Governor of Former Slave State: We’ve Never Had Racist Laws

Governor of Former Slave State: We’ve Never Had Racist Laws

Honest to God, she actually said this: "When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion."

WTF?

How any person in charge of a state, especially a former Confederate state, could say anything this disingenuous and ignorant is, frankly, beyond my comprehension. Surely she must know that her own state cannot claim never to have "done anything based on race," so that covers the disingenuous part.

As for the ignorant part:

America's history of immigration, from the 1880s until my youth, was based on quotas. For a while we we trying to restrict the number of Eastern Europeans (read: Jews and Commies and did I mention Jews), then Southern Europeans, then Asians.

Sometimes we didn't even pretend to use a quota and just banned people outright. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in force from 1881 to 1943, and was only repealed because China was a WW2 ally.

Furthermore, even after the repeal of that odious act, while Chinese people were allowed to immigrate, they were not allowed to marry "white" people in California for another five years. Other states had anti-miscegenation laws until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

So, yeah, I'd say we did a lot of shit based on race.

Not to mention that whole, wacky slavery thing. I'm pretty sure that was race-based, because I didn't read about a lot of Swedish and Danish guys who had to be out there pickin' cotton for free under the Confederate sun.

You have to wonder, "How could she be that stupid?" My guess is that she meant to say just "religion" and the phrase "race and religion" slipped out. and she probably meant to say "passed any laws" instead of the ridiculous phrase "passed any laws or done anything." She would have been on firmer ground in claiming we have never passed any laws based on religion. Not solid ground, mind you, but firmer than the path she chose. America has an uneven and sometimes shameful history in its treatment of Jews (and sometimes Catholics), but that has normally been de facto, not de jure, and the laws against Eastern European immigration were meant to keep Jews out, but they didn't specifically say that.