Dreadful Deceit
In 1656, a Maryland planter tortured and killed an enslaved man named Antonio, an Angolan who refused to work in the fields. Three hundred years later, Simon P. Owens battled soul-deadening technologies as well as the fiction of race that divided him from his co-workers in a Detroit auto-assembly plant. Separated by time and space, Antonio and Owens nevertheless shared a distinct kind of political vulnerability; they lacked rights and opportunities in societies that accorded marked privileges to people labeled white.
An American creation myth posits that these two black men were the victims of racial discrimination, a primal prejudice that the United States has haltingly but gradually repudiated over the course of many generations.
An American creation myth posits that these two black men were the victims of racial discrimination, a primal prejudice that the United States has haltingly but gradually repudiated over the course of many generations.
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