George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade. These are some of the most recent publicized deaths of unarmed black people dying at the hands of police that have led to nationwide and international protests, those that have been described as riots and uprisings. But these personal and national

human losses are not the only reason for the protests we're seeing. Beyond what the news shows us

day after day, beyond the killings we've witnessed through the screens of our phones,

there is still an invisible machine embedded

in America, one that changes shape with each generation, but also in many ways stays the same.

For this episode, we're going to try to give you information that's relevant to what's going on

today and why this collective rage is exploding

the way that it is. We believe that context and understanding are extremely powerful and that the

truth of our past reveals the truth of our present. Through slavery, through the Black Codes and Jim Crow, through the civil

rights movement, the war on drugs, stop and frisk in the 94 crime bill, our unprecedented

mass incarceration, and the history of policing, we hope that this can be a short introductory

guide, a timeline of America and the long, hard

path that has gotten us to where we are. There is a lot of frustration and conversation around the

idea that slavery was a long time ago and that equal rights were achieved in the 1960s, and now we are equal,

one race, and come on, the past is in the past, right?

But we inherit our present, just as people inherit family heirlooms, and these long-term oppressions exist in the very fabric of our

justice system, our government, our culture, and the biases that we all inherit ourselves.

Of course, we know that West Africans were stolen from their land and brutalized on ships coming to

America all the way back in 1619 and would go on to build much of America with their bare hands

under the abusive eyes of slaveholders. But slaveholders told a story of happy and contented workers who were of

a lower animal order put on earth by God to serve the white elite. Southern newspapers painted

slaves as monsters and even witches who mixed chicken blood with the dirt of graves and drank a toast

...