John Brown and the Struggle for Freedom: The Cost of Liberation and the Burden of Historical Memory

Abstract

The 1990s have thus far not attested to a lessening of the pervasive reality of the racism that seems so much a part of American life. Charles Long persuasively argues that dominant people use a cultural language, be it theological, political, or socioeconomic, which is a language of “conquest and suppression.” The very terms that White Americans use to describe themselves render “invisible oppressed people” while preventing those who are more free from “seeing themselves as they really are.” Christians too often share in this process by accepting definitions of social reality that obscure rather than expose the nation’s longest and deepest injustice. Racism remains the American, and Christian dilemma.

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