this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Nobody should be ashamed of the history of their people. That encourages some to hide from it. Instead one should not shy away, but try to study and learn from the mistakes of their forebears, so their children might get a better world someday.
Shame for something you yourself have not done, though? Pointless.
Basically, the US obsessing about race but refusing to face it's history with blanket word bans that are frowned upon no matter the context.
The US is clearly not facing their slavery past and instead avoiding the difficult and deeply disturbing vocabulary associated with it.
IMHO there is nothing wrong with the N word used in an history lesson. On the contrary, I think it's especially important to show younger generations how evil some our ancestors were.
And I say that as a french guy living in a city that was extremely important during the slave trade. We know what our ancestors did, we are not proud of it, we don't feel responsible for it but we do make sure it's not forgotten.
Certain individuals and organizations are doing this, sure, but then you have the monumental amount of academic research in the humanities into slavery, you have publicly and privately owned historical sites and museums that explicitly teach about the history of slavery in the United States, and you have a non-trivial amount of media depicting the horrors of slavery. It's not a monolithic cultural rejection in the same way that a nation like Japan has attempted to totally erase any record of its wrongdoings in the first half of the twentieth century.