The treatment of Black people in America is sickening. The violence and dehumanization and removal of dignity is an awful history. Suppressing the teaching of these historical facts is collusion with this criminal and immoral behavior.
'Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Study Says'
Today's Letter lucidly connects the time from President Abraham Lincoln's birth to the formation of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
'They vowed “to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, employment according to their ability, and complete equality before the law.” (Letter)
Our struggle as a people '...to advance the interest of colored citizens...' is still woefully unfinished. Here are excerpts from today's front page story in The New York Times.
'In the United States, the richest mothers and their newborns are the most likely to survive the year after childbirth — except when the family is Black, according to a groundbreaking new study of two million California births. The richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies.'
'Research has repeatedly shown that Black mothers and babies have the worst childbirth outcomes in the United States. But this study is novel because it’s the first of its size to show how the risks of childbirth vary by both race and parental income, and how Black families, regardless of their socioeconomic status, are disproportionately affected.'
“This is a landmark paper, and what it makes really stark is how we are leaving one group of people way behind,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, a University of Pennsylvania economist who studies racial health disparities and was not involved in the research.'
'This finding suggests that the American medical system has the ability to save many of the lives of babies with early health risks, but that those benefits can be out of reach for low-income families.
'The babies born to the richest Black women (the top tenth of earners) tended to have more risk factors, including being born premature or underweight, than those born to the richest white mothers — and more than those born to the poorest white mothers. It’s evidence that the harm to Black mothers and their babies, regardless of socioeconomic status, begins before childbirth.'
“As a Black infant, you’re starting off with worse health, even those born into these wealthy families,” said Sarah Miller, a health economist at the University of Michigan. She was an author of the study with Professor Rossin-Slater and Petra Persson of Stanford, Kate Kennedy-Moulton of Columbia, Laura Wherry of N.Y.U. and Gloria Aldana of the Census Bureau.'
'Black mothers and babies had worse outcomes than those who were Hispanic, Asian or white in all the health measures the researchers looked at: whether babies were born early or underweight; whether mothers had birth-related health problems like eclampsia or sepsis; and whether the babies and mothers died. There was not enough data to look at other populations, including Native Americans, but other research has shown that they face adverse outcomes nearing those of Black women and infants in childbirth.'
“It’s not race, it’s racism,” said Tiffany L. Green, an economist focused on public health and obstetrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data are quite clear that this isn’t about biology. This is about the environments where we live, where we work, where we play, where we sleep.”
'There is clear evidence that Black patients experience racism in health care settings. In childbirth, mothers are treated differently and given different access to interventions. Black infants are more likely to survive if their doctors are Black. The experience of the tennis star Serena Williams — she had a pulmonary embolism after giving birth, yet said health care professionals did not address it at first — drew attention to how not even the most famous and wealthy Black women escape this pattern.' (NYTimes) Gifted link to the article below.
Thanks Fern, excellent post, as always. Pain management studies I have read indicate that those presenting in EDs who are least likely to have their pain addressed are older, black, and female. Racism leaves its mark on all who experience it. It settles into bodies, reducing health quality and life span.
Dr. J. Marion Sims, "Father of American Gynecology" operated on enslaved Black women with no anesthesia. He believed Black people did not feel pain. IMO, I think he CHOSE to disregard that a Black woman might feel pain because such a thought would interfere with HE wanted to do--racism and misogyny at work. Those same attitudes are still present today.
Not to take anything away from the plight and atrocities black women have suffered, but my mother, a German Holocaust survivor, had something similar with a dentist. She was in pain from an abscessed tooth. The Nazis would not let her go to her own dentist. They sent her to one of theirs, clear across Berlin, on a bus. The dentist did nor use Novocain. She was in agony for years. She slowly lost her teeth in America and ended up with dentures that never fit right. There was a board of doctors who concluded it was the trauma of having that tooth pulled and the events of what was happening to Jews, that her teeth and gums suffered.
Thank you, Fern. These disparities make me sick and very angry. Crying doesn’t help but protesting does. I will continue to do so until my last dying breath.
Fern, thank you for another excellent post. The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that there is a problem. Hopefully this won’t be the only study, but will lead to better childbirth and postpartum management so that black mothers have an equal chance.
Mary, the following from the article will indicate that while race, even among the richest Blacks people is significant, the mortality and health of mothers and babies of all Americans indicate weakness in our medical model, which effect everyone.
'Many parts of the United States have much higher maternal mortality than California, and fewer policies to support families. California was the first state to offer paid family leave. It has one of the most generous public insurance programs for pregnant women. The state has invested in specific programs aimed at reducing maternal deaths and racial disparities in childbirth.'
'Yet even in this best-case American scenario, mothers and babies fare worse compared with another rich country the researchers examined: Sweden. At every income level, Swedish women have healthier babies. This held true for the highest-income Swedish women and those from disadvantaged populations, including low-income and immigrant mothers.
In the United States, earning more regularly translates into superior access to the fastest, most expensive health care. But even with that advantage, the richest white Californians in this study still gave birth to less healthy babies than the richest Swedish women. Their newborns were more likely to be premature or underweight. The two groups had roughly equal maternal death rates.'
“That finding really does strongly suggest that it’s something about the care model,” said Dr. Neel Shah, chief medical officer of Maven Clinic for women’s and family health and a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School. “We have the technology, but the model of prenatal care in the United States hasn’t really gotten an update in the last century.”
'Sweden, like most European countries, has universal health insurance with low out-of-pocket costs for the patient. Midwives deliver most babies in Sweden and provide most of the prenatal care, which has been linked to lower C-section rates and lower rates of preterm births and low birth weights. It has long paid leaves and subsidized child care.'
'Like California, Sweden has also started targeted efforts to reduce maternal deaths. When officials there recognized that African immigrants giving birth were dying more frequently, they began piloting a “culture doula” program, with doulas who were immigrants themselves helping pregnant women navigate the country’s health system.'
'Local maternal health programs could begin to help reduce racial disparities in the United States, too, as could a more diverse medical workforce, research suggests. Nonprofits and universities have experimented with ways to address racism and poverty, with programs like cash transfers for low-income pregnant women and initiatives to improve the environments of Black communities.'
'By the time a woman is pregnant, Professor Miller said, “it’s almost too late.”
“Health is going to depend on exposures throughout her life, health care she’s received, environmental factors,” she said. “A lot goes on prior to the pregnancy that affects the health of the mother and baby.”
Another look at this is found in a different study that looked at birth outcome differences between foreign-born Black women and USA-born Black women. Those researchers concluded "The difference in risk of adverse birth outcomes between American-born and foreign-born Black women is not due to genetics. Rather, we believe that it can be explained by differences in exposure to racism across the lifespan."
Karen, Thank you for your reply and article. There are important questions that could not be answered in the California study. From the article itself, and not the study (which probably provides a more detailed understanding in its conclusions) women's work, living quarters, healthcare models, doctors' origins, etc., are all factors in the health and mortality of mother and child of all stripes. In the article I referenced, women and infants in Sweden did better than than those in America.
What pain do we endure as a nation, inflicted on every single person in our county, not only those who are abused, the price paid in strangled social joie de vivre,, in order to play the cruel games of delusional supremacy?
Many parts of it are sickening, yet millions of white men went to war to end slavery, and millions more (men and women) elected the presidents and legislators who passed civil rights laws at all levels and marched and fought to make those rights real. And don’t forget the “ ordinary” Americans who support equality every day, through voice, and votes and friendship.
Jon, while intellectually I know you're right, emotionally I feel it's not enough. As a child of Holocaust survivors, I know it's a lot, and critical, but not enough.
What will be enough? Not for me to say. I've personally experienced antisemitism, but walking anywhere, I can ignore that detail. A black person can't.
We'll be getting close when we all individually react to a person's character, accomplishments, and dreams more than we react to that person's color. We have come far as a nation, yes. But we have quite far yet to go as individuals. We're not close enough.
Our history of cruelty and conquest has been repeated for thousands of years on Earth. The cry of “American Exceptionalism” does not exempt us from it. Time and the efforts of like-minded groups inch the bend of the arc
I like the words in your bio Kerry, that you are "informed by it", meaning History. I'm with you. To be a bunch of human beings swimming around in the pool with our fellow man along with all we have together in this world of today... and to behave in this manner, this childish manner. To refer to our behavior as "in-humane" would imply that we are grown-ups and understand the meaning of the word. Have some sangria for me my friend.
You are so right. We have a huge population of clueless adults with absolutely no conception of the actual history of this country. They spend their lives mesmerized by advertising and living in a fantasy world of “manifest destiny”, exceptionalism, and white Christian privilege. We’ve been glossing over the “all men are created equal” equivocation for centuries now. Barely a mention of the “treaties” with Native Americans that were spit on with impunity. The ends have justified all the means is what we really teach.
It's not all we teach, but (long ago) I was certainly fed a narrative of American exceptionalism in school. And so much of what I learned (until college) was so fragmented it was hard to appreciate its impact on today. Kids are expected to deal wisely with society's challenges and run a functional democracy once out of school, so I think we could be giving them a lot more tools and training to hit the ground running. And not hobbling, exploiting, and indenturing them with student debt.
Half of the Christian "Great Commandment" is "love they neighbor as thyself", but we commonly use the word "love" as an intensified form of the word "like" and also as intimate identification, and I think the two concepts, while both legitimate, become muddled.
I recall reading news about a man who dangled his (and her) infant outside an upper story window, threatening to kill the child because his partner was leaving him. That's extreme, but malignant or clueless narcissism too often gets conflated with "love". Compassionate love is awareness and concern for another creature's sentient experience. Immersive travel can do that, for those who are open to it. "Mindfulness" practices of various sorts can also facilitate compassion. And just observing, just listening. It occurs to me that being observant, let alone being compassionate, is allied but not the same as being clever. And we have so many ways, certainly including myself, of getting in our own way. Given human limitations, how much of are problems can be traced to what we cannot see, and how much is what we simply prefer not to see? The consequences are huge.
We could learn a thing or two from other nations, as well as see people as more than their customs, by paying more attention to the day to day lives of people elsewhere in the world. Not just focus on big, and usually, bad events. I suspect Mid-twentieth Century America got a big boost from the convergent knowledge of many sorts of immigrants.
It's even more embarrassing to be a US citizen living outside the country and have newly intriduced friends remark on the malicious stupidity of white supremacists in America. I am supposed to account for their behavior, but I don't know how.
As a nine-year expat, I can tell you that most locals who are worth knowing are usually well aware of their native countries' own inglorious pasts, which generally include barbarity and stupidity. Having said that, I was in France last summer, introduced to a British woman, who expressed sympathy upon learning I was a Yank. It was the 4th of July, and I told her I was celebrating our exit from her stinking empire.
Who says you need to explain, justify or defend them? They're idiots like any other idiots. Who hasn't got a few of those around?
Whenever i'm in that position, i will simply agree with empathy if it's true. Why would i do anything else? No need to go on about it. We are not responsible for the behavior of others.
Maybe not so many idiots as fools and an idiot can be wiser than a fool. And who has never been fooled. But some fools refuse to learn, and some predators devise to keep them from doing so. Or to fool them even further. That's why good faith communication and a truly free press is so important, and truly free means free of domination by the few.
My daughter is married to a Canadian and lives in Canada. Canada has it's plutocratic problems too, and sabotaged itself for nine years under Harper. And Canada has it's share of dangerous delusional supremacists. That said, my experience is that overall the culture is noticeably more community-minded than here. My son-in-law sees American culture as more "punitive". If only Columbo was here to aid team Jack Smith, but hopefully the well experienced prosecutor is on the scent.
Somebody said it was better to light one candle than curse the darkness, though I think bearing vocal witness to pernicious lies is essential and sometimes heroic. But it's going to take a lot of candles to dispel the the shadow of the modern RNC. United we stand, divided we fall, and the power to divide is always a well practiced tool of tyrants. Solidarity is almost the opposite of conformity because very diverse, different people can agree on the bottom line that we all have human rights. Those that see none have fallen into sociopathy.
Certainly the system has not explored the continuing consequences. Yes, there is only so much children of a given age are prepared to understand, but we can prepare them better than we have.
Those in power, making those deliberate decisions to not educate the populace... like Sanctimonious... have an agenda. The rest of us need to understand the efforts and strategy so we can try to stop or at least maneuver around it effectively.
