Slavery and Jim Crow inflicted lasting moral harm on white Americans as well
Evidence
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
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- QUESTION: This ‘curse of slavery’ framing as white moral harm is a distinctive argument — worth tracing how she uses it vs. material harm arguments elsewhere in the book.
Related
- Reparations require confronting how slavery corrupted white beneficiaries, not just black victims (similarity 0.89)
- Slavery’s enduring curse is the white-supremacy notion it instilled (similarity 0.83)
- Slavery’s principal enduring harm is the corruption of white attitudes (similarity 0.81)
- Reparations cannot be more divisive than the harms they would right (similarity 0.80)
- Slavery’s deepest damage was producing a white-supremacy belief in whites themselves (similarity 0.80)