New Jersey Legislator Says US Blacks Should Thank the Lord for Slavery

Michael Patrick Carroll, a Republican member of the New Jersey state assembly, says that African-Americans should be thankful for slavery:

[I]f slavery was the price that a modern American's ancestors had to pay in order to make one an American, one should get down on one's knees every single day and thank the Lord that such price was paid.

Carroll made these remarks in expressing his opposition to a bill before the assembly that if passed would make New Jersey the first northern state to express apology for the institution of slavery. Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia have passed similar apology bills, and another is being considered by the Georgia legislature.

Yes, thank the Lord for slavery, without which it wouldn't be true that in California a black man is more likely to go to prison than to a state college. Those poor bastards who died in shackles in the Middle Passage were just unlucky. Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings, drugs in the ghetto — Praise Jesus!

(via Mary Shaw)