'The worshipping of whiteness': why racist symbols persist in America
In life, the seventh US president, Andrew Jackson, and his family accrued their wealth at the expense of hundreds of enslaved people. Now, even in death, Jackson still wields the power to haunt Black Americans whenever they pull a $20 bill from their wallets.
“Racism isn’t always abrupt. It isn’t always in your face. Sometimes, it’s very insidious,” said Franklin Eugene Forbes II, an architect and urban planner. “Why am I, a Black person, using a bill where a man who believed I was inferior to somebody else as a way to buy things, the same way people that look like me were bought by him?”
For weeks now, against systemic racial inequity and injustice have also reinvigorated passionate debate around the most obvious memorials to slavery, white supremacy and racism across the United States. A growing number of in the US have been removed, alongside a or homages to who profited from slavery.
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