This isn’t just a diminishment of the impact of racism, but a misreading of how racism operates. There are no traits that are inherent to blackness that then become the basis for oppression. It’s the other way around. The system of racism invented, and continually adjusts, the rubric to justify its existence. Whether we’re talking about the idea that enslaved Africans were a less evolved form of the human species and therefore better suited to field work, on down to identifying who is and isn’t a thug based on their fashion choices and patterns of speech, the underlying context is that black
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