Having documented facts can release people from shame attached to their group’s history.

Evidence

I will never forget the woman I met after giving a talk in New Orleans, one of the most brutal slave-trading cities in our country. Almost ninety years old, she came up and hugged me, wiping her eyes as she thanked me for helping birth a project that had allowed her to release the shame that comes with being told that the only thing Black people have contributed to this country is our brute labor. “I always knew the truth,” she told me. “But I didn’t have the facts of what happened.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 42

Categorization

• SHARE: The line ‘I always knew the truth. But I didn’t have the facts of what happened’ is worth sending to anyone interested in how knowledge and evidence relate to emotional/political identity.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s case study on how the reframing argument (slavery as foundational) works emotionally for its intended audience, key to distinguishing the project’s thesis from its contested claims. — connects to: The source trumping content of information can shift national guilt — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 2094