Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jeanette Burney Sullivan's avatar

Great article. I wish I had learned about it in school and taught it, when I was a teacher. White people, mostly, whispered about slavery after Emancipation, but didn’t teach their kids. They wanted to sweep it all under the rug. Likewise, it was easy to “forget” the unjust enrichment white people enjoyed that came from the forced labor of blacks. White people still think their families before them earned everything they had by hard work, forgetting the hard labor of slaves that brought in cotton harvests and built the fancy mansions of their masters. We tell our kids a great lie in this country: that people get what they deserve. But some get far more, and some far less, than they deserve. In the end, things are better now but not decent yet: our health care lags behind the decent countries of the world, and we still haven’t manned up and committed to public schools when all the other unatrocious nations have.

Expand full comment
1 more comment...

No posts