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Show 293: Dr. Joy DeGruy Reacts to Conservative African Americans on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome.

Belief in Free Will and Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome Denial

Audio here!

The belief that people’s behaviors are freely chosen, and not the result of all of their previous experience, enables some to justify the plight of others and perpetuates blaming victims for being victims.  And although it’s a belief that is contradicted by a mountain of evidence, it remains replete throughout our entire society, primarily inculcated as part of a traditional religious worldview.

This Sunday on Equal Time for Freethought Dr. Joy Degruy, author of “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome,” defends her work against criticism in the recent book by Sana Butler, “Sugar of the Crop: My Journey to Find the Children of Slaves.”  Butler claims that the children of freedmen simply chose to leave their slave experience behind, and that any  problems currently experienced in families who descend from African slaves is just the result of people deciding to not “choose” correctly.

Join us as Dr. DeGruy weighs in on personal choice, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome denial, and recent events in general.

Continue reading “Show 293: Dr. Joy DeGruy Reacts to Conservative African Americans on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome.”

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Show 273: Race & Racism in the 21st Century: A Humanist Approach

Race & Racism in the 21st Century: A Humanist Approach w/ Tim Wise & Joseph Graves

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It can be argued that perhaps the key issue which separates the United States from the other 17 world democracies is that this nation was built in no small way on the backs of chattel slavery, an institution which has had an impact not only on the “race” of people whom were enslaved, but the entire sociopolitical structure of the nation itself.  Not only has slavery, and the justification of slavery and domination which we know today as racism, affected the relationships between those of African-Americans and the dominant “race” (Caucasians) – as well as other people of color whose entrance and experiences in this nation, however problematic, were different by the very nature of how they came to be in America – but it has also blurred the line between the powerful and rich and the rest of us who share a class consciousness’ (or who should!)

And now, with the rise of Barack Obama to the most powerful position of power on the planet, many Caucasians – especially conservatives, but many liberals as well – have decided that the U.S. is a post-racial society, and that the only thing that really stands between other African-Americans and their potential Obama-like success is what whites perceive of as a lack of “personal responsibility” on behalf of blacks in America.

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Show 255: Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II

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Sunsara Taylor will speak with Douglas Blackmon about “the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude … and those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking,” as she uncovers the material basis which allowed such to occur (as opposed to some sense of divine working out of things or natural inferiority), and how the psychological burden of not having material explanations for this persisting inequality has had consequences right up to today.

A passage from “Slavery by any other Name“:

Continue reading “Show 255: Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II”