In my all white Massachusetts school, NONE of this was ever discussed. Lincoln announced an "emancipation", we fought the Civil War and won. Done. The insane and cruel treatment of fellow humans was never whispered. The incredible slaughter of the war? Nothing. The retaliation in the South after the war and going forward for decade after decade? Not a word.
And the war continues endlessly because we have allowed racism to become part of our cultural DNA. IMO, teaching CRT should not just be a college elective. It should start in grade school. KIds SHOULD BE TAUGHT about the horrors of their ancestors. Start with the European genocide of Native Americans. Teach what Columbus and his crew really did.
Teach that there are really no races - just different colors and different cultural experiences. Teach about bigotry. Teach how Americans have brutalized Blacks, Italians, Irish, Poles and Jews. Teach how as soon as the Irish gained power in Northern cities they did the same stuff that was done to them. Teach them they can be better. Teach them that they must.
And in teaching this cruel aspect of American history, teach our children to THINK! Kids are able to weigh the contradictions of the American story with the facts. Our history is brutal. Our history is glorious. Our history is complicated.
Well... we don't have to be so graphic with little ones. We CAN teach and encourage love, respect, tolerance and appreciation for our diversity and differences. Kids like to just play together. They don't naturally hate other kids who look or talk differently. They learn that.
I didn't learn it in school either. "And that is what the NAACP had done, and would continue to do: highlight that the inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples, bearing witness until “the believers in democracy” could no longer remain silent."
This is the truth that Florida and other states are fighting so hard to conceal. And they very cleverly have found a way to rally their base around remaining ignorant - get them scared of CRT! I'm remembering MTG's questioning during a House Oversight Committee hearing, of Gene Dodaro, head of the GAO, about COVID funds being illegally used for CRT. When Mr. Dodaro said, "CRT?" she explained, "It’s a racist curriculum used to teach children that somehow their white skin not equal to black skin and other things." Am I indulging in reverse racism when I cringe at her southern accent as she asked her ridiculous questions?
Thank you Jennifer. Even at 77, old tendencies to self-judgement sneak by my consciousness. I just realized I enjoy a southern accent when the words are kind and/or interesting. And I also just realized that, as a native Long Islander, I love my NY accent (shows up when I'm tired or back in NYC!) and don't enjoy it at all when I hear it from others expressing ignorance and/or racism.
When I post Heather's letters, I give a brief summary of the content. Today I added that here we are in 2023 and are still dealing with racism and in some places are going backwards....looking at you DeSatan and Florida and the use of the buzz initials, CRT, everywhere. Here in Salem, so far, we have two far right types running with help from regressive groups, including those who helped mess up the schools in Newburg, the board of which, had to change their policy about certain items in classrooms when they lost law suits. This is why we all must pay attention to all elections, local and otherwise.
And lawsuits!! Democracy Docket (free substack) will light your hair on fire. Right-wingers are wielding a heavy litigation weapon against democracy, free speech, "liberal arts" education -- you name it!
Chaplain Terry Nicholetti -- "Am I indulging in reverse racism when I cringe at her southern accent as she asked her ridiculous questions?"
She makes a lot of people cringe.
In an act of flagrant racism, representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) have decried the moving performance [ Sheryl Lee Ralph’s rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”] as an act of “wokeness.” Thankfully, Twitter wasn’t having it.
Journalist Dennis Perkins immediately put a halt to the representative’s attempt to spark a culture war, sharing a Taste of Country article that quotes Stapleton on his support for the Black Lives Matter Movement. “𝘋𝘰 𝘐 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳? 𝘈𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺. 𝘐 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦’𝘴 𝘢 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘐 𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘬𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯,"
And the title of the article: "Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert Lose It Over Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Black National Anthem, Are Immediately Roasted by Twitter: “Why Are You So Scared of Diversity?”
Story by Raven Brunner
Love the comebacks-- we need to develop volumes of comebacks to these insane and inane spews. Their white hoods are off and we see them, clearly. We need to respond and not be complicit.
Thank you! I don't follow football and none of this showed up in my own feed. I think we are waking up to what has to happen every single time some of this vile, racist ranting shows up.
This reminds me of how brilliantly Rep. Frost handled his questioning time in the House Oversight meeting last week. He tweeted in response to an article praising his performance: "I’ve found that these ridiculous and extreme far-right talking points are best met with simple ridicule. Seems to be effective." BTW he ridiculed the idea not the speaker. So skilled!
Terri—as I cringe when I listen to Louisiana’s Senator Kennedy (Oxford graduate) hush-my-mouth fifth-grade vocabulary speeches. His biography lists Magdalen College (one of the colleges that make up Oxford) and not Oxford.
I am constraining myself to not write a one thousand word reply. How can we get a species of animal where long term benefit just is not wired into our thinking brains, but greed is, to do what is vitally necessary to save our own skins? Especially in the wake of strong special interests (the fossil fuel supremacists), and their supporting political party, trying their best to muddy the waters with disinformation/misinformation.
A really important question. As an adult survivor of childhood physical and sexual abuse, and as part of my ongoing healing, I had to learn about my nervous system, reptile brain, fight, flight or freeze instincts and how we hold unprocessed memories of trauma. What else can we draw upon?
Answering that question is why it is so important to me to nurture my belief in a non-physical Source (whatever you call it, God/Goddess/ Goodness/Universe/Allah/Yahweh etc.) that resides in each of us, and is the source of all the important things we can't buy in the store: love, peace, justice, joy and more. We don't need to succumb to hierarchies of patriarchal religions in order to hold this belief and call upon these resources in ourselves and others every day. It's a life-long process, and it's worth it!
I'm a survivor also. Abuse seems endemic to the culture that raised me, but it is not at all clear to me how it became that way. But it does not seem to have always been like this, or not everywhere. Looking at gender relations and child rearing practices in other times and places has been useful for me.
An intriguing story about a very different culture:
Incredible article, Erik!! Thank you so much for posting it. Sadly, the links at the end of it are all out of date and gone. Still, some wonderful lessons and concepts and of course, fascinating American history that we don't get in school!! Just made my whole evening, kind sir!! :D
Yes I don't recall where I saw this, but it was only in the past year or so. I did not know of Sally Roesch Wagner and have not done a general search for more of her work, but two of the links on the above page can be retrieved using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive--a cool thing to know about:
We might start by asking whether greed and only working for short term gain are in fact hard-wired into all humans or if this is a particular moment in history where those traits have become ascendant in the most powerful populations of the world. It can be a quick route to despair to naturalize the way things are: it kills hope that things could be or ever have been different. Which is probably why we hear so many narratives telling us that we simply are incorrigible by nature.
Our brutal greed and short-sightedness certainly help to drive colonialism and capitalism, but there is plenty of historical and anthropological/archeological evidence that these are not universal dominant human drives. Indigenous cultures, both in the Americas and on other continents, are more often grounded by ideals of long-term stewardship of land and people; for many of them, the land and the people are not particularly separate, but are bound in a symbiotic relationship where the health of each is dependent on the other. There is even evidence that the "barbarians" of Europe, maybe as late as just before Roman conquest, saw their relationship to land and time very differently from how we see it now.
There have also been quite nearly countless other cultures over humanity's lifetime thus far, and they do not all match up with the story that would naturalize the features of dominant capitalist Western cultures. I am still in the middle of Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything", but it is rearranging my own thoughts on what the archeological record does and does not show--and I have been studying many of the same times and places that they have, and for about as long.
But their overall point seems to be one I agree with: the way things are here and now are historically contingent; we need not throw up our hands and see all humanity as hopelessly narcissistic and cruel.
Well an anthropologist I am not! This book suggests that human societies have gotten it right in the past. If so, today's human societies have a long road to hoe before we get serious about saving our children and the world's species from the worst of a climate disaster. The US, for quite a while now, has been looked upon world wide as the preeminent civilized nation on earth (IMO largely because of our contribution to victory over fascism in WW2, and our growth since then). What we do on the international stage matters. We can influence the other civilized nations. But we are failing miserably when it comes to addressing climate change. And we are hamstrung by a large segment of our population that just refuses to take it seriously, represented by and influenced by a political party that is so evil as to publicly reject that which they know to be true in favor of short term profits for the rich corporations and individuals they represent. I don't see a way out of it. What the hell happened that we are this way, in spite of the societal successes that seem to have occurred, described in this book?
That is the big question that they are trying to answer, and that I and many others have been trying to answer for a very long time. I have not finished the book, so I do not yet know what their conclusion is, but I can say this much:
One of the standard answers to "where did Western civilization go wrong?" starts with the Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent, where, beginning about 10,000 years ago, Europe's ancestors switched from hunting and gathering to intensive agriculture and domestication of livestock. According to this narrative, notions of private property arose as fields were cordoned off, and the first accumulation of wealth was in grain, stored for the winter and against bad harvests. Farming could support larger, more permanent populations, so hunting camps became villages which turned into towns and then cities, where contagion could much more easily spread, lowering individual lifespans, and where inequities in material wealth become sharper and sharper over time.
The main idea here is that hunting and gathering is a kind of eutopian existence where people do not have to work all day, relations are egalitarian because resources are shared and not hoarded, and people live in small groups in a state of natural bliss--or some would figure it that way--all until agriculture ruins everything forever.
Graeber and Wengrow are sympathetic to this narrative* but suspect, as I do, that it is much too simplistic. There were "neolithic revolutions" on every continent, most starting around 7000-10,000 years ago, and although they all introduced more intensive agricultural practices than had been known before, they produced a variety of outcomes. So they look deeply into those that happened in North America and compare them to what happened in the Fertile Crescent, and what they found over some 15-20 years of research and conversation is that the Neolithic Revolution was not one.
That is, it seems not to have happened all at once anywhere: many different kinds of agriculture arose, and some groups started farming and then stopped and went back to hunting and gathering--which itself almost always incorporates a degree of husbandry of wild game as well as cultivation of wild crops. The line between the two forms of culture is not only not always distinct, but is not necessarily between only two forms of culture.
In other words? It's really incredibly complicated, and just like most Western academic discourse, archeology and anthropology have a tendency to tell Just So stories that make Euroamerican culture the "natural" outcome of much of prehistory, leaving those of us who distrust that degree of neatness to try to understand what might really have happened, or indeed, whether we can look backward with any accuracy at all, given the (post-)modern glasses we all look through.
I wish the answer were simple. I wanted it to be when I started looking at the Neolithic Revolution, the Roman Conquest and subsequent Christianization of (the rest of) Europe, and even the Black Death/Great Plague. I do think those were crucial moments, but I still do not have the answer to what has become my most central question: when/where/why/how did (some subset of?) European culture forget that we are a part of the natural world and decide instead that Nature must be conquered--brutally, if necessary--so that "men" may unlock "her" secrets?
I do not know yet. When I finish the book, I'll try to say more about Graeber and Wengrow's conclusions. There are other questions that attend to the overall Where Did We Go Wrong, but it does seem to me that one of the most important things for us to remember now is that we belong to life on Earth, that everything and everyone here is dependent on everything and everyone else here--human, non-human, animal, vegetable, mineral. Continuing to remain forgetful may well be suicidal. It has already been genocidal throughout human and non-human kingdoms.
*They also contrast it with a different, but equally simplistic narrative about the "war of all against all" coming to an end with the first Social Contract, where no blissful state of nature has ever existed. I'm leaving that out for, um, brevity. :) Ultimately, though, it is just as reductive and historically inaccurate as the first.
That's why I'm committed to posting these ideas and stories as far and wide as I can. It's something I can do, along with postcards, no matter how much energy I have for actual in person protests and rallies.
I often tell people that Central Illinois is much more "southern" in character than its Land of Lincoln image would suggest. I grew up in Decatur, during the 1960's, only 30 minutes from Springfield on the two-lane highway. While we all went on school field trips to see the "Lincoln sites" abundant in our area, we NEVER learned about the Springfield riot. My mother was extremely racist, while my father, a defense lawyer was not. He told me, "people are people, no matter the color of their skin." Fortunately, I absorbed his message, not my mother's. As I got into high school I began to see the subtle and not so subtle racism that permeated our community.
