Reposted by Adam Rogers
For 60 years power over the built environment in DC was divided between two cosmic forces: norms around historic preservation and the paranoia of security agencies.
Only one left now.
Adam Rogers
@jetjocko.bsky.social
16K followers 953 following 24K posts
Journalist and author. Ex-Business Insider, ex-Wired. Hosted a podcast about an Alien TV show. Wrote a book about booze and a book about colors. Signal: @jetjocko.15 adam-rogers.net
![The memorial's many textual panels give the white-guilt theme quite a workout. Panels near the entrance to the memorial grounds say that Africans were "kidnapped" for enslavement-like Kunta Kinte in Alex Haley's famous epic, Roots
—without mentioning that the overwhelming majority were, as Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. noted in a 2010 New York Times commentary, "enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders." As Gates continued: "The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred." A nearby panel states that the nearly 6 million blacks who migrated to the North between 1910 and 1970 "fle[d] racial terror as traumatized refugees" without mentioning economic motivations that were surely more important, especially after the mechanization of agriculture got under way in the 1930s.
The memorial, in short, is the centerpiece of EJI's larger commemorative agenda of drawing a line from slavery to lynching to systemic racism in law enforcement. The title of EJI's multimedia Legacy Museum exhibition in downtown Montgomery is From Slavery to Mass Incarceration. when you read about 104 people being shot in Chicago over last summer's long July 4 weekend alone—almost all the incidents taking place in black or Hispanic neighborhoods, with none of the victims shot by police (though two policemen were shot)you get to thinking that the Legacy Museum is missing something where the abuses suffered by today's blacks are concerned. The museum's overarching narrative-addressing racial injustice throughout the nation, not just the South —jibes to perfection with Black Lives Matter propaganda.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:y2z7qjl6m6pqpn3msjo7j55q/bafkreic6unx33nqmd5u3466tszj7mizcm7pvjcl2kfpesfznoil53v64gi)
