US senator Tom Cotton has been heavily criticised after claiming that slavery was a “necessary evil” on which the US was built, and rejected claims that systemic racism exists within the US. Tara Pilkington reports.
Tom Cotton is the Republican senator for Arkansas, and made the comments in a local newspaper interview on Sunday following the introduction of his legislation on Thursday which prevents the use of tax dollars on a New York Times-funded school curriculum project which emphasises US slavery instead of independence.
Project founder Nicole Hannah-Jones said: “If chattel slavery — heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit — were a ‘necessary evil’ as [Mr Cotton] says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.”
Cotton has been an incredibly vocal critic of the Black Lives Matter protests and movement, describing them as an “orgy of violence”. He has also backed the President’s Donald threat to use troops to manage the ongoing unrest.
Following this article, more than 800 NYT employees signed a letter denouncing its publication saying that it contained misinformation.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has since apologised for the article, saying that the piece fell below its editorial standards.