All posts tagged: American slavery

Wokeness might set you free. No one said it would make you happy.

Wokeness might set you free. No one said it would make you happy.

(RNS) — Truth will set you free, goes the saying. The corollary says it will only do so after making you miserable. The latter was given more weight as fact by a recent study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology that suggests that people with strong social justice values may be more likely to be depressed, anxious and unhappy. Though its author, Finnish psychologist Oskari Lahtinen, studied only his fellow Finns, “the scale was designed to be used and validated in other Western and possibly other populations as well,” he wrote. In fact, Lahtinen admits in his study that the woke discourse arose from America, writing “critical social justice (or intersectional or ‘woke’) discourse draws mainly from dynamics within American society.” Conservatives have responded to these findings with predictable insults and inane questions. “Do progressive ideas make people unhappy, or are unhappy people drawn to the cultural Left?” asked Canadian politics professor Eric Kaufmann in an essay for the Manhattan Institute. But such questions obscure the oppressive conditions that produce so-called progressive ideas and …

American slavery Separating fact from myth

American slavery Separating fact from myth

On Juneteenth, the day that commemorates the ending of slavery in the US, a historian dispels myths about the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery. Slavery has been in the news a lot lately. From the discovery of the auction of 272 enslaved people that enabled Georgetown University to remain in operation to the McGraw-Hill textbook controversy over calling slaves “workers from Africa” and the slavery memorial being built at the University of Virginia, Americans are having conversations about this difficult period in American history.