I just turned 67 and feel like I am going back to school. Learning about history is helping me cope. Listening to podcasts and documentaries about women’s suffrage, slavery and Reconstruction, and medical history, is giving me a wider context for viewing and understanding the insanity of this moment where the pandemic and racial injustice have laid the US myth of exceptionalism in such stark relief.
I have known for a long time that the version of American history we were taught in school was reductionist and written largely from the POV of white, highly privileged men – mostly a boring account of one war battle after another featuring the heroic and decisive actions of the victors. But I did not realize until recently how much that early mythology still formed the skeletal understanding of events that I have retained after all these years since 5th grade history – a year marked in my memory by the assassination by President Kennedy.
I am still in the midst of listening to the “1619” podcast series, a beautifully told Pulitzer Prize winning series of essays, narrated by creator Nickole Hannah-Jones. There is an accompanying curriculum prepared for educators that has become quite controversial among a few historians who fault it for accuracy, and right wing pundits who have probably not read, watched or listened to much or any of it. It is controversial mainly because these pundits chose to turn it into a meme they can trot out and flail in public as their latest highly polarizing issue. But it is genuinely controversial due to its intentional employment of an African-American racial lens to view all of American history; and its insistence on most of the pieces being written, edited or presented by authors who are black. Not just a black history month tour, not just the Slavery + Civil Rights combo (thank God that’s over), but all of it: colonial times, the American revolution, the phenomenal rise of American industry and banking, music, medicine…all of it.
It begins: “In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”
I am listening to this while I do prepare food, do dishes, or other household jobs. Sometimes I gasp out loud. Sometimes Peter has to patiently listen to me recount what I have just heard.
I’m on Episode 4: How the Bad Blood Started: Black Americans were denied access to doctors and hospitals for decades. From the shadows of this exclusion, they pushed to create the nation’s first federal health care programs.
Join me!
Moana Marie Crab 