I heard racist talk and jokes in my family. My mother, bless her would fight against that kind of talk. She surprised everyone when she, as a blonde, middle-class, white woman drove her new buick 1 ½ hours north to volunteer in a Headstart program in a black ghetto (Watts). I was too young to know how the racists males in our family responded, but she became very attached to a preschooler named George. She brought him home and he played with my younger brother and me. My father was completely disconcerted when he came home from work to find his little white toddler splashing in the water with the little beautiful George. I was in charge of making sure they were safe whilst mom made dinner. I do not know what the yelling going on in the kitchen was all about. But I learned that the color of our new, little friend who was having a great time with my little brother wreaked havoc. I must have been about 10. And then the riots in LA happened and my mother was banned from returning to the ghettos of LA. I only know that little George introduced me to family behaviors that were appalling and unjust. Only as I have grown older have I realized how brave and courageous my mother was. And she appeared to have made such an impact upon me, the only girl in a family of six. I listened to her arguments at dinner with her husband and her father. I do not think any of my brothers really listened or learned, or even paid attention...The eldest is a evangelical trumpist. We could not talk due to his macho tenor and misogyny that I could not tolerate. He was the perfect specimen to relate to the dogma of trump and the growing fascism in America. Did I do the right thing in helping him to live when he almost died of cancer....I wonder sometimes. I know what TCinLA would say...on my left shoulder.... Racism is so damned deep in our foundations.
That is what my black soldier friend who had served in 4 theaters of war warned me about when we argued about the beauty of Obama running for prez. He was totally against it and swore to me that it would unleash what people of white privilege cannot imagine. I argued with him like my mom argued with the men in my family. They were both right. This is going to take all of us to face this ancient prejudice and take our country forward-- ALL OF THE PEOPLE THIS TIME.
And though the extremists are trying to set the narrative of CRT and WOKE being negatives. WE need to set them straight.
The meaning of WOKE is AWARE of and ACTIVELY ATTENTiVE to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). BE Proud to be woke.
Or Awakened. Stand up for our youth to be better educated than we were. Ken Burn's has great films on the history of our country. Watch them with your children and grandchildren and talk with them. It is not about guilt, it is about not repeating how atrocious some of our American history is, and that none should be proud of nor repeat. They will understand if you teach them. I learned from my mother's behaviors and actions. She taught me well to be Woke and my black, soldier friend taught me to really wake up—fully. Now, what am I gonna do today with all this wokeness energy I have been gifted?
Based on what I saw within my organization after Obama was elected was EXACTLY what your Black soldier friend warned about. I have used the analogy of Obama's election as ripping the scab off a poorly healed wound and watching the pus run out. His election only illustrated that we are part and parcel a country founded on racism and the theft of Indigenous lands. That is our "greatness".
Last night 60 Minutes re-played the program about Canadian "residential" schools that were responsible for so much abuse & killing of little indigenous children.
I dont know how anyone feels about the series "1923" but boy, it certainly made clear exactly how bad it was. And it needs to be made clear - like so very much of our history.
I grew up in Freeport, Illinois, home to one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and “history” was never very far away. Yet reading about Springfield makes me wonder what else I didn’t learn about my old hometown.
Where did such intense fear and hatred of Black people come from? In the spirit of explanation rather than excuse: The successful 1791-1804 revolution in Haiti shocked and terrified the white slave-owning world in the U.S. and Caribbean. Blacks on the island, inspired by France's own democratic revolution in 1789, demanded the end of slavery and the establishment of civil rights in Haiti. That led to suppression, revolution, war, and the massacre of whites. The revolution changed the course of history. The massacre was said to have soured the French on the Americas and may have helped motivate the French to sell Louisiana to the U.S. Haiti has since been desperately poor, even relative to its next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The white world largely cancelled it as punishment for the rebellion. Apropos of that: Since 1804, black efforts for equality in the US--including the recent Black Lives Matter movement--are often characterised as provocations, rather than as understandable human responses. "Black Lives Matter" was a response to the tacit but ubiquitous message: "Black lives don't matter." It is a blind spot in our culture, in media, and in government that we seem incapable of conceding that a people responded to a white Western provocation. We persist in characterising their aggression as striking for no reason at all. But unless we understand our role in that dynamic, and "retain the blow," as Saul Bellow wrote, the cycle of revenge rolls through history. Eventually everyone forgets how it started.
If only more people could see and feel the history that you have described. So important in understanding where we are today. But the new MAGA movement is burying it.
I would add that we need to complete that history lesson by revealing the essential evil of human nature. The evil that harks back thousands and thousands of years. The evil idea of zero sum.
American English Protestants persecuted newly arrived Catholics. And that continued as the Irish came in huge numbers. My ancestors saw them and the Italians as takers. Not the incredibly hard working family oriented folks that most of them really were.
So we are demonized until we are in charge and then we demonize the next group. After all, we have blame SOMEBODY ELSE for our difficulties. The Irish of Boston and NY imitated the Protestants once they gained power. An endless cycle of oppression.
And we just keep repeating the same cycle of stupidity and cruelty. America is now desperate for workers. Millions of jobs go unfilled. Our birth rate is less than replacement. Older Americans will be a growing burden on a shrinking work force.
Want the evidence that America is insane and dysfunctional? That this cycle of hate is self defeating? There are hundreds of thousands of job applicants knocking on our southern door. They want to work hard, care for their families and would be thrilled to pay taxes. And to make it even more pathetic and stupid, immigrants have proven over and over again that they perform better at work and they commit less crime than their native born counterparts. Why? Because they treasure the opportunity! Because they are so freaking grateful.
And yet, the cycle continues. They are "others". They are different. They must be a threat. They will "take from us". We fail to recognize that we were them. Teach that.
And then teach how much worse someone's life is today if their great grandfather's land had been stolen after the Civil War. And their grandfather had to pick crops under brutal circumstances. And their father got a job but could not advance because of his color. That his family couldn't travel through parts of the great nation without fear. That his mom and dad couldn't get a mortgage for a home in most neighborhoods. Need I go on? Teach that in school. In every school.
Teach that white folks inherited the property that was stolen from the black man. That all the black man could pass down is stories of lynching. Teach that.
The thing that really interests me is that those white folk of today who rail against teaching the actual history that shines light on the bad behaviors of the past, refuse to disassociate themselves from those crimes caused by past white folk. Because “ those guys were white, and I am white”; history is accusing “me” in my white skin as being guilty of those crimes today”
“I inherited those crimes, so I must not let the future world know they were committed”
Bill Alstrom, appreciate every word! Thank you for taking time and thought to express our sad history.... of lack of love and lack of appreciation for our fellow human beings. Because of our chosen decision to put someone down so that we might elevate ourselves, our nation and our world continue to put others on the front line to fight our self-serving battles with money, power and control the goal from hate mongers and those who sell weapons and who just want MORE........
I wish that desire could be for more understanding....more of a desire to work together for clean water to drink, better air quality, excellent free education for all, our oceans, health care for children, men and women. world economies: , safety- in all areas.....respect for one another.....these are good goals and challenging enough to last until forever...... if we could work together!!!!
The things you mention are obvious priorities. But apparently there are too many people who don't see the damage done by our abuse of the planet and each other. I just don't understand. It's like they are saying I am willing to burn down my whole house with my family in it.
Bill - you can go even further back than that. As a species, we were and are comparative weaklings as opposed to other predators who must somehow compete and survive in the cold cruel natural world that we evolved in. The big cats do it on strength, speed, and great big teeth. Elephants and rhinos do it with shear bulk and an ornery disposition. We do it (or did it) by outsmarting them and banding together and combining talents. And critically, in a world where resources are hard earned, hatred of the other - who would want those same resources - tends to improve the odds your band (and its gene pool) survives. That is what is hardwired into the human brain. It is an instinct, and it is fallible in a changing world. That is why extinction exists. What we have though, that other species do not, is enough reasoning power to overcome instinctual behavior. So we can do it, if there is the will to do so. Not sure how to get that will to do so more strong.
This series on Haiti published in the NYT is an impressive and extensive research project that is informative, heart rending, and mind boggling. I tried to link it as a gift article but that did not work.
I hope those of you that have NYT subscription will take the time to read this research. Warning: it is not light reading and it has several installments.
The Ransom: A Look Under the Hood
Thousands of pages of original documents, and hundreds of books and articles. Here are the historians and researchers on which the Haiti project drew.
Many, many thanks for this history of the NAACP. I was completely ignorant, in every way, of its origins, if not the violence that gave birth to the organization.
I will join the NAACP today. I did not realize that folks who are not black could join.
I would also like to recognize Mahomes and Hurts for their leadership in the NFL. You can see how both quarterbacks treat their team mates in a way that Tom Brady never, ever did. Each man treats their team mates as EQUALS. As VALUABLE. Brady only treated Gronkowski as an equal, and, probably not even him. Brady was the man in his own mind. Still is.
Lastly, I was told, in 1992, by a manager at a big corporation, in highly segregated northern city, upon learning where I was planning on purchasing a house: "I remember when people knew their place".
Actually, at the time the words were spoken to me I did understand what he meant. Growing up down south I had never, even once, heard something like that. It was a few years of watching what was going on inside the corporation and meeting folks in the segregated north that enlightened me as to those words meaning.
"I remember when people knew their place" meant that I had purchased a house in an all white area that he remembered (and believed should be) as off limits to "you people" like me, EVEN though I am light skinned and not African American. I do have a minority last name. My father was from Mexico. But, honestly, I never thought all that much about that growing up down south (nobody believes me up here in the north when I say this but it is true).
!992. And? I live in the same town now and I can assure everyone who reads this, nothing has changed since 1992, and, honestly has grown WORSE since then.
Snowshoes tested, broken repaired broken repaired new designs under way. Need large shoes for my 250 lb. frame + capacity for 50 lb pack. Must sustain 300 lbs. I have achieved the working size necessary and am beefing up the rail size. Will weave two new steam bent frames. Manana. Thursday night Continental Divide overnight.
I am the large predator! Just imagine a 250 lb man with a full sized axe. The lions and wolverines up there don’t carry guns. The two legged ones are too smart to go up there and the bears are sleeping. Life is good.
Thank you for a beautiful Letter. We have even greater challenges now now that did not even exist a century ago.
We have a planet whose capacity to support civilization is collapsing under the pressures of how we live. We have more people being killed by class privilege placing universal access to health care so far beyond the reach of citizens that it kills us at rates greater than wars and domestic violence.
We cannot unite in the ways needed to deliver ourselves out of these challenges so long as we allow ourselves to be divided and directed into reviving a second civil war. Either we engage in ending this self-destructive division ASAP, or we engage in hastening the ending of ourselves. There is no alternative middle road in dinking, dithering, do-nothingness.
Long ago, I taught history (social studies was the term). That was before I became a school official. Well after my retirement I learned about the 1921 race massacres and destruction of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street." It was less than ten years ago, visiting friends who retired in Wilmington, NC, that I learned about the 1898 coup d'etat and killings in that city. And today, I read for the first time, about the 1908 racial killings and destruction of the Black community in Springfield, IL. This may be a confession of my ignorance, but I intend it as a call for more study of the history of race in America rather than the suppression of that history as advocated by the distasteful governor of Florida.
Leonard, have you ever heard of Ax Handle Saturday? It was a racial riot that happened in Jacksonville, FL on a Saturday. Whites attacked Black people peacefully protesting in downtown Jacksonville. The attackers used ax handles, among other things, to beat the protesters. I never heard of this situation until my daughter moved to Jacksonville. This is the history that people like DeSantis want swept under the rug.
Also, check out the book "American Character" by Colin Woodward. It was a real eye opening read for me. Sadly, the US has a very bloody history, largely stemming from the perception of race.
There’s so much to learn about Racism in the United States. We have been a model including to Hitler. Not news, and a web search provides more resources. “How the Nazis Used Jim Crow Laws as the Model for Their Race Laws”Bill Moyers in conversation with author James Whitman about his new book "Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law."”
William English Walling is my great-grandfather. The family story about the founding of NAACP is that Walling and his wife Anna Strunsky Walling were speaking at Cooper Union in NYC about the Russian revolution. (They were committed Socialists and had spent time in Russia.) They were both to speak with my great-grandmother following to talk about the women's situation in Russia. But as I heard it when it was her turn to speak her heart was heavy with the news of the Springfield lynching and that's what she spoke about. As she was speaking she worried about how her husband would respond. After that speech Ida B Wells approached my great-grandparents and the plan for the first meeting was held. I thought it was at their Greenwich house.
Thought it would be fun to add this story. And I note, how my great grandmother's role gets overlooked. :)
Professor, you demonstrate every day how and why History is alive, how critical it is for every American to understand what came before us, how today is connected to the past. This morning I listened to “Up First”NPR podcast,”The Civil Rights Generation.”
