Reparations require confronting how slavery corrupted white beneficiaries, not just black victims

Evidence

As I described previously, President Biden told us: “Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments. They embrace them.” But we often would rather quickly move on and forget that part of our history, which is difficult to accept. As Justice Harlan predicted more than a century ago, establishing a system of Jim Crow would “render permanent peace impossible and…keep alive a conflict…which must do harm to all concerned.” That part of our history has been too easily forgotten and erased. And while that is who we were, that is not what we can become…together. Getting to reparations means finally coming to grips with our past and the reality that “the true curse of slavery is not what it did to the black man, but what it has done to the white man.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 607

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘curse of slavery on the white man’ inversion echoes the Frankfurt School’s structural argument that oppression dehumanizes the oppressor too — a cross-domain parallel worth noting.