Renowned researcher and educator Dr. Joy DeGruy speaks to a crowd of academics in this classic 2008 clip from a London lecture about post traumatic slave syndrome.
In the video clip, DeGruy starts with two quotes from Thomas Jefferson. The first is a warning to white America about the dangers of slavery and backlash that will soon come. The other calls Black people unattractive, smelly and lazy.
In reference to lazy, the renowned educator talks about the origins of the old adage: “Black people must work twice as hard to get half of what whites have.”
To point out the irony of this quotation, she dives into the working conditions of enslaved people working on Caribbean sugar plantations. DeGruy states that enslaved Black people were worked so hard they often died. Because of this, white slavers had to bring in more enslaved Black people. Females were fed so poorly and treated so badly they never reached their menstrual cycles.
“Black people run from the shame of being perceived as lazy. I live with that so much that when I go to hotels, I would leave it cleaner than I found it,” DeGruy says.
