Reply To: From Separate to Equal and The 1619 Project

[Jihad_Miller]

#758

From Separate to Equal Response:
A). While watching the From Separate to Equal documentary, I felt a sense of pride for my heritage and my people. Throughout the documentary, countless nurses, doctors, and just ordinary citizens during that time period detailed the challenges and obstacles our people had to go through to break the barrier of access to basic healthcare. Even Dr. Bluford himself described those challenges when remembering the clinic that he used to go to as child instead of being allowed to get help from the public hospital facility in his time. I felt pride because even though it seemed one obstacle was stacked on another, our people never gave up. When black doctors weren’t allowed to serve on the staff of General Hospital #2, we found a way to fight through it. When Dr. Jabez Jackson rejected our black doctors because he believed that they weren’t smart enough to perform surgery, we proved them and the others wrong. When General Hospital #2 lacked equipment, our nurses created their own bandages and saline solution. That grit and determination to never give up was passed from generation to generation through our ancestors.
B). Dr. Jabez Jackson’s excerpt in the documentary was infuriating because of the lack of judgment he had. “I just don’t believe colored people can think that fast” is insulting and ignorant because as a racist he based the doctors not off their abilities but their skin color. The examinations the city used to proctor their physicians reminds me of how when blacks were fighting for the right to vote, they also had to take unfair examinations. Unsurprisingly most blacks failed why whites passed. However, when the exams for both instances were graded justly, many blacks had actually passed the exams.

1619 Project Response:
A) While I was reading the 1619 Project, I felt anger and embarrassment that our people had to go through such horrible events. I agree with Nikole Hannah-Jones that this country ideals is full of irony and hypocrisy. The colonists claimed they were slaves to the British but they kept slaves on their own. It angers me that the first several presidents of our nation such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had hundreds of our people in bondage; yet those men wanted to create a “free country.” In my opinion the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are based on lies by frauds. “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I don’t know what more ridiculousness, that our president actually wrote these words or that our whole country believed and idolized those words and him.
B). I agree with the statement that the United States was built by African Americans because it actually was. Literally almost everything that is here was built by us. If we never stolen from Africa, America would not be the nation that it is today. If it wasn’t for Native Americans, the original colonists would not have survived the winter in 1619.