Racism Unhealed and Revealed: NY Times 1619 Project Leads the Way
America, it’s time we had that talk about racism. Specifically, I’m referring to the whitewashed version of history most of us learned in school. We can’t undo what was done, but we can--at a minimum--acknowledge the truth, a truth absent from too many assumptions made about the country we live in.
The veil surrounding the “Again” part of the current regime’s MAGA slogan has been lifted in some small ways by the media lately. These efforts deserve praise, even as too much news coverage has the effect of normalizing the worst actions occurring on the political stage.
On Sunday the New York Times Magazine, published a block of essays collectively called The 1619 Project in observance of the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.
It opens with these words:
In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.
Today I’ll share some excerpts from the 1619 project, some reactions, praise a local effort at getting voices heard, and tell you how to access the online version sans the NYT paywall. (Though you really should subscribe--at $1 a week there is no better deal for staying on top of current events, even when --as they often do-- the paper gets it wrong.)
The first series of articles published included the following:
America Wasn't a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One, essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones
American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation, essay by Matthew Desmond
A New Literary Timeline of African-American History, a collection of original poems and stories from 16 different writers, including Clint Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, Eve L. Ewing, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Barry Jenkinsand Jesmyn Ward, among others[9]
How False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live in Medicine Today, essay by Linda Villarosa
What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery, essay by Jamelle Bouie
Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?, essay by Wesley Morris
How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam, essay by Kevin Kruse
Why Doesn't America Have Universal Healthcare? One word: Race, essay by Jeneen Interlandi
Why American Prisons Owe Their Cruelty to Slavery, essay by Bryan Stevenson
The Barbaric History of Sugar in America, essay by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
How America’s Vast Racial Wealth Gap Grew: By Plunder, essay by Trymaine Lee
Their Ancestors Were Enslaved by Law. Now They're Lawyers, photo essay by Djeneba Aduayom, with text from Nikole Hannah-Jones and Wadzanai Mhute
These essays and interactive online content are the start of an ongoing project, led by Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, with contributions by the paper's writers, poems, short fiction, and a photo essay.
Each of these parts examines a modern phenomenon and reveals its history. What they reveal is the truth that no part of America has been untouched by slavery--from the lack of healthcare to mass incarceration, from the brutality of capitalism to the epidemic of sugar, it’s all there if you look at it through unfiltered glasses.
In “America Wasn't a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One,” Hanna-Jones writes:
They say our people were born on the water.
When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after fear had turned to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These men and women from many different nations, all shackled together in the suffocating hull of the ship, they were one people now.
Just a few months earlier, they had families, and farms, and lives and dreams. They were free. They had names, of course, but their enslavers did not bother to record them. They had been made black by those people who believed that they were white, and where they were heading, black equaled “slave,” and slavery in America required turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. This process was called seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa were forced, often through torture, to stop speaking their native tongues and practicing their native religions.
But as the sociologist Glenn Bracey wrote, “Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.” For as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we forged a new culture all our own.
Jamelle Bouie, in “What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery” makes the connections clear:
There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while the racial content of that ideology has attenuated over time, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic “replacement”; of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.
The past 10 years of Republican extremism is emblematic. The Tea Party billed itself as a reaction to debt and spending, but a close look shows it was actually a reaction to an ascendant majority of black people, Latinos, Asian-Americans and liberal white people. In their survey-based study of the movement, the political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto show that Tea Party Republicans were motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country.”
The scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson came to a similar conclusion in their contemporaneous study of the movement, based on an ethnographic study of Tea Party activists across the country. “Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending,” they note in “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”; “it is a heartfelt cry about where they fear ‘their country’ may be headed.” And Tea Party adherents’ “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people,” they write, “signal a larger fear about generational social change in America.”
To stop this change and its political consequences, right-wing conservatives have embarked on a project to nullify opponents and restrict the scope of democracy. Mitch McConnell’s hyper-obstructionist rule in the Senate is the most high-profile example of this strategy, but it’s far from the most egregious.
In “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation,” Matthew Desmond, reveals the antecedents of the core efficiencies and management systems (really!) in modern day businesses while shedding light on our boom or bust history:
During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, “Flush Times and Fever Dreams.” That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008.
It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider— one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.
The indignities of the past suffered by people of color influence our policies and even scientific perceptions.
With “How False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live Today,” Linda Villarosa explains how the myths used to justify slavery still influence doctors in the 21st Century.
A 2016 survey of 222 white medical students and residents published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that half of them endorsed at least one myth about physiological differences between black people and white people, including that black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s.
When asked to imagine how much pain white or black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents insisted that black people felt less pain. This made the providers less likely to recommend appropriate treatment. A majority of these doctors to be also still believed the lie that Thomas Hamilton tortured John Brown to prove nearly two centuries ago: that black skin is thicker than white skin.
This disconnect allows scientists, doctors and other medical providers — and those training to fill their positions in the future — to ignore their own complicity in health care inequality and gloss over the internalized racism and both conscious and unconscious bias that drive them to go against their very oath to do no harm.
