THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-EDMONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 N A21ON THE ISSUEof American slavery, I am
an absolutist: enslavers were amoral
monsters.
The very idea that one group of people
believed that they had the right to own
another human being is abhorrent and
depraved. The fact that their control was
enforced by violence was barbaric.
People often try to explain this away
by saying that the people who enslaved
Africans in this country were simply
men and women of their age, abiding by
the mores of the time.
But, that explanation falters. There
were also men and women of the time
who found slavery morally reprehensi-
ble. The enslavers ignored all this and
used anti-black dehumanization to jus-
tify the holding of slaves and the profit-
ing from slave labor.
People say that some slave owners
were kinder than others.
That explanation too is problematic.
The withholding of another person’s
freedom is itself violent. And the en-
slaved people who were shipped to
America via the Middle Passage had al-
ready endured unspeakably horrific
treatment.
One of the few written accounts of the
atrocious conditions on these ships
comes from a man named the Rev.
Robert Walsh. The British government
outlawed the international slave trade in
1807, followed by the United States in- The two nations patrolled the seas
to prevent people from continuing to kid-
nap Africans and bringing them to those
countries illegally. In 1829, one of the pa-
trols spotted such a ship, and what Walsh
saw when he boarded the ship is beyond
belief.
The ship had been at sea for 17 days.
There were over 500 kidnapped Africans
onboard. Fifty-five had already been
thrown overboard.
The Africans were crowded below the
main deck. Each deck was only 3 feet 3
inches high. They were packed together
so tight that they were sitting up be-
tween one another’s legs, everyone com-
pletely nude. As Walsh recounted, “there
was no possibility of their lying down or
at all changing their position by night or
day.”
Each had been branded, “burnt with
the red-hot iron,” on their breast or arm.
Many were children, little girls and little
boys.
Not only could light not reach down
into the bowels of those ships, neither
could fresh air. As Walsh recounted, “The
heat of these horrid places was so great
and the odor so offensive that it was quite
impossible to enter them, even had there
been room.”
These people, these human beings, sat
in their own vomit, urine and feces, and
that of others. If another person sat be-
tween your legs, their bowels emptied
out on you.
These voyages regularly lasted over a
month, meaning many women onboard
experienced menstruation in these con-
ditions.
Many of the enslaved, sick or driven
mad, were thrown overboard. Others
simply jumped. In fact, there was so
much human flesh going over the side of
those ships that sharks learned to trail
them.
This voyage was so horrific that I can
only surmise that the men, women and
children who survived it were superhu-
man, the toughest and the most resilient
our species has to offer.
But of the people who showed up to
greet these reeking vessels of human tor-
ture, to bid on its cargo, or to in any way
benefit from the trade and industry that
provided the demand for such a supply, I
have absolute contempt.
Some people who are opposed to tak-
ing down monuments ask, “If we start,
where will we stop?” It might begin with
Confederate generals, but all slave own-
ers could easily become targets. Even
George Washington himself.
To that I say, “abso-fricking-lutely!”
George Washington enslaved more
than 100 human beings, and he signed
the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, authoriz-
ing slavers to stalk runaways even in
free states and criminalizing the helping
of escaped slaves. When one of the Afri-
can people he himself had enslaved es-
caped, a woman named Ona Maria
Judge, he pursued her relentlessly,
sometimes illegally.
Washington would free his slaves in
his will, when he no longer had use for
them.
Let me be clear: Those black people
who were enslaved by George Washing-
ton and others, including other founders,
were just as much human as I am today.
They love, laugh, cry and hurt just like I
do.
When I hear people excuse their en-
slavement and torture as an artifact of
the times, I’m forced to consider that if
slavery were the prevailing normalcy of
this time, my own enslavement would
also be a shrug of the shoulders.
I say that we need to reconsider public
monuments in public spaces. No per-
son’s honorifics can erase the horror he
or she has inflicted on others.
Slave owners should not be honored
with monuments in public spaces. We
have museums for that, which also pro-
vide better context.
This is not an erasure of history, but
rather a better appreciation of the horri-
ble truth of it. 0CHARLES M. BLOWYes, Even
George
Washington
Slavery was a cruel
institution that can’t be
excused by its era.
APPROXIMATELY ONE BILLIONnews cycles
ago — which is to say, on June 9 — a busi-
nesswoman named Marjorie Taylor
Greene finished first in the Republican
primary in Georgia’s deeply conserva-
tive 14th Congressional District, north-
west of Atlanta, which means that after a
runoff she’s all but assured a seat in the
House of Representatives next year.
Unfortunately, she is a cheerful bigot
and conspiracy-theory fluffernutter. She
subscribes to QAnon, the far-right fever
dream that says Donald Trump is under
siege from a cabal of deep-state saboteurs,
some of whom run a pedophile ring; she
says African-Americans are being held
back primarily by “gangs.”
