What will historians say about us

Our answers to racism continue to be as insufficient as ever. Some foolishly thought we were getting better, but Brunswick, Louisville and Minneapolis have thrown such delusions to the ground and shattered them. Baker Jr. He penned this as a young man:. It is past the time for good people to speak out.

I hope that one day it will be said of us that we as a people came out of this time a better nation even more intent on listening to the call to do good, to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God see Micah 6. The Rev. Bill Holmes of Louisville is a retired child neurologist and hospital chaplain. Home Opinion Facebook. Facebook Twitter Email. What will history say about our response to the coronavirus and the plague of racism?

He stresses how the pandemic has shown that the public health infrastructure needs strengthening. Another lesson of COVID is how longstanding social and economic factors play a role in creating higher risk of illness and death. But this is not new — it was recognized nearly years ago during typhus outbreaks in London. A surge of infection that overwhelms capacity is similar with flu, as is the government downplaying of infection that led to a lack of concerted, centralized guidelines, and the loneliness of social isolation.

He notes that in , sales of phonographs to allow the playing of music during isolation was portrayed as a means to keep people entertained. Today, the internet has done the same. Kazanjian marks similarities between the current global response to the pandemic and the way AIDS and syphilis were handled in the past, with biomedical treatments being preferentially allocated to wealthy groups, resulting in uneven disease distribution that accentuated underlying social and racial disparities.

The early years of the AIDS pandemic also included great mistrust in science and government by those most affected, but that distrust was fed during COVID by disinformation on social media, he says. But while Navarro was pleasantly surprised by how well these approaches worked in many parts of the United States in spring , despite highly politicized rhetoric regarding the pandemic, he was still shocked by how quickly things changed.

On the other, the lengthy, detailed narratives that people sought to write down in letters hundreds of years ago may be considered rarer. Future historians may wonder how the "doge" meme, which consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog, became so popular that it spawned a new currency Credit: Alamy.

Prolific letter writers didn't just preserve what happened, they also narrated events and their personal responses to them — from Mary Montagu, who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain after witnessing it abroad, to Horace Walpole, whose letters captured all kinds of societal changes , including the Georgian craze for spa-bathing.

Blogs, non-fiction books and some longform journalism have arguably taken the place of letters today, though they are by definition less private and potentially less intimate sources of information. Katrin Weller, an information scientist and head of the social analytics and services team at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany, says that, given the nature of social media today, future historians may judge our era as a particularly narcissistic one — perhaps rightly.

Social capital has always mattered in human society, and vanity is certainly nothing new. However, Weller suggests that the endless posting of selfies and self-promotion in status updates suggests that huge numbers of people today are highly conscious of how they're perceived by others.

The fact that people care so much about this might bemuse researchers of the future. While 17th-Century portraits tend to depict aristocrats and royals, since they were the ones wealthy enough to employ artists who could capture their likenesses, the visual media that survives us may be skewed in its own way — towards those who were most visible and vocal on the web.

Class still matters but practically anyone can chronicle their own life on social media today. And future researchers won't just rely on digital records.

Where it survives, they'll also pick through the physical artefacts we leave behind. One material in particular will probably endure more widely, and for longer, than any other — plastic. Packaging, for example, retains all kinds of details about the products we buy and also what food we eat, which ingredients are used, and how we store such items. It's now relatively common to find decades-old plastic littering the environment.

My sister found a year-old crisp packet buried in her garden recently. That's another thing that will be obvious to future generations — we produced copious volumes of waste and didn't really know what to do with it.

Here's hoping that people have a better handle on things in the centuries to come. Today's memes may fascinate future historians as the modern equivalent of satirical cartoons Credit: Alamy. Knowing what daily life was like in the 21st-Century may be relatively easy, then, in the distant future. It refocused the conversation towards the continuity of this historical struggle that Black Americans have faced both in Richmond and the commonwealth of Virginia, but also nationally as well.

It became a site of black joy, almost a pilgrimage site. There were many stories about families driving hours to show their children this new location. A sterile middle-of-the-road thing that nobody ever actually used became a place of BBQs and parties and protest and civic involvement. When monumental spaces have been reclaimed in the past, the structures have been pulled down.

They time travel in a way. These monuments were constructed in the past and exist in the present. They are physical manifestations of this long history, that goes back in this particular case to the early 20th century, nostalgia for the Lost Cause and the Confederacy.

I see the reclamation of the Robert E. Lee statue as a piece of what the Project has done too. Both have made us talk about American History in a very different way now. Amid an unprecedented national movement for racial justice in the summer of , we witnessed one of the most important political statements in the history of American sport.

On Aug. These protests against racism and police violence soon inspired similar actions in the majority-white Major League Baseball and National Hockey Leagues. The sports demonstrations are profound expressions of a new, multiracial coalition of Americans calling for racial justice and an end to inequality. A century after the 19th Amendment, Kamala Harris finally broke the glass ceiling.

Mink and Chisholm both ran for the U. We should recognize Harris as a woman whose personal and political lineage stems from anti-imperial circuits of migration and activism.

Along with Mink and Chisholm, Harris is a first. Even in , secessionists acknowledged Lincoln had won the election as they tried to break the nation in two.