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In this moment of painful and complex reckoning with the realities of ongoing racism a question that kept cropping up was: How did it come to this? To help answer that question, we compiled a century-and-half of @TheAtlantic’s writing about race in America https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2020/06/atlantic-reader-race-and-racism-us/613057/
Here’s a thread of just a few of the pieces we’ve included, many of which chronicle America grappling with some of the same pernicious issues, again and again, for more than a century and a half.
William Parker escaped bondage and spent years fighting for “the entire liberation” of America’s slaves. He recounted his life story in 1866. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/02/the-freedmans-story/308737/
A year after the Civil War, Frederick Douglass argued that the only way Congress could protect black Americans was by enfranchising them. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/12/reconstruction/304561/
In 1897, W. E. B. DuBois wrote "One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" about the idea of “double-consciousness” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/
“It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative,” Martin Luther King wrote in 1963 of the city's uprisings. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/letter-from-a-birmingham-jail/552461/
Four years later, in an address after Detroit’s “long hot summer” of 1967 MLK said, "The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/martin-luther-king-jr-the-crisis-in-americas-cities/552536/
In regard MLK, @mychalsmith argued in 2018 that people have appropriated King’s legacy “as a way of upholding an idea of societal change that rests on personal conduct and respectability, rather than grassroots organizing and power building.” https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/04/mlk-revered-man/556832/
In 2014 @nhannahjones wrote: While segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/segregation-now/359813/
“An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2014 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
A year later, Coates wrote of the staggering toll of policing and incarceration on black communities: One in four black men born since the late 1970s has spent time in prison. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
By allowing police departments to largely define what constitutes excessive force, the Supreme Court has limited oversight of the system—and that's created conditions that allow police to use violence with impunity, Osagie Obasogie argued in 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/how-courts-judge-police-use-force/594832/
In 2018, @OlgaKhazan wrote of America's staggering racial health disparity citing a 20-year gap in life expectancy between Baltimore's poor, largely African American neighborhoods and its wealthier, whiter areas, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/being-black-in-america-can-be-hazardous-to-your-health/561740/
In 2017, @AdamSerwer wrote that Trump combined “an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356/
“The true cause of American political discord is the lingering resistance of those who have traditionally held power to sharing it with those who until recently have only experienced its serrated edge,” @adamserwer wrote in our December 2019 issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/adam-serwer-civility/600784/
On the economic toll of discrimination and land theft, Vann R. Newkirk II’s 2019 cover story reveals that the total land and income lost by black farmers is worth between $3.7 billion and $6.6 billion in today’s dollars. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/594742/
Just last month @DrIbram wrote about the disparate toll of the pandemic: “the slaveholder clamoring for his freedom to infect, and the enslaved clamoring for our freedom from infection.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/what-freedom-means-trump/611083/
And finally, "The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them," @AdamSerwer wrote last month. "This is the COVID contract." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/
If you're still with me, thank you! My hope is that readers will use this collection to educate themselves, to spur deeper conversations, and to understand more fully the difficult but important history of this country. Read all of the stories here: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2020/06/atlantic-reader-race-and-racism-us/613057/
