Episode 4 – The Elephant in the Country
Welcome to Episode 4 of the Good Citizen Podcast. We’re here to improve our civic competence: it’s Social Studies for Grownups. In each episode we take a look at things that affect our civic life in America.
This time that “thing” is the elephant in our country. Racism in America is a very big elephant and one that affects our civic life and our society in a whole lot of ways, the basis of discrimination in voting, gerrymandering, our justice system, to name a few.
For this episode, we’ll take a slice of the issue – a vertical history – and we’ll examine it as we always do through social studies to help us understand the origins of our particular American version of racism.
Fair warning: this will be a broad vertical stroke through American Colonial history and social studies. It will, by necessity, gloss over, pick and choose, and/or generalize. There are plenty of scholars who spend their entire careers drilling down into these time periods and these issues, so let your interest in them take you where they may. I am, essentially, an essayist, starting with a premise that I aim to prove by weaving my way through a particular path in history.
Here are the reference links this episode:

* New York Times article: Heather Heyer, Charlottesville Victim, Is Recalled as ‘a Strong Woman’
* Channel 5, NBC Dallas-Fort Worth: Protesters Clash Over Confederate Monuments in Dallas
* D Magazine: At the Confederate War Memorial, a Protest Devolves Into Shouting Match
* YouTube: Confederacy: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) – cited news clip at about 9 mn
* Wikipedia: Confiscation Act of 1861
* Lumen Learning: Settling the Southern Colonies
* Humboldt State University: Discussion Guides : The Colonists – What They Created
* Wikipedia: Colonial empire
* Wikipedia: British colonization of the Americas
* Wikipedia: London Company
* Wikipedia: Richard Hakluyt
* Wikipedia: Starving Time
* Encyclopedia Virginia: Indentured Servants in Colonial Virginia
* History Detectives (PBS): Indentured Servants In The U.S.
* Lumen Learning: Treatment of Slaves in the United States
* Law Library of Congress: Slavery and Indentured Servants
* Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Ideas of Race in Early America
* English Oxford Living Dictionaries: