Top Comments: The 1619 Project

Tara the Antisocial Social Worker for Top Comments

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday March 02, 2022 · 7:00 PM PST

2022/03/02 · 19:00

The right-wing moral panic over “critical race theory” has trained its sights on The 1619 Project, a compilation edited by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. It contains essays by more than a dozen historians, tracing ways that the legacy of slavery still affects Black people's lives - and all Americans' lives - over 150 years after its official end. The chapters alternate with poems and short fiction connected with historical events: Gabriel’s Rebellion in Virginia, the destruction of Black Wall Street in Oklahoma, Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. It all weaves together.

But first, a word from our sponsor!

Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!

Some of the connections are easy to make: the Electoral College was designed to give extra power to slave states (despite attempts to retcon a different motive for it in recent times). More than two centuries later, it saddled us with George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

The section on medicine traces an insidious line from Dr. Thomas Hamilton, an early 19th-century physician who claimed Black people were nearly impervious to pain because of “thicker skin,” through the 20th-century Tuskegee “study” that let Black men die of untreated syphilis, through a survey that found a third of 21st-century medical students still believed the “thicker skin” canard.

Some of the research takes things you’d always suspected, and puts them into quantifiable terms. In the slave era, Black people (even if free) had no legal right to self-defense. In the 1960’s, California discovered gun control after Reagan fanned fears of the Black Panther Party. And today, a white person killing a Black person is ten times more likely to be ruled a justifiable homicide than the reverse. “Stand Your Ground” laws have only made it worse.

Glenn Youngkin demagogued his way into the governor’s mansion in Virginia in part by trying to fan hysteria over this book, and over what I’ve been calling “critical boogeyman theory.” Nearly drowned out in all the shouting : over 80 percent of Americans oppose banning books, including ones that criticize US history. And while schools try to both-sides the issue, we need to speak up: erasing history is the easiest way to wind up reliving it.

On to Top Comments:

From your humble (if antosocial) diarist:

In Walter Einenkel’s diary Texas Oath Keeper and Jan. 6 insurrectionist busted with help from his ex-girlfriend, PadreMellyrn gives a colorful description of an insurrectionist who “felt betrayed” because TFG had promised her a job in the White House.