“The story of civil rights in America is the story of legends like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also the story of countless ordinary people who made a difference in their own, less-visible ways.” A must 30 minutes listen at a time when Civil Rights and Human Rights are in danger in the USA. Voting Rights! Gerrymandering. Supreme Court decisions. Gun laws. Prison and law enforcement. Education. CRT and books banned. Poverty. Overt Racism. Still. How do we achieve equality (we do not have equality in America) when we are in danger of our lawmakers and courts dismantling protections? Black Lives Matter. Here is the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/up-first/id1222114325?i=1000599181487
I mourn the loss of Lincoln's birthday as a separate, national holiday. Not only for his championing of Abolition, an essential step toward healing one of Americas most grievous crimes, but for his lucid understanding and elucidation of democracy. Real democracy. Lincoln's understanding of the black race was far from perfect, but he understood the evil that was slavery was consuming America's soul.
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of those may be turned against our liberties, without making us weaker or stronger for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
I also mourn the loss of Lincoln's birthday as a separate holiday. If it were still separate, we would more likely focus on him and what he said and did.
When I read accounts like the one in this HCR Letter, I am sickened at the violence and brutality visited upon Black Americans by White Americans, and at the Whites' absolute conviction that they were right in doing so!
When I read these accounts, I feel as if it were being done to me. And I am a White woman.
As a woman, I have some visceral understanding of being vulnerable to rape, as even White women are so often blamed for their victimization. But Black women, and Black people in general are treated SO MUCH WORSE!
The group hatred evinced by the Whites in today's Letter is horrifying! Mob violence with a clearly erroneous feeling of righteousness! Can't help being reminded of the mob violence of January 6th's attack on the Capitol. Brutal. Horrifying. And that sense of self-righteousness inflamed by DJT and right wing media hosts.
Lincoln was certainly right that we have lost the genius of our own independence and become fit subjects of that cunning would-be tyrant, DJT.
😡😔💔
And yet. We can still wake up and turn this ship around.
I see the bane of humanity as the abuse of power over others. Rape is abuse of power, slavery is abuse of power, as is war. For what is Ukraine being decimated? Political corruption is abuse of power, as is theft, if you think about it, and some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen. Bullies in a school yard or on the internet is abuse of power. Any idiot can grab a rock and kill someone, but we foul our own nest when we do so. Obviously unacceptable pollution is an abuse of power, even against the future.
That is why we form social contracts to regulate power, so that the negligent or predatory actions of one person does not rob the human rights liberties of another. Freedom is freedom from as well as freedom to.
So is regulation bad? Is government bad? Is water bad? It depends on if you are drinking it or drowning. The government of Nazi Germany was obviously bad, yet a prudent and just democracy (what Reagan was actually ridiculing) is not; the devil is in the details. Why are there enforced rules at a four way stop? To establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, and save human lives. That's the bright side of "regulation". Anti-woke, anti-gay is the other.
JL and Cheryl, I'll add another YES!! When Lincoln's birthday and Washington's birthday were clumped together, I was appalled but still highlighted the separate dates when I began teaching.
Growing up in the '50's in the Cleveland public schools American History was heavily cut cut with folklore, such as Pocahontas pleading for the life of John Smith, for which there is no corroborating evidence, and strong evidence that it was an idle boast. I was taught that Christopher Columbus was a great hero, and the very first person who realized that the world was round, despite ancient Greek Eratosthenes having calculated the circumference of the earth with mathematical logic with amazing accuracy.
But every Lincoln's birthday (no school on the actual day) we focused quite a bit on Lincoln, whether it was drawing pictures or learning lore of his character and accomplishments. One such lesson was memorization of the Gettysburg address, and while I think some things are worth memorizing and others far less so, I have thought of those words throughout my life. That, and the preamble to the Constitution. I think that no other president quite so eloquently nailed what a just democracy is all about. And now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Thank you for bringing the attention of the young to thoughts that might save us yet. We the living have a fair degree of power and responsibility to shape our own future, which requires seeking wisdom and creativity and also, in Newton's words, standing on the shoulders of giants (as well as innumerable others whose names are lost to history).
Two tenacious NAACP legal bulldogs, Thurgood Marshall and his extraordinary mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, targeted Plessy v Ferguson, 19th century Supreme Court ruling that ‘separate but equal’ was OK for African American students. Their focus was to eliminate racial discrimination in education.
Theirs was a decades long struggle. When Houston, the first NAACP legal counsel died, Marshall succeeded him. He pursued a deliberate policy of gradually chipping away at Plessy v. Ferguson bit by bit. He won 29 of his 32 cases on racial discrimination before the Supreme Court.
His monumental triumph was the 9-0 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education that totally overturned PvF. While implementation of this decision has been a long and tortuous path, it remains one of the truly precedent-changing rulings in Supreme Court history.
Marshall was the first Black to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He was a liberal on the Court. Following his death, after a contentious Senate hearing Clarence Thomas was named to fill the ‘Marshall seat.’
Thank for writing so clearly and compellingly about our history, especially the bits that point out how we, as a nation, have so often failed to live up to the ideal that we are all created equal and are to be treated as equals under the law.
What a good column. It is a vivid reminder of how racism has infected the US and created wounds, scars and injustices that have torn apart the social and political fiber of the country. Notwithstanding fighting a Civil War to eradicate the injustices of racism the infection remains and we have seen its fruit borne by the current trends of political chaos and violence. The failure to deal with these issues are debilitating the prospects of achieving a great country and society.
Powerful, poignant, and timely. You are a national treasure, speaking truth to power. Thank you for this. It brings our current crisis into perspective.
There has been progress as well as manipulative regression. A black president, a female POC VP, advanced gay rights despite corrupt misuse of law to suppress them. It's like a Civil War all over again.
But yes, we should be far beyond institutional sociopathy by now.
And knowing & respecting the knowing of this history is what today is called "woke", which in my mind clearly means to be "awake", "Christian" and a humanitarian.
Too many politicians and leaders have been spreading bigotry and hatred among white Christians against racial and religious minorities for too long. It all started on this continent in 1619 which is why the NY Times chose the "1619 Project" for it's American Black history project. The seed of racism in America was sown with the sale and purchase of black African slaves in Virginia in 1619, and has grown into a jungle of poisonous vines wrapping throughout the American civilization, fed and led by every politician who promotes their race from behind masks and hoods of self righteousness, claiming white victimhood, banning words, books and education addressing our full and accurate history, as they dismiss the violence and oppression that they and people like them have fostered and foisted on the nation that first said "all men are created equal".
David, I really think we should all resist, very seriously, referring to accurate history as "woke".
Reason: Accurate history is just that. History. Buying in to using the word "woke", which is a right wing denigration of accurate history about black experiences, helps the right wing in the quest to Keep Americans Ignorant (Again). KAIA.
I recently had breakfast with a long time friend who, during the breakfast started raving about "woke" this and that.
I listened until he was finished, as is polite, and then asked him: "What, exactly, does "Woke" mean". Because, I have no idea.
He, it turns out, ALSO could not provide me a clear definition BUT he knew it meant denigrating "those people".
After being tired of hearing people say the word “woke” in a disparaging way, I went to the online Merriam Webster dictionary & looked up the meaning. Here’s what it says:
“Awareness of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues or racial and social justice).”
So, being “woke” is a positive trait, not a negative one! I’m trying to memorize that definition - so the next time some jerk complains about people being “woke”, I can calmly give him or her the dictionary definition. While smiling sweetly, of course.
Mike S -- "this history is what today is called "woke""
David, I really think we should all resist, very seriously, referring to accurate history as "woke".
"Reason: Accurate history is just that. History. Buying in to using the word "woke", which is a right wing denigration of accurate history about black experiences, helps the right wing in the quest to Keep Americans Ignorant (Again)."
Well, it is their story ... and they are sticking with it. <chuckle>
During an interview on Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan asked Govenor Sununu why he had criticized Republicans trying to "out-do" Democrats by imposing government rules.
Any word or phrase that becomes commonly used by people who favor social, historical, political, and/or economic justice will be turned into a pejorative by rightwing people, nearly all of whom, no matter what they say, seek to continue and even bolster the enormous systemic advantages that white people enjoy in the US (and Europe, for that matter). It doesn’t matter what you call it. They oppose it and will do anything they can to preserve their unfair (to put it as mildly as possible) systemic advantages. Don’t let them denigrate your terminology and get away with it. Double down and shove it down their throats… or up their wazoo, whichever is more convenient.
David My wife advises me not to say that I am ‘woke’ since it might be misunderstood. I’ve just checked the dictionary definition and I am proud to say I AM WOKE!
The treatment of Black people in America is sickening. The violence and dehumanization and removal of dignity is an awful history. Suppressing the teaching of these historical facts is collusion with this criminal and immoral behavior.
'Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Study Says'
Today's Letter lucidly connects the time from President Abraham Lincoln's birth to the formation of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
'They vowed “to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, employment according to their ability, and complete equality before the law.” (Letter)
Our struggle as a people '...to advance the interest of colored citizens...' is still woefully unfinished. Here are excerpts from today's front page story in The New York Times.
'In the United States, the richest mothers and their newborns are the most likely to survive the year after childbirth — except when the family is Black, according to a groundbreaking new study of two million California births. The richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies.'
'Research has repeatedly shown that Black mothers and babies have the worst childbirth outcomes in the United States. But this study is novel because it’s the first of its size to show how the risks of childbirth vary by both race and parental income, and how Black families, regardless of their socioeconomic status, are disproportionately affected.'
“This is a landmark paper, and what it makes really stark is how we are leaving one group of people way behind,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, a University of Pennsylvania economist who studies racial health disparities and was not involved in the research.'
'This finding suggests that the American medical system has the ability to save many of the lives of babies with early health risks, but that those benefits can be out of reach for low-income families.
'The babies born to the richest Black women (the top tenth of earners) tended to have more risk factors, including being born premature or underweight, than those born to the richest white mothers — and more than those born to the poorest white mothers. It’s evidence that the harm to Black mothers and their babies, regardless of socioeconomic status, begins before childbirth.'
“As a Black infant, you’re starting off with worse health, even those born into these wealthy families,” said Sarah Miller, a health economist at the University of Michigan. She was an author of the study with Professor Rossin-Slater and Petra Persson of Stanford, Kate Kennedy-Moulton of Columbia, Laura Wherry of N.Y.U. and Gloria Aldana of the Census Bureau.'
'Black mothers and babies had worse outcomes than those who were Hispanic, Asian or white in all the health measures the researchers looked at: whether babies were born early or underweight; whether mothers had birth-related health problems like eclampsia or sepsis; and whether the babies and mothers died. There was not enough data to look at other populations, including Native Americans, but other research has shown that they face adverse outcomes nearing those of Black women and infants in childbirth.'
“It’s not race, it’s racism,” said Tiffany L. Green, an economist focused on public health and obstetrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data are quite clear that this isn’t about biology. This is about the environments where we live, where we work, where we play, where we sleep.”
'There is clear evidence that Black patients experience racism in health care settings. In childbirth, mothers are treated differently and given different access to interventions. Black infants are more likely to survive if their doctors are Black. The experience of the tennis star Serena Williams — she had a pulmonary embolism after giving birth, yet said health care professionals did not address it at first — drew attention to how not even the most famous and wealthy Black women escape this pattern.' (NYTimes) Gifted link to the article below.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/12/upshot/child-maternal-mortality-rich-poor.html?unlocked_article_code=CIblF48D71oi2PS6gMA4oYv08fHmDJlWzKQrEY49rw8GvEFjUOrtn7i_O8KvwQ1hdu6UFDIPJPlarwmroNd1_ZZoEYGaBUP59iGNohmIZysYFxSFAdhbNhgtt5TTVms0UprTNSidmAlGKug02z56Wiwd_DITINKqsKi29oZrUdwJYKztPj6myj_E0vF4JkAYfS6Qm3jGXT5EN8FymQYgiQbGBQO_Pz-Uh1bAFANvN7QFX7PqpvPMUo9FafxyVwuK_4V_U3HFC_2r6OPpg-Gu5im5ZSJRzE-d4CpN0grgsZ--Lf6VQv35R778Kx86xxqIugBFb6hr6GpY8_PfttUVSywHo4Lwhv1h8Xf5HDbMMSCSlPl-H8uxNSqqag&smid=share-url
Thanks Fern, excellent post, as always. Pain management studies I have read indicate that those presenting in EDs who are least likely to have their pain addressed are older, black, and female. Racism leaves its mark on all who experience it. It settles into bodies, reducing health quality and life span.
