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PSYCHOLOGY
To Fight White Supremacy, We Must First Destroy The Wall of Denial
The first step toward change is acknowledging the problem
Denial can be more than a personal failure to acknowledge something, like your addiction to eating cookies after midnight. It can also be a societal one, like White Americans systematically denying the existential threat of white supremacy. How has this denial been created and sustained over the years?
America was founded on the principles of democracy by White men, many of whom believed Black people were inferior and thus undeserving of liberty. Their denial was codified into law and supported by pseudoscientists. For instance, Samuel Adolphus Cartwright claimed Black people who ran away from their enslavers had a mental illness he dubbed “drapetomania.” Of course, running away from violent oppression is a perfectly natural reaction to the circumstances. Yet, early White Americans, in a state of cognitive dissonance, convinced themselves that enslaving Black people was harmless to justify the cruelty of the system. If white silence is violence, then so is white denial.
In Virginia, “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” became law in October of 1705, declaring that if any enslaved person “happens to be killed in such correction, it shall not…
