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From the News & Observer:A white legislator in the North Carolina House interrupted his Black colleague Wednesday to ask if he could have achieved his educational successes at Harvard University had he not been “an athlete or a minority.” Rep. Jeff McNeely, a Republican from Stony Point and a member of the chamber’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, made his remarks during floor debate Wednesday on a controversial education bill. Legislators were arguing over a bill that would expand the eligibility requirements for North Carolina Opportunity Scholarships. As Rep. Abe Jones, a Democratic lawmaker from Raleigh, debated the bill, McNeely interrupted with a question. “I understand that you went into public schools and you went to Harvard and Harvard Law,” McNeely said to Jones, who is Black. “And the question I guess, is, would you have been able to maybe achieve this if you were not an athlete or a minority or any of these things, but you were a student trapped in a school that the slowest — you know, in the wild we’ll say the slowest gazelle does not survive, but yet the herd moves at that pace. So the brightest child sometimes is held back in order — “Who wears a jacket and bow tie like that to work? Did he get it from John Wayne Gacy?