From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
“What it means to be a Negro in America,” wrote James Baldwin in the wake of the lynching of Emmett TIll, “can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.” To create a framework for our conversation on reparations, Rebirth focuses on four racial myths: myths about Black sexuality and Black families, myths about Black sloth and Black dependence, myths about the intellectual inferiority of Black people, and myths about Black men as criminal beasts. Taken together, these myths display how the racial logics that once justified slavery and lynching continue today to war against our nation’s potential to realize an interracial democracy marked by economic equity and racial justice.