slavery

Only in North Carolina*

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Image courtesy NBC News

A man who alleged in a lawsuit that he was fired from a hospital system because he is a white man has been awarded a $10 million verdict by a North Carolina jury, according to court documents.

Jury awards $10M to former exec who said he was fired because he is white male, NBC News, October 28, 2021

My guess is that many on the jury that awarded this poor, victimized dude $10,000,000.00 for his misfortune of being born white and male overlapped with the University of North Carolina board of trustees who denied tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The New York Times Magazine, for her blasphemously accurate reportage of the United States’ bleak history of slavery…

*And by North Carolina, I mean South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas… you get the picture.

If you condemn and attack Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project* without any understanding of either…

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Sorry to say but chances are you’re a racist…

One more than likely slave to a supremist ego and motivated by fear and seduced by a willful (and more than likely generational) ignorance.

However, if you condemn and attack Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project without any understanding of either and truly believe you’re not a racist, then please at least make an effort to explain to us (in your own words, not Fox News’) how that is possible.

Good luck with that.

In exploring the reasons why there is so much pushback and misinformation being disseminated regarding critical race theory (CRT) … let’s examine the psychology of humans. There is a theory called “psychological reactance,” which was first proposed by Jack W. Brehm in 1966. Brehm theorized that people are inherently resistant to certain persuasion, specifically when they feel that the persuasion is somehow posing a threat to their freedoms or their existence. People who are threatened usually feel uncomfortable, hostile, aggressive and angry.

Psychological reactance makes people disregard even the most glaring reality in order to protect their perception of themselves — their ego. They view an acceptance of this reality as a threat to their entire existence and do everything in their power to stifle that “perceived threat.”

Justin J. Grooms, The San Diego Union-Tribune, June 15, 2021

*and #BLM and the Take a Knee Movement and on and on and on…

In Celebration of Juneteenth

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I present to you a little insight to the historical hometown hood of my youth…

The Hubbard House was an Underground Railroad terminus station which sets on a hill overlooking Lake Erie. It was instrumental in helping countless fellow humans find escape from the incomprehensible wretchedness of slavery.

It also sets right across the street from where my old high school used to be.

Unfortunately, during my time growing up in my hometown hood of Ashtabula, Ohio, I didn’t know much about the house, only that it had some vague association with slavery.

I didn’t know because back in my time the history of slavery was barely taught in school. And that which was taught about it, was glossed conveniently over… like the whitewashing of rotted wood.

My real education of slavery didn’t begin until 1977 when the landmark television miniseries ROOTS aired, a story which of course is based on Alex Haley’s hugely important book about his family’s history.

No, during my time the house was abandoned and run down and assumed haunted.

While my old high school has since been torn down, fortunately the community of Ashtabula came together to save the Hubbard House from a similar fate and worked to restore it so that it is now a beautiful and important national landmark of which I’m very proud.

#HAPPYJUNETEENTH
#BLACKLIVESMATTER

Meet our 2016 National Book Award Winner

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COLSON WHITEHEAD: USA TODAY “2016 AUTHOR OF THE YEAR”

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music… COLSONWHITEHEAD.COM

2016 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

IMAGE COURTESY OF DOUBLEDAY

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