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Wyoming Lawmaker Suggests Black Americans Are ‘Stuck’ In A Mentality ‘Worse Than Slavery’

Rep. Jeremy Haroldson said “people cannot get free” because of their “past.”

A Wyoming legislator has raised some eyeybrows after he suggested there are two sides to the horrors of slavery.

According to The Star Tribune, the House Education Committee had a hearing about HB-177, which is a bill that would adjust parts of Wyoming’s public schools curriculum away from a “liberal view.”

Rep. Jeremy Haroldson (R-Wheatland) told lawmakers on March 17, “Slavery was something that shouldn’t have happened in America, but it did. But we’ve created slavery into a place that has created a position of being stuck, in my opinion, for a people group.”

He continued, “And that’s a sad place to be. And that was probably, in my opinion, worse than the slavery itself, because we have created a place where people cannot get free from because of their past.”

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Haroldson also added, “So slavery needs to be discussed. It needs to be brought forward and the different views, that slavery was not maybe what it has been painted as in this nation, completely.”

Additionally, Haroldson claimed the aim of the bill was to  recalibrate what he saw as a current curriculum that is “very much tilting more towards a liberal view of education.”

The bill would require Wyoming public schools to educate children on the United States Constitution but also on “threats encountered by the democratic republic and free society.” According to the bill, those threats include identity politics.

Haroldson felt the school system now focused too much on racism and that there was a lack of knowledge about the U.S. Constitution. But when asked if he knew what the 19th amendment of U.S. The Constitution was, the pastor replied, “I would have to look at it right now ma’am.”

The 19th amendment gave women the right to vote. 

HB-177 failed to advance on a 7-2 vote.

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