I believe that. Not only is it racism it is sexism.
Dr. J. Marion Sims, "Father of American Gynecology" operated on enslaved Black women with no anesthesia. He believed Black people did not feel pain. IMO, I think he CHOSE to disregard that a Black woman might feel pain because such a thought would interfere with HE wanted to do--racism and misogyny at work. Those same attitudes are still present today.
See Michelle Browder’s sculpture of those women used by Sims as medical experiments in Montgomery, Alabama.
Why did I not know this??🤬🤬🤬
Not to take anything away from the plight and atrocities black women have suffered, but my mother, a German Holocaust survivor, had something similar with a dentist. She was in pain from an abscessed tooth. The Nazis would not let her go to her own dentist. They sent her to one of theirs, clear across Berlin, on a bus. The dentist did nor use Novocain. She was in agony for years. She slowly lost her teeth in America and ended up with dentures that never fit right. There was a board of doctors who concluded it was the trauma of having that tooth pulled and the events of what was happening to Jews, that her teeth and gums suffered.
I do not understand the hatred of man.
Check out Michelle Browder's site......the images she created speak louder than any words that could be written on the subject.
"It settles into bodies......."
Thank you, Fern. These disparities make me sick and very angry. Crying doesn’t help but protesting does. I will continue to do so until my last dying breath.
This article is another chilling read:
https://www.elle.com/life-love/a39586444/how-serena-williams-saved-her-own-life/
This story is amazing and chilling, simultaneously. .
Thank you, Ally for sharing Serena's story. She is a beautiful soul!
Thank you for that link--horrifying tale of ignoring a reasonable, informed request by the patient and, thank goodness, a happy ending.
Thank you, Ally... i'd heard or read versions of her story before. Nothing like this.
What a powerful story. Thank you so much for the link.
It all just makes me want to cry. And then it makes me want to push on, find ways to reach those who haven't so far been truly reached.
Fern, thank you for another excellent post. The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that there is a problem. Hopefully this won’t be the only study, but will lead to better childbirth and postpartum management so that black mothers have an equal chance.
Mary, the following from the article will indicate that while race, even among the richest Blacks people is significant, the mortality and health of mothers and babies of all Americans indicate weakness in our medical model, which effect everyone.
'Many parts of the United States have much higher maternal mortality than California, and fewer policies to support families. California was the first state to offer paid family leave. It has one of the most generous public insurance programs for pregnant women. The state has invested in specific programs aimed at reducing maternal deaths and racial disparities in childbirth.'
'Yet even in this best-case American scenario, mothers and babies fare worse compared with another rich country the researchers examined: Sweden. At every income level, Swedish women have healthier babies. This held true for the highest-income Swedish women and those from disadvantaged populations, including low-income and immigrant mothers.
In the United States, earning more regularly translates into superior access to the fastest, most expensive health care. But even with that advantage, the richest white Californians in this study still gave birth to less healthy babies than the richest Swedish women. Their newborns were more likely to be premature or underweight. The two groups had roughly equal maternal death rates.'
“That finding really does strongly suggest that it’s something about the care model,” said Dr. Neel Shah, chief medical officer of Maven Clinic for women’s and family health and a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School. “We have the technology, but the model of prenatal care in the United States hasn’t really gotten an update in the last century.”
'Sweden, like most European countries, has universal health insurance with low out-of-pocket costs for the patient. Midwives deliver most babies in Sweden and provide most of the prenatal care, which has been linked to lower C-section rates and lower rates of preterm births and low birth weights. It has long paid leaves and subsidized child care.'
'Like California, Sweden has also started targeted efforts to reduce maternal deaths. When officials there recognized that African immigrants giving birth were dying more frequently, they began piloting a “culture doula” program, with doulas who were immigrants themselves helping pregnant women navigate the country’s health system.'
'Local maternal health programs could begin to help reduce racial disparities in the United States, too, as could a more diverse medical workforce, research suggests. Nonprofits and universities have experimented with ways to address racism and poverty, with programs like cash transfers for low-income pregnant women and initiatives to improve the environments of Black communities.'
'By the time a woman is pregnant, Professor Miller said, “it’s almost too late.”
“Health is going to depend on exposures throughout her life, health care she’s received, environmental factors,” she said. “A lot goes on prior to the pregnancy that affects the health of the mother and baby.”
Fern, thank you for posting this study.
Another look at this is found in a different study that looked at birth outcome differences between foreign-born Black women and USA-born Black women. Those researchers concluded "The difference in risk of adverse birth outcomes between American-born and foreign-born Black women is not due to genetics. Rather, we believe that it can be explained by differences in exposure to racism across the lifespan."
See https://pretermbirthca.ucsf.edu/news/us-born-black-women-california-have-worse-birth-outcomes-black-immigrant-women
Karen, Thank you for your reply and article. There are important questions that could not be answered in the California study. From the article itself, and not the study (which probably provides a more detailed understanding in its conclusions) women's work, living quarters, healthcare models, doctors' origins, etc., are all factors in the health and mortality of mother and child of all stripes. In the article I referenced, women and infants in Sweden did better than than those in America.
Sweden has such a different approach to life and people and families.
I heard this on the television when I turned it on this morning. I was not surprised.
What pain do we endure as a nation, inflicted on every single person in our county, not only those who are abused, the price paid in strangled social joie de vivre,, in order to play the cruel games of delusional supremacy?
Bottom line: our history is sickening!
Many parts of it are sickening, yet millions of white men went to war to end slavery, and millions more (men and women) elected the presidents and legislators who passed civil rights laws at all levels and marched and fought to make those rights real. And don’t forget the “ ordinary” Americans who support equality every day, through voice, and votes and friendship.
Well said Jon. There is, on balance, much more good than bad; the good, however, is taken for granted and the bad sells.
Jon, while intellectually I know you're right, emotionally I feel it's not enough. As a child of Holocaust survivors, I know it's a lot, and critical, but not enough.
What will be enough? Not for me to say. I've personally experienced antisemitism, but walking anywhere, I can ignore that detail. A black person can't.
We'll be getting close when we all individually react to a person's character, accomplishments, and dreams more than we react to that person's color. We have come far as a nation, yes. But we have quite far yet to go as individuals. We're not close enough.
Evidence why the racists are trying to suppress the teaching of our sickening history.
no question
Our history of cruelty and conquest has been repeated for thousands of years on Earth. The cry of “American Exceptionalism” does not exempt us from it. Time and the efforts of like-minded groups inch the bend of the arc
Participation,, even more than collusion.
I like the words in your bio Kerry, that you are "informed by it", meaning History. I'm with you. To be a bunch of human beings swimming around in the pool with our fellow man along with all we have together in this world of today... and to behave in this manner, this childish manner. To refer to our behavior as "in-humane" would imply that we are grown-ups and understand the meaning of the word. Have some sangria for me my friend.
You are so right. We have a huge population of clueless adults with absolutely no conception of the actual history of this country. They spend their lives mesmerized by advertising and living in a fantasy world of “manifest destiny”, exceptionalism, and white Christian privilege. We’ve been glossing over the “all men are created equal” equivocation for centuries now. Barely a mention of the “treaties” with Native Americans that were spit on with impunity. The ends have justified all the means is what we really teach.
It's not all we teach, but (long ago) I was certainly fed a narrative of American exceptionalism in school. And so much of what I learned (until college) was so fragmented it was hard to appreciate its impact on today. Kids are expected to deal wisely with society's challenges and run a functional democracy once out of school, so I think we could be giving them a lot more tools and training to hit the ground running. And not hobbling, exploiting, and indenturing them with student debt.
Half of the Christian "Great Commandment" is "love they neighbor as thyself", but we commonly use the word "love" as an intensified form of the word "like" and also as intimate identification, and I think the two concepts, while both legitimate, become muddled.
I recall reading news about a man who dangled his (and her) infant outside an upper story window, threatening to kill the child because his partner was leaving him. That's extreme, but malignant or clueless narcissism too often gets conflated with "love". Compassionate love is awareness and concern for another creature's sentient experience. Immersive travel can do that, for those who are open to it. "Mindfulness" practices of various sorts can also facilitate compassion. And just observing, just listening. It occurs to me that being observant, let alone being compassionate, is allied but not the same as being clever. And we have so many ways, certainly including myself, of getting in our own way. Given human limitations, how much of are problems can be traced to what we cannot see, and how much is what we simply prefer not to see? The consequences are huge.
We could learn a thing or two from other nations, as well as see people as more than their customs, by paying more attention to the day to day lives of people elsewhere in the world. Not just focus on big, and usually, bad events. I suspect Mid-twentieth Century America got a big boost from the convergent knowledge of many sorts of immigrants.
It's even more embarrassing to be a US citizen living outside the country and have newly intriduced friends remark on the malicious stupidity of white supremacists in America. I am supposed to account for their behavior, but I don't know how.
As a nine-year expat, I can tell you that most locals who are worth knowing are usually well aware of their native countries' own inglorious pasts, which generally include barbarity and stupidity. Having said that, I was in France last summer, introduced to a British woman, who expressed sympathy upon learning I was a Yank. It was the 4th of July, and I told her I was celebrating our exit from her stinking empire.
All of the nations of which I have any familiarity have had serious problems bullying, certainly including our own. And not just in the distant past.
I am aware that the US has a widespread reputation in Europe for excess and lawlessness. Also elements of admiration. We have a problem with violence.
Who says you need to explain, justify or defend them? They're idiots like any other idiots. Who hasn't got a few of those around?
Whenever i'm in that position, i will simply agree with empathy if it's true. Why would i do anything else? No need to go on about it. We are not responsible for the behavior of others.
Maybe not so many idiots as fools and an idiot can be wiser than a fool. And who has never been fooled. But some fools refuse to learn, and some predators devise to keep them from doing so. Or to fool them even further. That's why good faith communication and a truly free press is so important, and truly free means free of domination by the few.
My daughter is married to a Canadian and lives in Canada. Canada has it's plutocratic problems too, and sabotaged itself for nine years under Harper. And Canada has it's share of dangerous delusional supremacists. That said, my experience is that overall the culture is noticeably more community-minded than here. My son-in-law sees American culture as more "punitive". If only Columbo was here to aid team Jack Smith, but hopefully the well experienced prosecutor is on the scent.
Somebody said it was better to light one candle than curse the darkness, though I think bearing vocal witness to pernicious lies is essential and sometimes heroic. But it's going to take a lot of candles to dispel the the shadow of the modern RNC. United we stand, divided we fall, and the power to divide is always a well practiced tool of tyrants. Solidarity is almost the opposite of conformity because very diverse, different people can agree on the bottom line that we all have human rights. Those that see none have fallen into sociopathy.
Thank you. I copied to my fb page using just your first name.
Certainly the system has not explored the continuing consequences. Yes, there is only so much children of a given age are prepared to understand, but we can prepare them better than we have.
Heather works hard to reveal it to all of us, in simple and straight forward terms.
Anyone who is an "other"! And this country should be ashamed - not only not educating but covering up information showing this.
Those in power, making those deliberate decisions to not educate the populace... like Sanctimonious... have an agenda. The rest of us need to understand the efforts and strategy so we can try to stop or at least maneuver around it effectively.
Thankyou,Heather. And thankyou for telling THE history I never learned in school.
In my all white Massachusetts school, NONE of this was ever discussed. Lincoln announced an "emancipation", we fought the Civil War and won. Done. The insane and cruel treatment of fellow humans was never whispered. The incredible slaughter of the war? Nothing. The retaliation in the South after the war and going forward for decade after decade? Not a word.
And the war continues endlessly because we have allowed racism to become part of our cultural DNA. IMO, teaching CRT should not just be a college elective. It should start in grade school. KIds SHOULD BE TAUGHT about the horrors of their ancestors. Start with the European genocide of Native Americans. Teach what Columbus and his crew really did.
Teach that there are really no races - just different colors and different cultural experiences. Teach about bigotry. Teach how Americans have brutalized Blacks, Italians, Irish, Poles and Jews. Teach how as soon as the Irish gained power in Northern cities they did the same stuff that was done to them. Teach them they can be better. Teach them that they must.
