micchiato 🍉 on Nostr: “Northern whites had come to accept irresponsibility, ignorance, and submissiveness ...

“Northern whites had come to accept irresponsibility, ignorance, and submissiveness as peculiar Negro characteristics, as natural products of the Negroes’ racial inferiority. Consequently, those who wrote above depravity failed to fit the stereotype and somehow seemed abnormal, even menacing. The ‘drunken, idle, ignorant, and vicious’ Negro, Frederick #Douglass explained, was the proper butt of the white man’s humor; he was termed a ‘good-natured fellow’ and was always first to be asked to hold the horse or shine the boots of the white man.”
— Leon #Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (1961)
#books #history #uspol #usa