- It’s dubious whether nail-studded barrels as torture devices actually existed, but lynching did really happen.
- Usually lynching was a black man being hung by a white mob because the man was accused of murder or rape (particularly of a white woman).
- Ancient Greeks wanted to justify having slaves.
- Aristotle came up with: Greece has a great climate, so Greeks are superior to “Ethiopians” (“burnt faces”) to the south and “Slavs” to the north (where the English word “slaves” comes from).
- After spending enough time in Greece, you stop being inferior because of the climate.
- Kind of the American beliefs of “racist assimilationists” - “If Black people spend time around American white people they’ll become ‘better.’”
- Systems of ideas, like white supremacy or misogyny, need to constantly be passed on and acted on in order to be kept alive.
- The Grimms’ Fairy Times were the way to disseminate ideas.