The House Republican leadership is
trying to distance itself from this woman,
as if she belongs to some other party from
a faraway galaxy. But her politics are
Trumpism distilled. And Trumpism itself
isn’t a style and philosophy that began in
2016, or even in 2010, with the Tea Party. It
began 40-odd years ago, in Greene’s own
state, with the election of a different poli-
tician just two districts over.
I’m talking about Newt. You really
could argue that today’s napalm politics
began with Newt.
The normalization of personal destruc-
tion. The contempt for custom. The media-
baiting, the annihilation of bipartisan co-
mity, the delegitimizing of institutions.
“Gingrich had planted; Trump had
reaped,” writes the Princeton historian
Julian Zelizer in the prologue to his forth-
coming book, “Burning Down the House:
Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and
the Rise of a New Republican Party.”
I recently read Zelizer’s book with mor-
bid fascination. My first real job in journal-
ism was as a reporter for the The Hill
newspaper the year it launched, in 1994,
which happened to be the same year Re-
publicans won control of the House, over-
turning four decades of Democratic rule.
(I wrote nothing memorable that day, but I
did come up with our banner headline:
“It’s Reigning Republicans.”)
Gingrich became speaker the next Jan-
uary. It was a stunning development. Pre-
vious speakers, no matter how partisan
they were, tended to work, lunch and even
drink across the aisle. The only kind of
cocktails Gingrich knew were Molotovs.
He conceived of governing as war. Dem-
ocrats were not merely to be defeated
ideologically. They were to be immolated.
Even as an inexperienced kid, I could
see his ascension was bad news. Looking
back, the parallels between then and now
couldn’t be clearer.
Democrats were devastated that a man
with so much malignity and anger in his
heart could suddenly be at the helm; but
in Republicans, Gingrich had a cult.
Gingrich despised the mainstream
press, breaking with tradition and giving
valuable real estate in the Capitol to con-
servative, nativist-populist radio hosts
who spoke loudly and carried a big
schtick, just as Trump gives coveted space
to One America News Network.
Gingrich was my introduction to Or-
wellian newspeak. He had this tic of start-
ing every other paragraph with “frankly”
and then telling a lie; it was his poker tell.
He freely trafficked in conspiracy theo-
ries. His PAC circulated a pamphlet for as-
piring politicians who wished “to speak
like Newt.” It advised them to repeat a
long list of words to describe Democrats,
including sick, pathetic, corrupt.
Like Trump, Gingrich was a thrice-
married womanizer who’d somehow se-
duced the evangelicals. He too had a
skyscraping ego, nursed grudges as if
they were newborns, and lacked impulse
control. In 1995, Bill Clinton made him sit
in the back of Air Force One; he re-
sponded with a tantrum and shut down
the government.
Gingrich turned the politics of white
racial grievance into an art form. They
may have started with Nixon’s Southern
Strategy, but Gingrich actually came
from the South. He intuited the backlash
to globalization, to affirmation action; the
culture teemed with stories about white
men under siege. It wasn’t long before
1994 became known as “The Year of the
Angry White Male.”
Most of Zelizer’s book is about Ging-
rich’s Javert-like quest to bring down the
House speaker, Jim Wright, for his shady
ethics. (Gingrich succeeded, only to later
be reprimanded and fined for his own
ethical breaches.) Zelizer never mentions
individual parallels to Trump once he
starts telling Gingrich’s story, because
there’s no need. They hop off the page
like frogs.
But the one that goosepimples me even
as I type, is this: Gingrich was the first
true reality TV politician. He understood
that the C-Span cameras didn’t have to be
a passively recording set of eyes. You
could operatically perform for them.
“Conflict equals exposure equals power,”
became one of his favorite sayings.
Which may as well be the motto of reality
television. And Trump.
Assuming she wins in November, Mar-
jorie Taylor Greene will likely be relegat-
ed to the margins of her caucus. But if
Gingrich — and Trump — have taught us
anything, it’s that there’s no telling where
the last exit is on the expressway to ex-
tremism; we know only that the guard-
rails get lower with each passing mile.
“These are the depths to which we’ve de-
scended,” Zelizer told me in a phone call.
“No one ever thinks that an outlier will
one day be the party’s future.” 0
JENNIFER SENIOR
Trump’s Nasty
Politics Began
With Newt
Gingrich wrote the
playbook: contempt for
norms and institutions.
F
OR THREE months, Chelsea
Alionar has struggled with fevers,
headaches, dizziness and a brain
fog so intense it feels like early de-
mentia. She came down with the worst
headache of her life on March 9, then lost
her sense of taste and smell. She eventu-
ally tested positive for the coronavirus.
But her symptoms have been stranger,
and lasted longer, than most.
