CBS This Morning on Thursday promoted the New York Times attempt to blame everything wrong in American on slavery. Talking to Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, co-host Gayle King praised the effort: “The thing that’s so amazing about this that makes me so proud, you can look at just about anything happening in the world today and tie it to slavery.”
She teed up Hannah-Jones, wondering, “You look at the naming of Wall Street. You look at sugar that we eat. But the thing that stuck out to me was health care, you can tie health care to slavery.”
According to the Times journalist, slavery, which ended in 1865, is the reason America doesn’t have total government-run health care:
We're the only western industrialized country that doesn't have universal health care. It starts with opposition to universal health care that occurs right after slavery when the Freedsmen’s Bureau was trying to offer free health care to the formerly enslaved and there was opposition to that. And so even today, you see with polling white Americans will reject social programs if they think large numbers of black people will benefit from them. So, the harms from slavery have not been contained because there are millions of white Americans, there are millions of Latinos and Asians and black Americans who don't have health care, who can’t get insurance because of slavery.
This past Sunday, the Times published The 1619 Project. One section assailed capitalism: “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”
A partial transcript is below:
CBS This Morning
8/22/19
8:37AM ETGAYLE KING: The thing that’s so amazing about this that makes me so proud, you can look at just about anything happening in the world today and tie it to slavery. You look at the highways in Atlanta. You look at the naming of Wall Street. You look at sugar that we eat. But the thing that stuck out to me was health care, you can tie health care to slavery. How?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES (NYT Magazine domestic correspondent): Absolutely. There's a piece there in we're the only western industrialized country that doesn't have universal health care. It starts with opposition to universal health care that occurs right after slavery when the Freedsmen’s Bureau was trying to offer free health care to the formerly enslaved and there was opposition to that. And so even today, you see with polling white Americans will reject social programs if they think large numbers of black people will benefit from them. So, the harms from slavery have not been contained because there are millions of white Americans, there are millions of Latinos and Asians and black Americans who don't have health care, who can’t get insurance because of slavery.
