Werner Horn, a New Hampshire lawmaker, has come under fire this week after saying that owning slaves doesn't make someone racist, according to the USA Today.

The comment came in response to a Facebook post by former state House member Dan Hynes, who asked if Trump could be the most racist president even though multiple past presidents owned slaves.

“Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist…," Horn responded. “It shouldn’t be surprising since owning slaves wasn’t a decision predicated on race but on economics. It’s a business decision.”

Hynes posed his rhetorical question after former Vice President Joe Biden referred to Trump, saying on Monday "there has never been a president in American history who has been so openly racist and divisive as this man," according to The Hill.

"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 told the New Hampshire Union Leader in a phone interview Wednesday. "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.”

For those unfamiliar, the institution of slavery started in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 African slaves to Jamestown, Virginia, according to the History Channel. Historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million Black slaves were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone in order to work the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast.

Ray Buckley, chairman of New Hampshire's Democratic Party, criticized Horn's comments, as well as the lack of condemnation by the state's Republican governor Chris Sununu.

"Sununu’s silence on Trump’s racism has sanctioned this kind of behavior from his Republican Party and has permitted comments like these with impunity," Buckley said in a statement to the Union Leader. "It’s disgusting."

Horn has since deleted his post, saying that his original thought was taken out of context and used without further clarification in articles by the Huffington Post and Union Leader.

Werner-Horn

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