Slavery-trauma folk theories divert attention from discrimination’s concrete economic harms

Evidence

Obama added his “legacy of defeat” theory to the many racist folk theories circulating in classrooms and around dinner tables and in barbershops about slavery and discrimination—especially its trauma—making Black people biologically, psychologically, culturally, or morally inferior. Over the years, people had been using these folk theories—giving them names such as “post-traumatic slave syndrome,” or the “slavery-hypertension thesis,” or the “Hood Disease”—to walk away from the complete truth that discrimination had resulted in inferior opportunities and bank accounts for Black people, and not an inferior racial group. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1218

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the assimilationist/racist folk-theory move: attributing Black disadvantage to slavery’s psychological legacy rather than to ongoing discrimination and lost opportunity.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of placing arguments into Kendi’s three-way scheme: these folk theories are segregationist/assimilationist moves.
• SHARE: The named folk theories (‘post-traumatic slave syndrome,’ ‘slavery-hypertension thesis,’ ‘Hood Disease’) are the kind of specific, catalogable examples worth sharing with someone studying race theory.