There’s no doubt that America has been marked in a big way, with many people still marginalized, by the presence of slavery in our history. I see this every week in Chicago, America’s most segregated city, where (except for Hyde Park, where I live), white and black communities are largely separated, with the latter having poorer schools, deficient government services, and, of course, lower incomes. This cannot be understood without apprehending the context in which black people came to America: as slaves.
And so I applaud the New York Times‘s “1619 Project”, described in Wikipedia and whose contents are at the NYT link just below. Its goal is to educate Americans about the legacy of slavery in America, and to produce materials to supplement secondary school history curricula. This is timely and needed: for example, a Southern Poverty Law Center survey showed this:
Only 8 percent of high…
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