Slavery’s deepest damage was producing a white-supremacy belief in whites themselves
Evidence
As the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas once wrote: “The true curse of slavery is not what it did to the black man, but what it has done to the white man. For the existence of the institution produced the notion that the white man was of superior character, intelligence, and morality.” In order to get to the other side of reparations, we must dismantle that notion. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 470
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Douglas’s inversion of the usual white-victim framing resonates with Milgrom/Bernstein’s recognition that beliefs (like reputation) are systems that must be changed — and points back to the moral-psychology objection opponents raise.
Related
- Slavery’s enduring curse is the white-supremacy notion it instilled (similarity 0.92)
- Slavery’s principal enduring harm is the corruption of white attitudes (similarity 0.88)
- Reparations require confronting how slavery corrupted white beneficiaries, not just black victims (similarity 0.82)
- Structural systems, not individual prejudice, are the primary target of reparations (similarity 0.80)
- Slavery and Jim Crow inflicted lasting moral harm on white Americans as well (similarity 0.80)
- Post-enslavement black people faced total inescapable white supremacy (similarity 0.78)