Listen to the Episode
Read the accompanying essays by Matthew Desmond, Mehrsa Baradran, Trymaine Lee, and Tiya Miles in The 1619 Project to better understand the violent theft that was slavery and how it echoes in the brutality of American capitalism today:
Slave Voyages is a digital memorial to the people who were enslaved and trafficked to the Americas in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This trade is an example of White settler colonial capitalism.
Warning: This site's content can be both emotionally disturbing as well as a powerful tool to create understanding and empathy. For example, watching the Timelapse data visualization of ships moving from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean can be overwhelming for viewers.
The project includes several datasets and images:
Section of Canoe for Transporting Slaves, Sierra Leone, 1840’s (1849)
The project was created by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. More from the website:
"The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The new Voyages website itself is the product of three years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America. The National Endowment for the Humanities was the principal sponsor of this work carried out at Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. The Hutchins Center of Harvard University has also provided support."
The 1619 project builds on recent scholarly research documenting the ways that slavery helped create the brutality of capitalism in the US today. These books identify "slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, [these books] recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom" (quote from blurb to Slavery's Capitalism).
Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by
Slavery in the United States was a morally reprehensible--and very profitable--business. Rosenthal argues that slaveholders in the American South and Caribbean were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts, techniques that are still used by businesses today.
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by
Americans tend to cast slavery as isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. In fact, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. This book draws on the memories of formerly enslaved people to document the systematic, organized violence that made this possible.
The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by
When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, Black Americans owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. Baradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap. These initiatives have functioned as a potent political decoy to avoid more fundamental reforms and racial redress. Examining the fruits of past policies and the operation of banking in a segregated economy, she makes clear that only bolder, more realistic views of banking's relation to black communities will end the cycle of poverty and promote black wealth.
Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development by
Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. American capitalism--renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man--has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence.
This photo is from the Portraits of African American formerly enslaved people from the U.S. Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers' Project slave narratives collections. For more photographs and manuscripts, click the first link below.
Inequalities persisted long after slavery ended, influencing all aspects of American life.
School Desegregation: Oral Histories toward Understanding the Effects of White Domination by
This book is written for the Millennial Generation to educate them about what school desegregation was actually about--the struggle over white domination in the United States. The textbooks they read as high school students describe the heroic efforts of African Americans to achieve civil rights but do not describe who was denying them these rights--white Americans. The oral histories in this book reveal how individuals navigated efforts to achieve educational equity amidst efforts to reassert white domination. These accounts counter the textbook history the Millennial Generation read which omits the massive white resistance to school desegregation, the various ways whites used subterfuge to slow down and redirect school desegregation in what would more benefit whites, and the concerted white political backlash that has been ensconced in educational policy and reform beginning with A Nation at Risk and continuing in No Child Left Behind. That is, educational policy as we know it is all about asserting white domination and not about educating children, and thus the Millennial Generation is faced with undoing what their parents and grandparents have done. Cover image by Echo Lilly Wilson.
The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century by
If you live in a city--and every year, more and more Americans do--you've seen firsthand how gentrification has transformed our surroundings, altering the way cities look, feel, cost, and even smell.Over the last few years, journalists, policymakers, critics, and historians have all tried to explain just what it is that happens when new money and new residents flow into established neighborhoods, yet we've had very little access to the human side of the gentrification phenomenon. The Edge Becomes the Center captures the stories of the many kinds of people--brokers, buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, artists, contractors, politicians, and everyone in between--who are shaping and being shaped by the new New York City.In this extraordinary oral history, DW Gibson takes gentrification out of the op-ed columns and textbooks and brings it to life, showing us what urban change looks and feels like by exposing us to the voices of the people living through it. Drawing on the plainspoken, casually authoritative tradition of Jane Jacobs and Studs Terkel, The Edge Becomes the Center is an inviting and essential portrait of the way we live now.
Redlining is the systematic denial of services (often financial services) to residents of Black neighborhoods. Specifically, it refers to maps drawn in the 1930s by a government-sponsored corporation that "'graded' neighborhoods ... based in large part on their racial makeup. Neighborhoods with minority occupants were marked in red — hence 'redlining' — and considered high-risk for mortgage lenders" (OPB). As a result, banks denied mortgages to people of color in these neighborhoods, or targeted them for contract leasing and other predatory lending practices. Ta-Nehisi Coates documents these practices and makes the argument that the many still-living people whose homes were stolen from them under discriminatory lending practices deserve reparations in his essay, "The Case for Reparations."
Related practices persist to this day. For example, during the early 2000s, African Americans and other people of color were offered loans on worse terms than they would have otherwise qualified for. As a result, a large portion of Black wealth was destroyed during the Great Recession of the late 2000s. These and related practices continue to drive down home values in Black neighborhoods. Below is some additional information on these practices. While little research has been done on redlining in Eugene, you can read more about redlining and other racist housing practices in Portland, Oregon and across the country. You can start by looking up the redlining map for Portland, or for a city near you:
The Color of Law by
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post-World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. "The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book" (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
According to the University of Virginia digital project site, the "racial dot map is an American snapshot; it provides an accessible visualization of geographic distribution, population density, and racial diversity of the American people in every neighborhood in the entire country. The map displays 308,745,538 dots, one for each person residing in the United States at the location they were counted during the 2010 Census. Each dot is color-coded by the individual’s race and ethnicity. The map is presented in both black and white and full color versions. In the color version, each dot is color-coded by race."
In the early '70s in Eugene, the Afro-American Institute provided many services including referral services for employment and housing. You can make an appointment to view the organization's records here:
LibrarySearch offers a streamlined interface for finding books and other media that combines the collections of UO Libraries and Summit libraries.
Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality by
Black Wealth/White Wealthdemonstrates how an analysis of private wealth uncovers a revealing story about race in America. An examination of how assets are created, expanded and preserved reveals a deep economic divide between blacks and whites. Charting the changing structure of inequality over many generations, the authors examine how and why many blacks have had difficulty accumulating wealth and opportunities for a better life. In combining quantitative data from over 12,000 households and interviews with a range of black and white families, the racial face of wealth in America is measured and conceptualized.
Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development by
Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. American capitalism--renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man--has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence.
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by
Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery's end--and created a culture that sustains America's deepest dreams of freedom.
An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade by
Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women's work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets. Through the personal histories of four enslaved women, Finley explores the intangible costs of the slave market, moving beyond ledgers, bills of sales, and statements of profit and loss to consider the often incalculable but nevertheless invaluable place of women's emotional, sexual, and domestic labor in the economy. The details of these women's lives reveal the complex intersections of economy, race, and family at the heart of antebellum society.
The Color of Law by
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post-World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. "The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book" (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
When Affirmative Action Was White by
A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action. When Affirmative Action Was White demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. This was no accident. With the United States still in an era of legal segregation, the powerful southern wing of the Democratic Party provided the framework for Social Security, the GI Bill, and landmark labor laws that helped create the foundations of the modern middle class. Through mechanisms that specifically excluded maids and farmworkers and through laws that kept administration in local hands, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. The publication of this deeply disturbing work promises to create a national debate on the meaning of affirmative action and the responsibility of government.
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