And in teaching this cruel aspect of American history, teach our children to THINK! Kids are able to weigh the contradictions of the American story with the facts. Our history is brutal. Our history is glorious. Our history is complicated.
Yes! YES!
Well... we don't have to be so graphic with little ones. We CAN teach and encourage love, respect, tolerance and appreciation for our diversity and differences. Kids like to just play together. They don't naturally hate other kids who look or talk differently. They learn that.
I didn't learn it in school either. "And that is what the NAACP had done, and would continue to do: highlight that the inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples, bearing witness until “the believers in democracy” could no longer remain silent."
This is the truth that Florida and other states are fighting so hard to conceal. And they very cleverly have found a way to rally their base around remaining ignorant - get them scared of CRT! I'm remembering MTG's questioning during a House Oversight Committee hearing, of Gene Dodaro, head of the GAO, about COVID funds being illegally used for CRT. When Mr. Dodaro said, "CRT?" she explained, "It’s a racist curriculum used to teach children that somehow their white skin not equal to black skin and other things." Am I indulging in reverse racism when I cringe at her southern accent as she asked her ridiculous questions?
I do not believe you are. You are reacting to what sounds to me like chosen ignorance and a distinct lack of personal and cultural insight.
Thank you Jennifer. Even at 77, old tendencies to self-judgement sneak by my consciousness. I just realized I enjoy a southern accent when the words are kind and/or interesting. And I also just realized that, as a native Long Islander, I love my NY accent (shows up when I'm tired or back in NYC!) and don't enjoy it at all when I hear it from others expressing ignorance and/or racism.
✅
When I post Heather's letters, I give a brief summary of the content. Today I added that here we are in 2023 and are still dealing with racism and in some places are going backwards....looking at you DeSatan and Florida and the use of the buzz initials, CRT, everywhere. Here in Salem, so far, we have two far right types running with help from regressive groups, including those who helped mess up the schools in Newburg, the board of which, had to change their policy about certain items in classrooms when they lost law suits. This is why we all must pay attention to all elections, local and otherwise.
And lawsuits!! Democracy Docket (free substack) will light your hair on fire. Right-wingers are wielding a heavy litigation weapon against democracy, free speech, "liberal arts" education -- you name it!
I do the same, Michele; I see it as a real public service that we can be proud of. Thank you!
And thank you. I have several friends who now pass on Heather's letters.
The sharing and expanding of good energy....a strong catalyst for a better world!
I hope. We are too old for a lot of physical activity, so it's posting and donating.
Chaplain Terry Nicholetti -- "Am I indulging in reverse racism when I cringe at her southern accent as she asked her ridiculous questions?"
She makes a lot of people cringe.
In an act of flagrant racism, representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) have decried the moving performance [ Sheryl Lee Ralph’s rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”] as an act of “wokeness.” Thankfully, Twitter wasn’t having it.
“𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘰𝘯 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘉𝘰𝘸𝘭. ... 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/marjorie-taylor-greene-lauren-boebert-lose-it-over-sheryl-lee-ralphs-black-national-anthem-are-immediately-roasted-by-twitter-%E2%80%9Cwhy-are-you-so-scared-of-diversity%E2%80%9D/ar-AA17phAn?li=BBnb7Kz
From the same article:
Journalist Dennis Perkins immediately put a halt to the representative’s attempt to spark a culture war, sharing a Taste of Country article that quotes Stapleton on his support for the Black Lives Matter Movement. “𝘋𝘰 𝘐 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳? 𝘈𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺. 𝘐 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦’𝘴 𝘢 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘐 𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘬𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯,"
And the title of the article: "Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert Lose It Over Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Black National Anthem, Are Immediately Roasted by Twitter: “Why Are You So Scared of Diversity?”
Story by Raven Brunner
Love the comebacks-- we need to develop volumes of comebacks to these insane and inane spews. Their white hoods are off and we see them, clearly. We need to respond and not be complicit.
Thank you! I don't follow football and none of this showed up in my own feed. I think we are waking up to what has to happen every single time some of this vile, racist ranting shows up.
This reminds me of how brilliantly Rep. Frost handled his questioning time in the House Oversight meeting last week. He tweeted in response to an article praising his performance: "I’ve found that these ridiculous and extreme far-right talking points are best met with simple ridicule. Seems to be effective." BTW he ridiculed the idea not the speaker. So skilled!
https://twitter.com/MaxwellFrostFL/status/1624814188102144001?s=20&t=5cEraR29CLr5NKkjm_QIUw
That needs intervention-- we need to educate our country on what CRT is. It is not a meme to own the libs. Write letters, post on social media. March.
MTG, an empty vessel.
Actually, Margaret, she is powerful and very dangerous vessel full of hatred and narcissism. Two very dangerous ingredients in a leader.
"inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples"
and this applies to so many parts of our government - as in policing, which we are all aware of at this point in time.
Absolutely! We are modeled on the caste system and the Great Experiment is still trying!!
Terri—as I cringe when I listen to Louisiana’s Senator Kennedy (Oxford graduate) hush-my-mouth fifth-grade vocabulary speeches. His biography lists Magdalen College (one of the colleges that make up Oxford) and not Oxford.
Important that we hear those words, "Silence under these conditions means tacit approval.”
Time to take a look at how we're living under the fossil fuel supremacists.
“Fossil fuel supremacists.” Perfect description, thanks Jeff.
I am constraining myself to not write a one thousand word reply. How can we get a species of animal where long term benefit just is not wired into our thinking brains, but greed is, to do what is vitally necessary to save our own skins? Especially in the wake of strong special interests (the fossil fuel supremacists), and their supporting political party, trying their best to muddy the waters with disinformation/misinformation.
A really important question. As an adult survivor of childhood physical and sexual abuse, and as part of my ongoing healing, I had to learn about my nervous system, reptile brain, fight, flight or freeze instincts and how we hold unprocessed memories of trauma. What else can we draw upon?
Answering that question is why it is so important to me to nurture my belief in a non-physical Source (whatever you call it, God/Goddess/ Goodness/Universe/Allah/Yahweh etc.) that resides in each of us, and is the source of all the important things we can't buy in the store: love, peace, justice, joy and more. We don't need to succumb to hierarchies of patriarchal religions in order to hold this belief and call upon these resources in ourselves and others every day. It's a life-long process, and it's worth it!
I'm a survivor also. Abuse seems endemic to the culture that raised me, but it is not at all clear to me how it became that way. But it does not seem to have always been like this, or not everywhere. Looking at gender relations and child rearing practices in other times and places has been useful for me.
An intriguing story about a very different culture:
https://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/genwom/iroquoisinfluence.html
Incredible article, Erik!! Thank you so much for posting it. Sadly, the links at the end of it are all out of date and gone. Still, some wonderful lessons and concepts and of course, fascinating American history that we don't get in school!! Just made my whole evening, kind sir!! :D
Yes I don't recall where I saw this, but it was only in the past year or so. I did not know of Sally Roesch Wagner and have not done a general search for more of her work, but two of the links on the above page can be retrieved using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive--a cool thing to know about:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070225015807/http://www.nyhistory.com/sallyroeschwagner/
https://web.archive.org/web/20030218171632/https://www.matildajoslyngage.com/
We might start by asking whether greed and only working for short term gain are in fact hard-wired into all humans or if this is a particular moment in history where those traits have become ascendant in the most powerful populations of the world. It can be a quick route to despair to naturalize the way things are: it kills hope that things could be or ever have been different. Which is probably why we hear so many narratives telling us that we simply are incorrigible by nature.
Our brutal greed and short-sightedness certainly help to drive colonialism and capitalism, but there is plenty of historical and anthropological/archeological evidence that these are not universal dominant human drives. Indigenous cultures, both in the Americas and on other continents, are more often grounded by ideals of long-term stewardship of land and people; for many of them, the land and the people are not particularly separate, but are bound in a symbiotic relationship where the health of each is dependent on the other. There is even evidence that the "barbarians" of Europe, maybe as late as just before Roman conquest, saw their relationship to land and time very differently from how we see it now.
There have also been quite nearly countless other cultures over humanity's lifetime thus far, and they do not all match up with the story that would naturalize the features of dominant capitalist Western cultures. I am still in the middle of Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything", but it is rearranging my own thoughts on what the archeological record does and does not show--and I have been studying many of the same times and places that they have, and for about as long.
But their overall point seems to be one I agree with: the way things are here and now are historically contingent; we need not throw up our hands and see all humanity as hopelessly narcissistic and cruel.
oh, thank you again, Erik!! i'll definitely be getting that book!! it's so encouraging and empowering to gain such insights from history!! :-)
Found it!! Ordered... thanks! :D
You're welcome! It's long, as you might have noticed, but their writing is very accessible. History requires detail, alas.
Well an anthropologist I am not! This book suggests that human societies have gotten it right in the past. If so, today's human societies have a long road to hoe before we get serious about saving our children and the world's species from the worst of a climate disaster. The US, for quite a while now, has been looked upon world wide as the preeminent civilized nation on earth (IMO largely because of our contribution to victory over fascism in WW2, and our growth since then). What we do on the international stage matters. We can influence the other civilized nations. But we are failing miserably when it comes to addressing climate change. And we are hamstrung by a large segment of our population that just refuses to take it seriously, represented by and influenced by a political party that is so evil as to publicly reject that which they know to be true in favor of short term profits for the rich corporations and individuals they represent. I don't see a way out of it. What the hell happened that we are this way, in spite of the societal successes that seem to have occurred, described in this book?
That is the big question that they are trying to answer, and that I and many others have been trying to answer for a very long time. I have not finished the book, so I do not yet know what their conclusion is, but I can say this much:
One of the standard answers to "where did Western civilization go wrong?" starts with the Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent, where, beginning about 10,000 years ago, Europe's ancestors switched from hunting and gathering to intensive agriculture and domestication of livestock. According to this narrative, notions of private property arose as fields were cordoned off, and the first accumulation of wealth was in grain, stored for the winter and against bad harvests. Farming could support larger, more permanent populations, so hunting camps became villages which turned into towns and then cities, where contagion could much more easily spread, lowering individual lifespans, and where inequities in material wealth become sharper and sharper over time.
The main idea here is that hunting and gathering is a kind of eutopian existence where people do not have to work all day, relations are egalitarian because resources are shared and not hoarded, and people live in small groups in a state of natural bliss--or some would figure it that way--all until agriculture ruins everything forever.
Graeber and Wengrow are sympathetic to this narrative* but suspect, as I do, that it is much too simplistic. There were "neolithic revolutions" on every continent, most starting around 7000-10,000 years ago, and although they all introduced more intensive agricultural practices than had been known before, they produced a variety of outcomes. So they look deeply into those that happened in North America and compare them to what happened in the Fertile Crescent, and what they found over some 15-20 years of research and conversation is that the Neolithic Revolution was not one.
That is, it seems not to have happened all at once anywhere: many different kinds of agriculture arose, and some groups started farming and then stopped and went back to hunting and gathering--which itself almost always incorporates a degree of husbandry of wild game as well as cultivation of wild crops. The line between the two forms of culture is not only not always distinct, but is not necessarily between only two forms of culture.
In other words? It's really incredibly complicated, and just like most Western academic discourse, archeology and anthropology have a tendency to tell Just So stories that make Euroamerican culture the "natural" outcome of much of prehistory, leaving those of us who distrust that degree of neatness to try to understand what might really have happened, or indeed, whether we can look backward with any accuracy at all, given the (post-)modern glasses we all look through.
I wish the answer were simple. I wanted it to be when I started looking at the Neolithic Revolution, the Roman Conquest and subsequent Christianization of (the rest of) Europe, and even the Black Death/Great Plague. I do think those were crucial moments, but I still do not have the answer to what has become my most central question: when/where/why/how did (some subset of?) European culture forget that we are a part of the natural world and decide instead that Nature must be conquered--brutally, if necessary--so that "men" may unlock "her" secrets?
I do not know yet. When I finish the book, I'll try to say more about Graeber and Wengrow's conclusions. There are other questions that attend to the overall Where Did We Go Wrong, but it does seem to me that one of the most important things for us to remember now is that we belong to life on Earth, that everything and everyone here is dependent on everything and everyone else here--human, non-human, animal, vegetable, mineral. Continuing to remain forgetful may well be suicidal. It has already been genocidal throughout human and non-human kingdoms.
