Extreme racial violence served to absolve white Americans of slavery’s founding sin

Evidence

We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy overseas while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens. During the height of racial terror in this country, Black Americans were not merely killed in mob attacks and lynchings but castrated, burned alive, and dismembered, with their body parts displayed in storefronts and strewn across lawns in Black communities. This violence was meant to terrify and control Black people, but perhaps just as importantly, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: you would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 160

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the thesis that the reframing argument treats slavery as foundational rather than peripheral — the ‘original sin’ framing is central to the book’s origin-story argument the reader is tracking. — connects to: Founders who ordered slaves beaten were falsely claimed to abhor all violence. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 175