresswomen of color — Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) – to "go back" to their where they came from.
In his response, Horn said he thought the president’s comments were “rude” and “inaccurate” but broke from other lawmakers who described the remarks as “racist.”
We've hit peak, "I'm not racist BUT..." levels here.
If I play devil's advocate (and play damn hard), I suppose I could see what Horn was trying to get at, but even that generous assumption still reveals an disgustingly unforgivable ignorance about history. He's essentially saying that because slaveowners didn't own slaves out of pure sadism and instead had some money-making interests in mind, that means that slave-owning was purely monetarily driven and therefore not racist at all, completely ignoring everything we know about how slavery in the Americas got started, how it was justified, how even many anti-slave people felt about black people, etc. 'Cuz if you don't know, there's a reason that none of those "purely economically motivated" slaves were white. (And no, the Irish were never slaves, sorry that conservative facebook meme lied to you.)
As small an incident as this may be, I believe it is emblematic of larger disturbing trends going on in America, namely the increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics of mainstream right-wingers to sympathize with horrific traditions and practices without having to suffer the label of a bigot. And, of course, continuing to cling to the notion that the south was somehow an innocent victim in the Civil War.
What says you?