*They also contrast it with a different, but equally simplistic narrative about the "war of all against all" coming to an end with the first Social Contract, where no blissful state of nature has ever existed. I'm leaving that out for, um, brevity. :) Ultimately, though, it is just as reductive and historically inaccurate as the first.
Those words jumped out at me too, Jeff. "Tacit approval" indeed.
That's why I'm committed to posting these ideas and stories as far and wide as I can. It's something I can do, along with postcards, no matter how much energy I have for actual in person protests and rallies.
I often tell people that Central Illinois is much more "southern" in character than its Land of Lincoln image would suggest. I grew up in Decatur, during the 1960's, only 30 minutes from Springfield on the two-lane highway. While we all went on school field trips to see the "Lincoln sites" abundant in our area, we NEVER learned about the Springfield riot. My mother was extremely racist, while my father, a defense lawyer was not. He told me, "people are people, no matter the color of their skin." Fortunately, I absorbed his message, not my mother's. As I got into high school I began to see the subtle and not so subtle racism that permeated our community.
I heard racist talk and jokes in my family. My mother, bless her would fight against that kind of talk. She surprised everyone when she, as a blonde, middle-class, white woman drove her new buick 1 ½ hours north to volunteer in a Headstart program in a black ghetto (Watts). I was too young to know how the racists males in our family responded, but she became very attached to a preschooler named George. She brought him home and he played with my younger brother and me. My father was completely disconcerted when he came home from work to find his little white toddler splashing in the water with the little beautiful George. I was in charge of making sure they were safe whilst mom made dinner. I do not know what the yelling going on in the kitchen was all about. But I learned that the color of our new, little friend who was having a great time with my little brother wreaked havoc. I must have been about 10. And then the riots in LA happened and my mother was banned from returning to the ghettos of LA. I only know that little George introduced me to family behaviors that were appalling and unjust. Only as I have grown older have I realized how brave and courageous my mother was. And she appeared to have made such an impact upon me, the only girl in a family of six. I listened to her arguments at dinner with her husband and her father. I do not think any of my brothers really listened or learned, or even paid attention...The eldest is a evangelical trumpist. We could not talk due to his macho tenor and misogyny that I could not tolerate. He was the perfect specimen to relate to the dogma of trump and the growing fascism in America. Did I do the right thing in helping him to live when he almost died of cancer....I wonder sometimes. I know what TCinLA would say...on my left shoulder.... Racism is so damned deep in our foundations.
That is what my black soldier friend who had served in 4 theaters of war warned me about when we argued about the beauty of Obama running for prez. He was totally against it and swore to me that it would unleash what people of white privilege cannot imagine. I argued with him like my mom argued with the men in my family. They were both right. This is going to take all of us to face this ancient prejudice and take our country forward-- ALL OF THE PEOPLE THIS TIME.
And though the extremists are trying to set the narrative of CRT and WOKE being negatives. WE need to set them straight.
The meaning of WOKE is AWARE of and ACTIVELY ATTENTiVE to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). BE Proud to be woke.
Or Awakened. Stand up for our youth to be better educated than we were. Ken Burn's has great films on the history of our country. Watch them with your children and grandchildren and talk with them. It is not about guilt, it is about not repeating how atrocious some of our American history is, and that none should be proud of nor repeat. They will understand if you teach them. I learned from my mother's behaviors and actions. She taught me well to be Woke and my black, soldier friend taught me to really wake up—fully. Now, what am I gonna do today with all this wokeness energy I have been gifted?
Based on what I saw within my organization after Obama was elected was EXACTLY what your Black soldier friend warned about. I have used the analogy of Obama's election as ripping the scab off a poorly healed wound and watching the pus run out. His election only illustrated that we are part and parcel a country founded on racism and the theft of Indigenous lands. That is our "greatness".
That “we are part and parcel a country founded on racism and the theft of Indigenous lands. That is our "greatness".
Truth is disheartening, disgusting Isn’t it? The scab has been yanked off….. will we ever heal?
Last night 60 Minutes re-played the program about Canadian "residential" schools that were responsible for so much abuse & killing of little indigenous children.
I dont know how anyone feels about the series "1923" but boy, it certainly made clear exactly how bad it was. And it needs to be made clear - like so very much of our history.
Brilliant! thank you
The Day Lincoln was born plus 100 years, a new movement was born
I was taught virtually nothing of this in primary or secondary school. You probably weren’t either
And here we are still, with the embers of supremacy still hot under the ashes of the evening’s fire
I grew up in Freeport, Illinois, home to one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and “history” was never very far away. Yet reading about Springfield makes me wonder what else I didn’t learn about my old hometown.
We don't have to learn the history necessarily; we live it, or have lived it.
Where did such intense fear and hatred of Black people come from? In the spirit of explanation rather than excuse: The successful 1791-1804 revolution in Haiti shocked and terrified the white slave-owning world in the U.S. and Caribbean. Blacks on the island, inspired by France's own democratic revolution in 1789, demanded the end of slavery and the establishment of civil rights in Haiti. That led to suppression, revolution, war, and the massacre of whites. The revolution changed the course of history. The massacre was said to have soured the French on the Americas and may have helped motivate the French to sell Louisiana to the U.S. Haiti has since been desperately poor, even relative to its next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The white world largely cancelled it as punishment for the rebellion. Apropos of that: Since 1804, black efforts for equality in the US--including the recent Black Lives Matter movement--are often characterised as provocations, rather than as understandable human responses. "Black Lives Matter" was a response to the tacit but ubiquitous message: "Black lives don't matter." It is a blind spot in our culture, in media, and in government that we seem incapable of conceding that a people responded to a white Western provocation. We persist in characterising their aggression as striking for no reason at all. But unless we understand our role in that dynamic, and "retain the blow," as Saul Bellow wrote, the cycle of revenge rolls through history. Eventually everyone forgets how it started.
If only more people could see and feel the history that you have described. So important in understanding where we are today. But the new MAGA movement is burying it.
I would add that we need to complete that history lesson by revealing the essential evil of human nature. The evil that harks back thousands and thousands of years. The evil idea of zero sum.
American English Protestants persecuted newly arrived Catholics. And that continued as the Irish came in huge numbers. My ancestors saw them and the Italians as takers. Not the incredibly hard working family oriented folks that most of them really were.
So we are demonized until we are in charge and then we demonize the next group. After all, we have blame SOMEBODY ELSE for our difficulties. The Irish of Boston and NY imitated the Protestants once they gained power. An endless cycle of oppression.
And we just keep repeating the same cycle of stupidity and cruelty. America is now desperate for workers. Millions of jobs go unfilled. Our birth rate is less than replacement. Older Americans will be a growing burden on a shrinking work force.
Want the evidence that America is insane and dysfunctional? That this cycle of hate is self defeating? There are hundreds of thousands of job applicants knocking on our southern door. They want to work hard, care for their families and would be thrilled to pay taxes. And to make it even more pathetic and stupid, immigrants have proven over and over again that they perform better at work and they commit less crime than their native born counterparts. Why? Because they treasure the opportunity! Because they are so freaking grateful.
And yet, the cycle continues. They are "others". They are different. They must be a threat. They will "take from us". We fail to recognize that we were them. Teach that.
And then teach how much worse someone's life is today if their great grandfather's land had been stolen after the Civil War. And their grandfather had to pick crops under brutal circumstances. And their father got a job but could not advance because of his color. That his family couldn't travel through parts of the great nation without fear. That his mom and dad couldn't get a mortgage for a home in most neighborhoods. Need I go on? Teach that in school. In every school.
Teach that white folks inherited the property that was stolen from the black man. That all the black man could pass down is stories of lynching. Teach that.
The thing that really interests me is that those white folk of today who rail against teaching the actual history that shines light on the bad behaviors of the past, refuse to disassociate themselves from those crimes caused by past white folk. Because “ those guys were white, and I am white”; history is accusing “me” in my white skin as being guilty of those crimes today”
“I inherited those crimes, so I must not let the future world know they were committed”
Wheew, talk about unexpected projection
Bill Alstrom, appreciate every word! Thank you for taking time and thought to express our sad history.... of lack of love and lack of appreciation for our fellow human beings. Because of our chosen decision to put someone down so that we might elevate ourselves, our nation and our world continue to put others on the front line to fight our self-serving battles with money, power and control the goal from hate mongers and those who sell weapons and who just want MORE........
I wish that desire could be for more understanding....more of a desire to work together for clean water to drink, better air quality, excellent free education for all, our oceans, health care for children, men and women. world economies: , safety- in all areas.....respect for one another.....these are good goals and challenging enough to last until forever...... if we could work together!!!!
From your lips to....
The things you mention are obvious priorities. But apparently there are too many people who don't see the damage done by our abuse of the planet and each other. I just don't understand. It's like they are saying I am willing to burn down my whole house with my family in it.
Bill - you can go even further back than that. As a species, we were and are comparative weaklings as opposed to other predators who must somehow compete and survive in the cold cruel natural world that we evolved in. The big cats do it on strength, speed, and great big teeth. Elephants and rhinos do it with shear bulk and an ornery disposition. We do it (or did it) by outsmarting them and banding together and combining talents. And critically, in a world where resources are hard earned, hatred of the other - who would want those same resources - tends to improve the odds your band (and its gene pool) survives. That is what is hardwired into the human brain. It is an instinct, and it is fallible in a changing world. That is why extinction exists. What we have though, that other species do not, is enough reasoning power to overcome instinctual behavior. So we can do it, if there is the will to do so. Not sure how to get that will to do so more strong.
Truth. All truth.
Well said.
This series on Haiti published in the NYT is an impressive and extensive research project that is informative, heart rending, and mind boggling. I tried to link it as a gift article but that did not work.
I hope those of you that have NYT subscription will take the time to read this research. Warning: it is not light reading and it has several installments.
The Ransom: A Look Under the Hood
Thousands of pages of original documents, and hundreds of books and articles. Here are the historians and researchers on which the Haiti project drew.
Catherine PorterConstant MéheutSelam GebrekidanMatt Apuzzo
By Catherine Porter, Constant Méheut, Selam Gebrekidan and Matt Apuzzo
Published May 20, 2022
Updated May 22, 2022
Yes, ”the cycle of revenge rolls through history” and its momentum, fed by hate, injustice, ignorance and lies, continues.
Dr. Richardson,
Many, many thanks for this history of the NAACP. I was completely ignorant, in every way, of its origins, if not the violence that gave birth to the organization.
I will join the NAACP today. I did not realize that folks who are not black could join.
I would also like to recognize Mahomes and Hurts for their leadership in the NFL. You can see how both quarterbacks treat their team mates in a way that Tom Brady never, ever did. Each man treats their team mates as EQUALS. As VALUABLE. Brady only treated Gronkowski as an equal, and, probably not even him. Brady was the man in his own mind. Still is.
Lastly, I was told, in 1992, by a manager at a big corporation, in highly segregated northern city, upon learning where I was planning on purchasing a house: "I remember when people knew their place".
Actually, at the time the words were spoken to me I did understand what he meant. Growing up down south I had never, even once, heard something like that. It was a few years of watching what was going on inside the corporation and meeting folks in the segregated north that enlightened me as to those words meaning.
"I remember when people knew their place" meant that I had purchased a house in an all white area that he remembered (and believed should be) as off limits to "you people" like me, EVEN though I am light skinned and not African American. I do have a minority last name. My father was from Mexico. But, honestly, I never thought all that much about that growing up down south (nobody believes me up here in the north when I say this but it is true).
!992. And? I live in the same town now and I can assure everyone who reads this, nothing has changed since 1992, and, honestly has grown WORSE since then.
Thank you again.
Snowshoes tested, broken repaired broken repaired new designs under way. Need large shoes for my 250 lb. frame + capacity for 50 lb pack. Must sustain 300 lbs. I have achieved the working size necessary and am beefing up the rail size. Will weave two new steam bent frames. Manana. Thursday night Continental Divide overnight.
I am the large predator! Just imagine a 250 lb man with a full sized axe. The lions and wolverines up there don’t carry guns. The two legged ones are too smart to go up there and the bears are sleeping. Life is good.
Thank you for a beautiful Letter. We have even greater challenges now now that did not even exist a century ago.
We have a planet whose capacity to support civilization is collapsing under the pressures of how we live. We have more people being killed by class privilege placing universal access to health care so far beyond the reach of citizens that it kills us at rates greater than wars and domestic violence.