“I tell the same stories repeatedly; I for-
get words I know,” she told me. Her fin-
gers and toes have been numb, her vision
blurry and her fatigue severe. The 37-
year-old is a one of the more than 4,000
members of a Facebook support group for
Covid survivors who have been ill for
more than 80 days.
The more we learn about the coro-
navirus, the more we realize it’s not just a
respiratory infection. The virus can rav-
age many of the body’s major organ sys-
tems, including the brain and central ner-
vous system.
Neurologists don’t think that every
Covid patient will suffer brain damage —
far from it. But the virus may injure and
thereby age the brain through a number of
mechanisms that aren’t yet fully under-
stood.
It’s likely that these brain injuries aren’t
that different from other kinds of insults
that might accumulate over a person’s life-
time; the problem is that “Covid is a large
bolus of these things at once,” said Dr. Ma-
jid Fotuhi, a neurologist and neuroscien-
tist affiliated with Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Igor Koralnik agrees. He runs the
Neuro Covid-19 Clinic at Northwestern
Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He expects
that when recovered Covid patients go on
to develop cognitive issues later in life,
“their presentation is going to be worse
because of the damage to the brain that
was caused by Covid-19.”
How does this happen? Research sug-
gests that the coronavirus can directly in-
fect neural cells, said Dr. Jeffrey Cirillo, a
professor of microbial pathogenesis and
immunology at Texas A&M University.The virus most likely replicates inside the
cells and affects how they function. This
viral invasion could cause patients to
“have a persistence of cognitive problems,
or maybe they will have persistent
seizures,” Dr. Koralnik said. In April, a 40-
year-old Los Angeles woman with a head-
ache, seizures and hallucinations was
found to have the RNA from the coro-
navirus in her cerebrospinal fluid.
Another way the coronavirus can dam-
age the nervous system is i through wide-
spread inflammation caused by the body’s
immune response. Inflammation “is bad
for the brain, and we know that for a fact,”
Dr. Fotuhi said. One of the leading theories
in Alzheimer’s research is that inflamma-
tion drives the disease.
Brain inflammation can also spark the
creation of blood clots. Studies suggest
that clots occur in up to 30 percent of criti-cally ill Covid patients. These clots can
permeate the brain, causing it “to function
at a lower level,” Dr. Fotuhi said. They can
also lead to strokes that starve the brain of
oxygen. Studies from China and Italy have
suggested that as many as 5 percent of
hospitalized patients with Covid experi-
ence strokes, though a more recent N.Y.U.
study found the figure to be lower, at 1 per-
cent, in hospitalized New York patients.
If the inflammation becomes so severe
as to involve a “cytokine storm,” in which
a patient’s body in effect turns on itself,
the blood brain barrier can be breached,
allowing more viruses and cytokines into
the brain and ultimately killing brain cells.
“It’s like the defense system is called to
quiet a small riot in one neighborhood, and
all of a sudden, the whole military is ticked
off and they don’t know what’s going on,
they just go bomb everything,” Dr. Fotuhi
said.
A small number of patients with the co-ronavirus have gone on to develop Guil-
lain-Barré syndrome, in which a person’s
immune system attacks that person’s own
nerves, causing paralysis. Michele Hart, a
41-year-old psychotherapist in Colorado,
is one of them.
She began experiencing electrical,
shocklike pains in her body, numbness in
her extremities and stabbing pains down
the side of her face in April. She went to
the E.R., worried she might have the coro-
navirus, but they sent her home, saying
her neurological symptoms weren’t con-
sistent with the infection. When her blood
pressure skyrocketed a few days later, she
returned to the E.R. and this time was giv-
en a coronavirus test that came back pos-
itive. She was also diagnosed with Guil-
lain-Barré syndrome.
In addition to memory problems and
dizziness, she struggles with nerve pain.
“I have pins and needles and shooting
nerve pain constantly, as well as burning
sensations in my skin,” she told me.
Given all of these concerns, neurolo-
gists argue that it is crucial to study Covid
patients in order to understand how their
nervous systems recover — or don’t. Dr.
Cirillo, Dr. Koralnik and Dr. Hornig are all
undertaking studies on the topic, but more
research will be essential, they say.
Among other things, research on the
topic may be able to identify drugs or
other treatments that can be given to
Covid patients to reduce the risk of ner-
vous system injury.
Physicians also need to keep in mind
that their Covid patients could benefit
from cognitive and neurological assess-
ments and prompt neurological treat-
ment. Dr. Fotuhi, for one, believes that all
patients hospitalized for the coronavirus
should receive brain MRIs to identify
nascent issues.
So far during this pandemic, the medi-
cal community has largely — and under-
standably — been focused on keeping
Covid patients alive. But we need to con-
sider how the virus could shape the rest of
their lives, too. 0Can Covid Damage the Brain?
