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African slaves driven by African slavers, 1859 wood engraving.
Despite what the New York Times
will try to tell you, American slavery was just one small part of a long, horrible history
You've probably heard it said that slavery is America's "original sin." Perhaps you've said it yourself. I know I have. In a sense, it's plainly true. The bondage of millions of dark-skinned people — first Amerindians and then Africans — was a practice that was not only blessed by the American Constitution but one that, as
The New York Times notes in their Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the legacy of slavery, the
1619 Project, predated the birth of the nation itself, stretching back to the first European settlements on the North American continent.
"The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country's original sin," Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in the
Project's lead essay. Even in our highly secular age, we often still reach for religious language when we put our moral concerns into words. You don't have to be a skeptic of climate science to notice how frequently environmentalists annex religious motifs to make points about the destruction of the natural world, talking about the earth as though it were a paradise despoiled by man, and prognosticating a coming apocalypse, complete with famines, flames, and boiling seas.
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