The centuries-old belief in racial differences in physiology has continued to mask the brutal effects of discrimination and structural inequities, instead placing blame on individuals and their communities for statistically poor health outcomes. Rather than conceptualizing race as a risk factor that predicts disease or disability because of a fixed susceptibility conceived on shaky grounds centuries ago, we would do better to understand race as a proxy for bias, disadvantage and ill treatment. The poor health outcomes of black people, the targets of discrimination over hundreds of years and numerous generations, may be a harbinger for the future health of an increasingly diverse and unequal America.
As the concept of Medicare for All becomes accepted --even the AMA has stopped opposing it-- few Americans realize the racism behind the reason why the other industrial nations of the world have universal health care of some sort and we don’t.
Jeneen Interlandi paints an ugly picture with “Why Doesn’t America Have Universal Healthcare? One Word - Race:”
Professional societies like the American Medical Association barred black doctors; medical schools excluded black students, and most hospitals and health clinics segregated black patients. Federal health care policy was designed, both implicitly and explicitly, to exclude black Americans. As a result, they faced an array of inequities — including statistically shorter, sicker lives than their white counterparts. What’s more, access to good medical care was predicated on a system of employer-based insurance that was inherently difficult for black Americans to get. “They were denied most of the jobs that offered coverage,” says David Barton Smith, an emeritus historian of health care policy at Temple University. “And even when some of them got health insurance, as the Pullman porters did, they couldn’t make use of white facilities.”
In the shadows of this exclusion, black communities created their own health systems. Lay black women began a national community health care movement that included fund-raising for black health facilities; campaigns to educate black communities about nutrition, sanitation and disease prevention; and programs like National Negro Health Week that drew national attention to racial health disparities. Black doctors and nurses — most of them trained at one of two black medical colleges, Meharry and Howard — established their own professional organizations and began a concerted war against medical apartheid. By the 1950s, they were pushing for a federal health care system for all citizens.
That fight put the National Medical Association (the leading black medical society) into direct conflict with the A.M.A., which was opposed to any nationalized health plan. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, the group helped defeat two such proposals with a vitriolic campaign that informs present-day debates: They called the idea socialist and un-American and warned of government intervention in the doctor-patient relationship. The group used the same arguments in the mid-’60s, when proponents of national health insurance introduced Medicare. This time, the N.M.A. developed a countermessage: Health care was a basic human right.
Needless to say, the New York Times effort with #The1619Project came under fire from politicians whose ideology is dictated by denying the oppression of those without access to power.
It’s no coincidence the same people complaining that the 1619 Project focuses too much on the role of race in shaping our country also oppose any effective civil rights law enforcement now.
https://twitter.com/Dr_ChadWilliams/status/1163073131885543424?s=20
https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1163228842389118983?s=20
https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1163447621966602247?s=20
https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/1163216101716766722?s=20
Read the whole 1619 Project here:
https://twitter.com/sejr_historian/status/1162935984134078464?s=20
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While I know there are those who could call it a token effort, I want to give a nod to our local daily--the San Diego Union-Tribune--for soliciting and printing the reactions of local Latinx leaders in response to the racially targeted shootings in El Paso.
A few snips:
Linda Caballero Sotelo, South Park. Executive director, New Americans Museum: As Mexican Americans, we have been made to feel unwelcome, unwanted, un-American — in our own country. Shockingly, this hateful prejudice joins a long and complex history of Mexican Americans being targeted as somehow not worthy of living here. Only 89 years ago, from 1930 to 1934, nearly a million Mexican Americans were quietly deported across the border by our government — with more than 600,000 being United States citizens who were offered no legal recourse simply because they were brown: not criminals or foreign; deported specifically because they were of Mexican origin and/or descent.
Fernando Z. López, University Heights. Executive director, San Diego LGBT Pride: This country was built on colonization, genocide, slavery, white supremacy, and the oppression of women and minorities. This country was also built with checks and balances that allow us to fight back against systemic legal and social oppression, but it only works if we as minorities and allies call out discrimination when we see it and actively work to end it. Since the shooting in El Paso, I feel like I have seen the media address the root of these issues as they are — acts of terrorism at the hands of white nationalists. That freedom of the press voice gives me hope. This is America.
E. Careaga Morones, Sherman Heights: Most people tend to bring up misinformation to distract from the truth. Even misrepresentations of the realities of Ellis Island are brought up to juxtapose the white immigrant root experience, forgetting to mention all the while, that yes Ellis Island has a rich history, but only 2% of people through Ellis Island were turned away. Migrants coming from Europe were yearning for the same life today’s migrants look for.
One huge difference of today’s migrants in contrast to yesteryear’s is the lack of a line and that the U.S. had no role in why people fled. I, like many Latinos in San Diego, worry we could suffer an El Paso-like attack here, especially when we have a former San Diegan and Fox “News” host, Tucker Carlson, saying “White supremacy is a hoax.” That frame, in these times, helps us understand better what delusion we are dealing with.
https://twitter.com/MsPackyetti/status/1163284358737928192?s=20
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Lead image via the New York Times Magazine