Melinda Wenner MoyerMELINDA WENNER MOYERis a science and
health writer and the author of a forth-
coming book on raising children.“I tell the same stories
repeatedly; I forget
words I know.”
ROBERT BEATTYL
IKEother crises in the past, the coro-
navirus pandemic has provided
an opportunity for communities
to act on their most exclusionary
impulses. This summer, private pools and
beach clubs, as well as public facilities in
wealthier areas, are reopening with new
measures to ensure that the general pub-
lic stays out: hiring more security, ag-
gressively checking beach tags and re-
stricting access to residents only.
Exclusionary measures that predomi-
nantly white and wealthier communities
have eagerly adopted, combined with the
fact that many cities and towns are keep-
ing public swimming pools closed to help
narrow budget gaps, mean many Ameri-
cans who rely on public facilities for out-
door recreation — disproportionately
lower income families and people of color
— will find that there are few places left for
them to go.
This has happened before. Throughout
American history, in times of heightened
racial tension and rising inequality, the so-
cially advantaged tend to retreat into pri-
vate spaces, withdraw taxpayer support
for public recreation and work to restrict
access to public space within their com-
munities, often using concerns about pub-
lic health and safety as justification.
In the summer of 1929, residents of the
town of Westport along Connecticut’s
Gold Coast reported a “new menace”
threatening the health and safety of their
community: New Yorkers fleeing the
squalid, scorching city and flocking to a
new state beach located on neighboring
Sherwood Island. Because it was state-
owned land, all the residents could do, one
reporter noted, was “to make access as
difficult as possible.”
Westport officials hired a contractor to
dredge a creek and flood the road connect-
ing the state beach to the mainland. They
insisted that they were simply seeking to
eliminate a mosquito breeding ground —but as another state official remarked,
“the real object is to keep the people off
state property.”
The people in question were the blacks,
Jews, Italians and others denied member-
ship to country clubs, who had few options
for summertime relief. As America
slipped deeper into the Great Depression,
the nation’s swelling homeless population
was added to the list. A state park, one res-
ident decried, “would be an invitation to
the scum.” Sherwood Island, another be-
moaned, “looks like a gypsy camp and
new tents are being erected every day.”
It was no coincidence that during these
same years, several towns along Connect-
icut’s Gold Coast first adopted ordinancesrestricting access to town beaches and
other places of outdoor recreation to resi-
dents only.
As black uprisings engulfed urban
America in the 1960s, white suburbanites
placed new restrictions on access to out-
door public space. On Long Island, Nas-
sau County banned nonresidents from all
of its parks, pools and golf courses, and re-
quired residents to purchase a “leisure
pass” to enjoy the county’s outdoor ameni-
ties.
Beginning in the 1970s, social activists
and civil liberties groups fought to dis-
mantle the barriers exclusive communi-
ties had used to keep the public out of its
public-in-name-only spaces. In 1973, the
New York Civil Liberties Union success-
fully fought to overturn the town of Long
Beach’s ordinance banning nonresidents
from its public beaches. In 2001, Connecti-
cut’s highest court ruled that Greenwich’s
ordinance banning nonresidents from its
town beaches was unconstitutional.
In both cases, the towns claimed thatthese measures were motivated by con-
cerns over public health and safety, or in
order to protect fragile environments
from overuse — anything but the racial
and class composition of the people they
were locking out.
Some of the same communities that
fought to keep nonresidents and other
“undesirables” out of public spaces in the
past are today adopting some of the most
restrictive measures in response to the
pandemic.
After New York City announced that it
would be keeping its beaches closed this
summer, the town of Long Beach enacted
what a reporter for The New York Times
described as the “most sweeping rebuke
of outsiders” of any suburban munici-
pality in the greater New York area. Simi-
larly, Greenwich and other wealthy com-
munities along the Connecticut coast have
used the pandemic to once again ban non-
residents from town beaches, in defiance
of the courts.
Public health experts agree that so long
as people take precautions, outdoor activi-
ties are not only safe but also necessary
for coping with the stress of the pandemic.
But the exclusionary tactics of privileged
communities and cost-cutting measures
of underresourced ones this summer will
force many Americans to suffer inside or
seek out unsupervised, potentially dan-
gerous bodies of water to cool off. And it’s
not hard to imagine that pools and
beaches with restricted access could be-
come flash points of conflict with law en-
forcement officials, endangering black
and brown youths.
It’s simple, really. Our ability to find re-
lief from the heat, and to enjoy time out-
doors this summer, should not be deter-
mined by where we live and the social and
economic advantages we enjoy. 0Not All Will Get to Swim This Summer
Andrew W. KahrlANDREW W. KAHRLis a professor of history
and African-American studies at the
University of Virginia and the author of
“Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll
and the Battle for America’s Most Exclu-
sive Shoreline.”Pools, beaches and clubs
open — but mostly for
the privileged few.