slavery
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Either Donald Trump Doesn’t Know Slavery Existed or He Doesn’t Think Black People Are Human Beings
It takes a real man to stand up and admit when he is wrong, so I’d like to take this opportunity and apologize for every time I’ve called Donald Trump a racist idiot. I was wrong. Now I understand that when he talks about Mexicans streaming over the border, either he is invoking white supremacist…
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The Root’s Clapback Mailbag: Apologetically Black Friday
A few days ago, during a meeting, I asked The Root staff for more mailbag material. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be hate mail,” I said. “It could be anything worth responding to.” In my head, I was sure that readers had reached out to our writers for a number of reasons. Maybe they tweeted…
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Is Anyone Shocked That Slavery Continued a Century After Emancipation?
Given the state of the world today, and being a black woman in America, I’m rarely shocked, especially when it comes to racial terror and exploitation. But admittedly, I was taken aback when an African-American historian and genealogist presented actual documentation of black communities in the Deep South that were enslaved well into the 1960s.…
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Tracing Your Roots: My Confederate Ancestor Is on Monuments; Who Did He Own?
The debate over Confederate monuments inspires one woman to find the descendants of people her memorialized ancestor enslaved. Dear Professor Gates: I just read your previous column regarding the Confederate general Wade Hampton III, of whom I am a direct descendant. In it, you addressed whether there was a connection between Gen. Hampton and a…
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So … Um … I Think Politico Just Published an Argument for Slavery. In 2018 (Yes, That Slavery)
On Tuesday, Politico published “Sponsor an Immigrant Yourself”—a thought exercise from people allegedly named “Eric Posner” and “Glen Weyl” that attempts to solve our immigration debate by thinking so far out of the box that the box now can only be seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. They’re so out of the box, in fact,…
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What We Thought We Knew About Africa and Slavery Might Not Be Right
Circumstances More Complex Than Most Report Defiant Immigrant Dad Leads ‘CBS Evening News’ Sinclair Wants News Directors to Pay Into PAC Joy Reid ‘a Heroine of the Resistance’ 2 More Guilty of Being Both Cops, Robbers Loophole Lets Cops Evade Sexual Assault Charges Surprise! Bloomberg Has Workplace Diversity Beat Media Missing ‘Shock Doctrine’ in Puerto…
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Today Is Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday—and a Good Time to Remind You He Did Not Free the Slaves
Monday is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, who was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Kentucky. He was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lauded as one of this nation’s best and brightest leaders, Lincoln is often credited with freeing the slaves through his Emancipation Proclamation.…
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Surprise, Surprise: Survey Reveals That American Students Are Not Being Adequately Taught About Slavery
Water is wet; also, a new survey from the Southern Poverty Law Center has drawn attention to the fact that students in the United States are not being taught the full truth about slavery, leaving them inadequately educated on the subject. Of course, anyone who knows anything about education in the United States is probably…
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New Slave Narrative Tells Story of Woman Who Escaped to Freedom on Underground Railroad
A newly available slave narrative tells the story of a Maryland woman who escaped slavery and traveled the Underground Railroad on a yearslong journey to Auburn, N.Y. The 12-page manuscript was penned by Julia C. Ferris, a white teacher who sat down with a former slave named Jane Clark, and it was never available to…