"Lies My Teacher Told Me" - Ch.5 (Slavery, racism)

     I don't mean to make a big deal of it, but right at the beginning Loewen mentions the three race relations as "Indian-African-European"; I learned in my American middle school that calling Native Americans "Indians" was incorrect, of course, and therefore could be offensive.  I'm sure Loewen could do a better job of arguing his point if he could correctly label them.
     I agree that racism supercedes slavery; the origin of the idea of enslavement has to have come from the thinking of another people as inferior.  As Loewen says, this way of thinking is probably what started the concept of enslavement.  It is an unfortunate thing that humans look down on and disrespect other same humans.
     On pg.147, Patrick Henry is mentioned for his hypocritical views; that is also another point that I believe we must all be careful of.  It's easy to denounce another's views when one doesn't have anything to do with it.  For me, the best example of a hypocritical, yet disturbingly understandable, situation is in the movie "Saving Private Ryan"(completely off topic I know but bear with me lol):  there is a scene in which two soldiers are fighting hand to hand with one another in a duel to the death.  The American calls for his partner to come help him, but he is too afraid to intervene, and the German kills his opponent.  There is a little more depth to this scene and its connection to other scenes later in the movie but this is the gist of it.  The problem is, it is easy to, say, criticize this soldier for not helping when he could have, but when one tries to stand in his shoes instead, it's not so easy to do otherwise.  I believe this is relatable to Patrick Henry's case, as with many others; racism spreads because one's own biases, when unaware of them, will unconsciously mold one's way of thinking before you even know it.
     The information Loewen provides here concerning racism in America is appalling!  The amount of violence done towards blacks in this time period is not all too different from the very genocides, riots, and protests that America opposes today.  I mean, driving out blacks until towns were all-white?  That's not too far from the infamous genocide that took place in Rwanda, where one faction slaughtered the other to the point where they had to flee their own country!  However, I don't think these acts of violence were conducted merely from white feelings of superiority; I believe there must have been a tinge of fear in these actions.  Fear, that if blacks were allowed the same equality as whites, they would one day exact a vicious revenge upon them.  This may have led to a spiral of death, where whites were assaulting blacks so they themselves would not be assaulted in turn for the damage they had been causing.  Just a thought.
     Loewen wraps up the chapter with the same message that I came up with for last chapter:  the truth should ever be present for all to know, for academics' sake if anything.