Today? Just rest.
Welcome back to Productivity, Without Privilege friends, where given the state of the world and the news recently, it feels weird to promote my book. I’ll do it anyway, because frankly, I want to make sure this is as much of a success as possible, but it still feels strange. That said, I’m going to keep this week’s newsletter relatively short, partially because it’s a holiday and instead of reading me, I sincerely hope you take the day to share your heart with your loved ones, and partially because it’s a holiday and you deserve to rest as well.
Now then, if you haven’t pre-ordered Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, please do! If you’re particularly interested in a signed copy, you can pre-order one from The Strand’s online store here, the only place you can get them right now.
If you’re in the New York City area, consider coming by The Strand on 6/10, where I’ll be in a Secrets of Publishing panel to celebrate my debut book, along with some other amazing authors, editors, and journalists—all thanks to the wonderful Susan Shapiro, who put the event together for me.
Also, I should note that I’ve been doing so many podcast interviews, article interviews, and working on book excerpts that it’s been a little tough for me to keep track of what’s out already and what’s coming out, but you can always check the “press” section over at alan-henry.net to see them updated as soon as I hear about them. Right now though, I’m celebrating this wonderful review in Kirkus, and being on last week’s episode of the Science for the People podcast, hosted by Bethany Brookshire! I also snagged a spot in Poynter’s newsletter, The Collective, which ran an intro I wrote and an excerpt of the book. Protocol ran an excerpt from the book as well, and there’s more to come!
So suffice it to say, I’m in full gear for the book launch, and I can’t wait to hear what you all think of it when it’s in your hands.
But for now, let’s turn our attention back to Memorial Day.
Do you know how the holiday got started? Or maybe you knew at one point but forgot, like I did until Jack Corvus, the one and only genuscorvidae, reminded me, not just of how important it is, but how unapologetically Black the holiday was, before it became the amorphous “great summer deals on stuff also oh yeah veterans” holiday it is today.
This piece from 2018 in The New York Times, written by Sewell Chan (an amazing editor and leader, and I’m glad to have his acquaintance,) now of the Texas Tribune, explains beautifully, but this really struck me:
David W. Blight, a historian at Yale, has a different account. He traces the holiday to a series of commemorations that freed black Americans held in the spring of 1865, after Union soldiers, including members of the 21st United States Colored Infantry, liberated the port city of Charleston, S.C.Digging through an archive at Harvard, Dr. Blight found that the largest of these commemorations took place on May 1, 1865, at an old racecourse and jockey club where hundreds of captive Union prisoners had died of disease and been buried in a mass grave. The black residents exhumed the bodies and gave them proper burials, erected a fence around the cemetery, and built an archway over it with the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
Some 10,000 black people then staged a procession of mourning, led by thousands of schoolchildren carrying roses and singing the Union anthem “John Brown’s Body.” Hundreds of black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Black men, including Union infantrymen, also marched. A children’s choir sang spirituals and patriotic songs, including “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration,” Dr. Blight wrote in a 2011 essay for The New York Times. “The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.”
The African-American origins of the holiday were later suppressed, Dr. Blight found, by white Southerners who reclaimed power after the end of Reconstruction and interpreted Memorial Day as a holiday of reconciliation, marking sacrifices — by white Americans — on both sides. Black Americans were largely marginalized in this narrative.
To read more about the origins of Memorial Day, Time has a great feature here as well.
Of course, the history of Memorial Day, like so many wonderful things and wonderful American history that so rarely is taught in this country, was suppressed as white southerners feared and hated their newly-freed Black neighbors, who dared to take part in society like they were, heaven forbid, human beings with rights amd liberties. They set out to rewrite their own history, embrace the Lost Cause movement, and the type of southern white supremacist terror that we’ve come to know and hate now in the 21st century was born, festering in the wounds of post-reconstruction hate.
So for today, I encourage you to rest, reflect, especially on, as I’ve written in my book, how marginalization comes for anyone without the privilege to fight it. Even the most fundamental parts of American history cannot escape being marginalized, suppressed, and reinterpreted in order to appease and comfort the people with power and privilege to mold their worldview in a way that suits them, truth be damned. And I encourage you to always remember this fact, and never allow this type of ahistorical narrative to persist. Not in the past, not the present, or in the future.
And perhaps most importantly, take care. Of you and your loved ones. There’s been so much trauma in our world and in our lives in just the past few weeks that I couldn’t, in any good conscience, ask you to consider anything else right now.
Now then, no recommendations, no worth readings. They’ll be back next newsletter. Right now I hope you archive this email, take a deep breath, exhale, and maybe text a friend to say you miss them and hope they’re doing well. Or call a parent or family member you’ve been thinking of. Or maybe even tell that crush you have that you’re kinda interested in them. It is springtime, after all.
Hang in there. I’ll see you back here in two.