To Fight White Supremacy, We Must First Destroy The Wall of Denial

<p>Denial can be more than a personal failure to acknowledge something, like your addiction to eating cookies after midnight. It can also be a societal one, like White Americans systematically denying the existential threat of white supremacy. How has this denial been created and sustained over the years?</p> <p>America was founded on the principles of democracy by White men, many of whom believed Black people were inferior and thus undeserving of liberty.&nbsp;Their denial was codified into law and supported by pseudoscientists. For instance, Samuel Adolphus Cartwright claimed Black people who ran away from their enslavers had a mental illness he dubbed &ldquo;<a href="https://www.masshist.org/events/strange-history-and-career-drapetomania-mania-caused-enslaved-blacks-escape-and-man-behind#:~:text=Samuel%20Adolphus%20Cartwright%20invented%20%E2%80%9CDrapetomania,tendency%20of%20Blacks%20to%20escape." rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">drapetomania</a>.&rdquo; Of course, running away from violent oppression is a perfectly natural reaction to the circumstances. Yet, early White Americans, in a state of cognitive dissonance, convinced themselves that enslaving Black people was harmless to justify the cruelty of the system. If&nbsp;<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103122000671" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">white silence is violence</a>, then so is white denial.</p> <p><a href="https://allyfromnola.medium.com/to-fight-white-supremacy-we-must-first-destroy-the-wall-of-denial-2692973b9a2a"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>
Tags: Wall Denial