Pg 101)
In his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Dubois wrote that the story the country tells about its relationship to chattel slavery is willfully distorted. 'Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center...One is astonished by the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.'
If in Germany today there were a prison built on the top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world. I imagine there would be international summits on closing such an egregious institution. And yet in the United States such collective outrage at this plantation-turned-prison* is relatively muted.'
(*reference to Louisiana State Prison, aka Angola Prison, built on site of a former plantation worked by slaves)
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