We cannot unite in the ways needed to deliver ourselves out of these challenges so long as we allow ourselves to be divided and directed into reviving a second civil war. Either we engage in ending this self-destructive division ASAP, or we engage in hastening the ending of ourselves. There is no alternative middle road in dinking, dithering, do-nothingness.
Exactly, Ed. Well said.
Long ago, I taught history (social studies was the term). That was before I became a school official. Well after my retirement I learned about the 1921 race massacres and destruction of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street." It was less than ten years ago, visiting friends who retired in Wilmington, NC, that I learned about the 1898 coup d'etat and killings in that city. And today, I read for the first time, about the 1908 racial killings and destruction of the Black community in Springfield, IL. This may be a confession of my ignorance, but I intend it as a call for more study of the history of race in America rather than the suppression of that history as advocated by the distasteful governor of Florida.
Leonard, have you ever heard of Ax Handle Saturday? It was a racial riot that happened in Jacksonville, FL on a Saturday. Whites attacked Black people peacefully protesting in downtown Jacksonville. The attackers used ax handles, among other things, to beat the protesters. I never heard of this situation until my daughter moved to Jacksonville. This is the history that people like DeSantis want swept under the rug.
Also, check out the book "American Character" by Colin Woodward. It was a real eye opening read for me. Sadly, the US has a very bloody history, largely stemming from the perception of race.
There’s so much to learn about Racism in the United States. We have been a model including to Hitler. Not news, and a web search provides more resources. “How the Nazis Used Jim Crow Laws as the Model for Their Race Laws”Bill Moyers in conversation with author James Whitman about his new book "Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law."”
https://billmoyers.com/story/hitler-america-nazi-race-law/
William English Walling is my great-grandfather. The family story about the founding of NAACP is that Walling and his wife Anna Strunsky Walling were speaking at Cooper Union in NYC about the Russian revolution. (They were committed Socialists and had spent time in Russia.) They were both to speak with my great-grandmother following to talk about the women's situation in Russia. But as I heard it when it was her turn to speak her heart was heavy with the news of the Springfield lynching and that's what she spoke about. As she was speaking she worried about how her husband would respond. After that speech Ida B Wells approached my great-grandparents and the plan for the first meeting was held. I thought it was at their Greenwich house.
Thought it would be fun to add this story. And I note, how my great grandmother's role gets overlooked. :)
Wow. Thank you for sharing your family’s history here.
Thank you. Very much!
Thank you for sharing with us your family history!
Wow,
Very cool history.
How cool! And not surprising about your great grandmother's role being ignored.
Professor, you demonstrate every day how and why History is alive, how critical it is for every American to understand what came before us, how today is connected to the past. This morning I listened to “Up First”NPR podcast,”The Civil Rights Generation.”
“The story of civil rights in America is the story of legends like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also the story of countless ordinary people who made a difference in their own, less-visible ways.” A must 30 minutes listen at a time when Civil Rights and Human Rights are in danger in the USA. Voting Rights! Gerrymandering. Supreme Court decisions. Gun laws. Prison and law enforcement. Education. CRT and books banned. Poverty. Overt Racism. Still. How do we achieve equality (we do not have equality in America) when we are in danger of our lawmakers and courts dismantling protections? Black Lives Matter. Here is the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/up-first/id1222114325?i=1000599181487
I mourn the loss of Lincoln's birthday as a separate, national holiday. Not only for his championing of Abolition, an essential step toward healing one of Americas most grievous crimes, but for his lucid understanding and elucidation of democracy. Real democracy. Lincoln's understanding of the black race was far from perfect, but he understood the evil that was slavery was consuming America's soul.
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of those may be turned against our liberties, without making us weaker or stronger for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
Yes, yes, and YES!
I also mourn the loss of Lincoln's birthday as a separate holiday. If it were still separate, we would more likely focus on him and what he said and did.
When I read accounts like the one in this HCR Letter, I am sickened at the violence and brutality visited upon Black Americans by White Americans, and at the Whites' absolute conviction that they were right in doing so!
When I read these accounts, I feel as if it were being done to me. And I am a White woman.
As a woman, I have some visceral understanding of being vulnerable to rape, as even White women are so often blamed for their victimization. But Black women, and Black people in general are treated SO MUCH WORSE!
The group hatred evinced by the Whites in today's Letter is horrifying! Mob violence with a clearly erroneous feeling of righteousness! Can't help being reminded of the mob violence of January 6th's attack on the Capitol. Brutal. Horrifying. And that sense of self-righteousness inflamed by DJT and right wing media hosts.
Lincoln was certainly right that we have lost the genius of our own independence and become fit subjects of that cunning would-be tyrant, DJT.
😡😔💔
And yet. We can still wake up and turn this ship around.
WOKE IS GOOD!
I see the bane of humanity as the abuse of power over others. Rape is abuse of power, slavery is abuse of power, as is war. For what is Ukraine being decimated? Political corruption is abuse of power, as is theft, if you think about it, and some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen. Bullies in a school yard or on the internet is abuse of power. Any idiot can grab a rock and kill someone, but we foul our own nest when we do so. Obviously unacceptable pollution is an abuse of power, even against the future.
That is why we form social contracts to regulate power, so that the negligent or predatory actions of one person does not rob the human rights liberties of another. Freedom is freedom from as well as freedom to.
So is regulation bad? Is government bad? Is water bad? It depends on if you are drinking it or drowning. The government of Nazi Germany was obviously bad, yet a prudent and just democracy (what Reagan was actually ridiculing) is not; the devil is in the details. Why are there enforced rules at a four way stop? To establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, and save human lives. That's the bright side of "regulation". Anti-woke, anti-gay is the other.
JL and Cheryl, I'll add another YES!! When Lincoln's birthday and Washington's birthday were clumped together, I was appalled but still highlighted the separate dates when I began teaching.
Growing up in the '50's in the Cleveland public schools American History was heavily cut cut with folklore, such as Pocahontas pleading for the life of John Smith, for which there is no corroborating evidence, and strong evidence that it was an idle boast. I was taught that Christopher Columbus was a great hero, and the very first person who realized that the world was round, despite ancient Greek Eratosthenes having calculated the circumference of the earth with mathematical logic with amazing accuracy.
But every Lincoln's birthday (no school on the actual day) we focused quite a bit on Lincoln, whether it was drawing pictures or learning lore of his character and accomplishments. One such lesson was memorization of the Gettysburg address, and while I think some things are worth memorizing and others far less so, I have thought of those words throughout my life. That, and the preamble to the Constitution. I think that no other president quite so eloquently nailed what a just democracy is all about. And now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Thank you for bringing the attention of the young to thoughts that might save us yet. We the living have a fair degree of power and responsibility to shape our own future, which requires seeking wisdom and creativity and also, in Newton's words, standing on the shoulders of giants (as well as innumerable others whose names are lost to history).
JL Graham, thank you for thoughts and opinions expressed so clearly and with such skill.
Such a necessary lesson in the history and initial workings of the NAACP. Thank you for a sensitive and helpful recounting, Heather.
Two tenacious NAACP legal bulldogs, Thurgood Marshall and his extraordinary mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, targeted Plessy v Ferguson, 19th century Supreme Court ruling that ‘separate but equal’ was OK for African American students. Their focus was to eliminate racial discrimination in education.
Theirs was a decades long struggle. When Houston, the first NAACP legal counsel died, Marshall succeeded him. He pursued a deliberate policy of gradually chipping away at Plessy v. Ferguson bit by bit. He won 29 of his 32 cases on racial discrimination before the Supreme Court.
His monumental triumph was the 9-0 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education that totally overturned PvF. While implementation of this decision has been a long and tortuous path, it remains one of the truly precedent-changing rulings in Supreme Court history.
Marshall was the first Black to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He was a liberal on the Court. Following his death, after a contentious Senate hearing Clarence Thomas was named to fill the ‘Marshall seat.’
He could only hope to be even half the justice Marshall was. Actually, I doubt he hopes to be at all :(
Dianna The only half that Thomas is to Marshall is half ass.
Thank for writing so clearly and compellingly about our history, especially the bits that point out how we, as a nation, have so often failed to live up to the ideal that we are all created equal and are to be treated as equals under the law.
What a good column. It is a vivid reminder of how racism has infected the US and created wounds, scars and injustices that have torn apart the social and political fiber of the country. Notwithstanding fighting a Civil War to eradicate the injustices of racism the infection remains and we have seen its fruit borne by the current trends of political chaos and violence. The failure to deal with these issues are debilitating the prospects of achieving a great country and society.
Powerful, poignant, and timely. You are a national treasure, speaking truth to power. Thank you for this. It brings our current crisis into perspective.
Sad that so little progress has been made.
There has been progress as well as manipulative regression. A black president, a female POC VP, advanced gay rights despite corrupt misuse of law to suppress them. It's like a Civil War all over again.
But yes, we should be far beyond institutional sociopathy by now.
Indeed. Heather's letter could have been written in Truman's day.
…and is being written NOW.
And knowing & respecting the knowing of this history is what today is called "woke", which in my mind clearly means to be "awake", "Christian" and a humanitarian.
Too many politicians and leaders have been spreading bigotry and hatred among white Christians against racial and religious minorities for too long. It all started on this continent in 1619 which is why the NY Times chose the "1619 Project" for it's American Black history project. The seed of racism in America was sown with the sale and purchase of black African slaves in Virginia in 1619, and has grown into a jungle of poisonous vines wrapping throughout the American civilization, fed and led by every politician who promotes their race from behind masks and hoods of self righteousness, claiming white victimhood, banning words, books and education addressing our full and accurate history, as they dismiss the violence and oppression that they and people like them have fostered and foisted on the nation that first said "all men are created equal".
"this history is what today is called "woke""
David, I really think we should all resist, very seriously, referring to accurate history as "woke".
Reason: Accurate history is just that. History. Buying in to using the word "woke", which is a right wing denigration of accurate history about black experiences, helps the right wing in the quest to Keep Americans Ignorant (Again). KAIA.
I recently had breakfast with a long time friend who, during the breakfast started raving about "woke" this and that.
I listened until he was finished, as is polite, and then asked him: "What, exactly, does "Woke" mean". Because, I have no idea.
He, it turns out, ALSO could not provide me a clear definition BUT he knew it meant denigrating "those people".
So, one less friend now.
After being tired of hearing people say the word “woke” in a disparaging way, I went to the online Merriam Webster dictionary & looked up the meaning. Here’s what it says:
“Awareness of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues or racial and social justice).”
So, being “woke” is a positive trait, not a negative one! I’m trying to memorize that definition - so the next time some jerk complains about people being “woke”, I can calmly give him or her the dictionary definition. While smiling sweetly, of course.
Yes it's very much like the phrase "politically correct"
Mike S -- "this history is what today is called "woke""
David, I really think we should all resist, very seriously, referring to accurate history as "woke".
"Reason: Accurate history is just that. History. Buying in to using the word "woke", which is a right wing denigration of accurate history about black experiences, helps the right wing in the quest to Keep Americans Ignorant (Again)."
Well, it is their story ... and they are sticking with it. <chuckle>
During an interview on Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan asked Govenor Sununu why he had criticized Republicans trying to "out-do" Democrats by imposing government rules.
"𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘭 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦."
"𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶?" Brennan interrupted.
"𝘞𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘭 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦? 𝘖𝘩, 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 — 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 — 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬, 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴... 𝘐𝘵'𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘸𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴. 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘶𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶, 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘥𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘺 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘐 𝘢𝘮 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘰𝘶𝘵. 𝘐𝘵'𝘴 𝘶𝘴 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮. 𝘐𝘵'𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘸𝘢𝘳. 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘢 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮 𝘸𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘪𝘹 𝘪𝘯 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢. ... 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘨𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘢 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮,"
In other words, Sanunu claims he is impotent
Any word or phrase that becomes commonly used by people who favor social, historical, political, and/or economic justice will be turned into a pejorative by rightwing people, nearly all of whom, no matter what they say, seek to continue and even bolster the enormous systemic advantages that white people enjoy in the US (and Europe, for that matter). It doesn’t matter what you call it. They oppose it and will do anything they can to preserve their unfair (to put it as mildly as possible) systemic advantages. Don’t let them denigrate your terminology and get away with it. Double down and shove it down their throats… or up their wazoo, whichever is more convenient.
David My wife advises me not to say that I am ‘woke’ since it might be misunderstood. I’ve just checked the dictionary definition and I am proud to say I AM WOKE!