"The Atlantic's" latest late-breaking Emmett Till news is from 1544
Seriously.
From the October 2024 issue of The Atlantic:
To Understand Mississippi, I Went to Spain
The forces that would shape my home state’s violent history were set in motion by a 480-year-old map made by a Spanish explorer.
By Wright Thompson
September 17, 2024, 7 AM ET
The city of Seville awoke early, the old streets alive with singing birds and distant bells. The cobblestone alleys smelled faintly of hidden gardens. I’d flown here for a chance to hold a 480-year-old map in my hand. …
I’d come researching my new book, The Barn, a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955.
The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine, sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow. It’s borne witness to the creation of the blues at Dockery Plantation; to the erasure of a Native American community; and, of course, to the death of Till. With so much violent history in such proximity, this project almost inevitably became a mapping. That led me on a hunt for the very first map of this land, which was likely drawn in 1544 by a Spanish cartographer named Alonso de Santa Cruz.
Take that, 1619 Project! I’ve beaten you by 75 years!
Of course, before 1544, Mississippi didn’t have any violent history. (It just had violent pre-history, but that doesn’t count.)
Seriously, this is yet another amusing example of the antiquarianism of contemporary progressivism. The further we get into our current era when progressive nostrums dominate all thought about race, the more we have to obsess over the increasingly distant past. Not just Emmett Till’s death in 1955, but how 1544 caused 1955.
As for race in the 2020s, well, who can remember that far back?
Here’s a graph I made from CDC cause-of-death data.
There’s nothing special about the trends in Mississippi of more blacks dying violently during the Great Awokening. All over the country, as BLM rose in influence and cops pulled back in response, blacks started dying more in Deaths of Depolicing (car crashes and shootings) after Ferguson in later 2014, with an explosion in the weeks following George Floyd in 2020.
But when is The Atlantic going to get around to mentioning that?
But when would The Atlantic have time to tell us that the once-celebrated “racial reckoning” promoted by the triumphant Black Lives Matter movement got a whole lot of incremental black lives murdered and splattered on the pavement, not when somebody has figured out a way to blame Emmett Till’s demise on white people an extra 75 years earlier?
Have any of the Ivy League universities yet opened a Department of Emmett Till Studies? Perhaps it could replace journalism as a major, as actual journalism is no longer in demand, while writing about Emmett Till would guarantee long-term employment.
White liberals have such an intense, bizarre and bottomless fetish for black pain and suffering the only thing I can think to compare it to is how Christian peasants used to line up to touch a sliver of the "real Cross" or to see the Virgin's face in a water stain. And I guess the purpose is the same: to feel righteous and holy, to feel the warm embrace of the saints and angels, to know that God is on your side and that you'll be in Heaven one day savoring thoughts of your wicked neighbors burning in Hell (with their Heaven being "the right side of History"). I think this is also why they can no longer discuss even the weather without breaking out with Racist!—it is absolutely fundamental to their self-image and as necessary as leaving the house with pants on for them to be seen and known as The People Who Love Blacks. They are like Ned Flanders when he sees a cross except with them it's anything resembling a noose, from a rope in a garage to one being used for pull-ups.
Mrs Steve Jobs should team up with the Super Friends of Antiracrism—Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah-Jones, Roxane Gay—and start selling strands of Emmit Till's noose and George Floyd's socks and underwear: What do you get for the rich white liberal who has everything?