Legacies links for July 11, 2022: health disparities, Episcopalians, and other topics

A weekly (more or less) roundup of current links related to the legacies of slavery. As always, feel free to share with your students and colleagues. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

Links:

• Mary Kay Linge and Jon Levine, “Monticello is going woke—and trashing Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in the process,” New York Post (July 9, 2022): LINK. A conservative commentary on the efforts at Monticello to present a more comprehensive interpretation of slavery at the site.
  
• Aaron Cerbone, “Uncovering American history in the Adirondacks,” Adirondack Daily Enterprise (July 6, 2022): LINK. Highlights the efforts of Curt Stager—a biology professor at CIC member Paul Smith’s College—to recover the history of slaves, abolitionists, and free Blacks in upstate New York during the 19th century.
  
• Kathryn Joyce, “America and the ‘Heathen’: How we set ourselves apart from ‘sh**hole countries,’” Salon (July 4, 2022): LINK. An interview with Stanford University religion professor Kathryn Gin Lum, who traces the long relationship between “heathenism” and race in her new book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History.
  
• Usha Lee McFarling, “‘It was stolen from me’: Black doctors are forced out of training programs at far higher rates than white residents,” Stat (June 20, 2022): LINK. This article explores a contributing factor to racial health disparities in America: systematic barriers to the advancement of Black doctors at the residency stage.
  
• Robert L. Reece, “Slave Past, Modern Lives: An Analysis of the Legacy of Slavery and Contemporary Life Expectancy in the American South,” Journal of Black Studies (May 2022): https://doi.org/10.1177/00219347221095167 (full text of preprint at this link). The author shows that “in southern counties where slavery was denser[,] black life expectancy remains proportionally lower and white life expectancy remains proportionally higher than in southern counties where slavery was less dense.”
  
• Jonathan M. Pitts, “Racial healing to top agenda as Episcopalians converge on Baltimore for their 80th churchwide convention,” Baltimore Sun (July 7, 2022): LINK. Since the 1990s, the church has tried to reckon with the fact that “Episcopalians were an integral part of the social and economic system of slavery in America.”
  
• Sarah Azaransky, “The Episcopal saint whose journey for social justice took many forms, from sit-ins to priesthood,” The Conversation (June 28, 2022): LINK. An appreciation of Pauli Murray, the first Black woman ordained by her denomination. Among other accomplishments, Murray’s 1956 memoir, Proud Shoes, “brought attention to how central sexual violence was in the history of U.S. slavery.”