Cartwright’s racist pseudo-psychology illustrates another delusion of whiteness: namely, the continued justification of oppression—state-sanctioned rape, murder, and unending torture—by portraying Black people’s insatiable inclination toward freedom as a sickness or a criminal impulse. For everyone else, the irrepressible compulsion for liberty is viewed as a symptom of a craven, barbaric psychopathy. This nation’s history is pockmarked with examples of the idea that freedom is for white people. Although most Enlightenment-era thinkers agreed that freedom is the natural state of man, they
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