POLITICS + RACISM
Why Do Some White People Enjoy Using Black People as Political Props?
They think tokenism is poetic justice, and it’s not
Throughout American history, White people have often taken great pleasure in using Black people as political props to promote racist policies. In Fredrick Douglass’s memoir, The Myth of the Happy Slave, he pushed back against the vicious lie that Black people enjoyed life as slaves. White enslavers insisted Black people were happy toiling in the fields, that it was better for everyone involved. A White pseudoscientist, Samuel A. Cartwright, coined the term “drapetomania” to describe the mental state of those who ran away. According to Cartwright, a Black person would have to be insane to want freedom. Approximately 70,000 enslaved Africans successfully escaped, shattering the myth. The trend is clear, that when politicians want to promote racist policies, they use Black people as props to justify the unthinkable.
In American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, one northerner described Black people singing as they labored throughout the day. While White Southerners often insisted Black people’s singing indicated they were happy, one witness said, “their singing proves that they want to be happy not that they are so.” Dr. Rush of Philadelphia…
