Page 156 - 1619 Project Curriculum
P. 156
7 of 11
America.”
Key Names, anesthesia, gynecology, lung capacity, pulmonary function
Dates, and
Terms
Guiding 1. What inaccurate and unfounded assumptions have doctors made
Questions throughout history about the bodies of enslaved black people, and how
did they attempt to prove those assumptions?
2. How have racist medical practices and attitudes influenced the medical
treatment that black Americans have received throughout history, and
continue to receive today?
12. “American Popular Music” by Wesley Morris (pages 60–67)
Excerpt “When we’re talking about black music, we’re talking about horns, drums,
keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. We’re also talking about
what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of
weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you
know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.”
Key Names, appropriation, minstrelsy
Dates, and
Terms
Guiding 1. How have popular musical and performance trends throughout history
Questions used traditions and styles developed by black Americans?
2. How does the author describe black music and blackness in music?
13. “Sugar” by Khalil Gibran Muhammad (pages 70–77)
Excerpt “None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic
might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way
foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his
second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks
with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined
sugar was a luxury product, the back-breaking toil and dangerous labor
required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything
approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained
These materials were created to support The 1619 Project, published in The New York Times Magazine August
2019. You can find this and more educational resources at www.pulitzercenter.org/1619
