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A House Built By Many

Contributed by Alyssa Mito Pusey, Senior Editor, Charlesbridge

“Every single day,” Michelle 
Obama told the graduating class
at the City College in New York, “I wake up in 
a house that was built by slaves.”

She’s right; the White House was built 
in large part by slaves
, along with freed black men and immigrants from
Scotland and Ireland. So why did I edit a book called The House That George Built? As Allie Jane Bruce points out in a recent blog post on Reading 
While White
, the book privileges white perspective and glosses over the 
contributions of slaves.

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