Thread by @NYTmag

No universal healthcare.
Highest rates of mass incarceration.
The brutality of capitalism.
An epidemic of sugar in our diets.

No aspect of modern American life has been untouched by slavery. These essays in our #1619project explain how nyti.ms/31JGGeN (thread)

Bryan Stevenson: The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth. Understanding the legacy of slavery is necessary to understand this practice of mass imprisonment and excessive punishment.
nyti.ms/31HZ5bB

The idea that health care was a basic human right was introduced by the National Medical Association, the leading black medical society, in the mid 1960s.

But the U.S. still lacks universal health care because of policies enacted after the Civil War nyti.ms/2z0DbnW

Matthew Desmond (@just_shelter): "Slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider"

American capitalism is brutal. You can trace that to the plantation.
nyti.ms/2yZ71ZU

@just_shelter Two persistent physiological myths — that black people were impervious to pain and had weak lungs that could be strengthened through hard work — wormed their way into scientific consensus, and they remain rooted in modern-day medical education and practice nyti.ms/31Gh2Y2

@just_shelter Plantations didn’t just produce goods; they produced ideas too. American democracy has never shed an undemocratic assumption present at its founding: that some people are inherently entitled to more power than others, @jbouie writes. nyti.ms/2yW6bgq

@just_shelter @jbouie Atlanta has some of the worst traffic in the United States. But what does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot, writes @KevinMKruse nyti.ms/31JQO7j

@just_shelter @jbouie @KevinMKruse Sugar has been linked in the United States to diabetes, obesity and cancer. If it is killing all of us, it is killing black people faster, writes @KhalilGMuhammad. nyti.ms/31CCz43

@just_shelter @jbouie @KevinMKruse @KhalilGMuhammad A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America nyti.ms/2yXCuM1