Guest Episode: Past Present with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela **TW racist violence**

**TW racist violence**

During the month of August, the Burn It All Down crew is taking a break from regular weekly Tuesday episodes. In their place, you will hear an episode of a podcast hosted by a guest of Burn It All Down.

This week's episode is from the podcast Past Present co-hosted by historians Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer, and Neil Young. They discuss the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, it being called a modern-day lynching, racialized policing, oppression of Black Americans by the state, and the sport/the act of running itself.

For more about the Past Present podcast: http://www.pastpresentpodcast.com

To support them on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pastpresentpodcast

Follow Natalia on Twitter at twitter.com/nataliapetrzela, Nicole at twitter.com/pastpunditry, and Neil at twitter.com/NeilJYoung17.

For their new podcast, Welcome To Your Fantasy: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/welcome-to-your-fantasy/id1517709981?i=1000478993399

Links

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:

In our regular closing feature, What’s Making History:

Transcript

Jessica: During this month, August 2020, the Burn It All Down crew is taking some time off to rest and retool the show. In place of our regular weekly Tuesday episodes, we are bringing you episodes from podcasts hosted by guests of Burn It All Down. We hope you enjoy, and we’ll be back soon. As always, burn on, not out.

Brenda: Hi flamethrowers, Brenda here. This week we’re gonna feature an episode from the Past Present podcast, tagged as, “A podcast where three historians turn hindsight into foresight.” It is hosted by three historians, as they say: Nicole Hemmer, Neil J Young, and Natalia Mehlman-Petrzela, who has been a guest on the show in the past. In this episode the team takes on – this was back in May – the death of Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging…The murder, actually. In it they delve into everything from the discourse about the murder being a modern-day lynching and what that feels like, what that sounds like to a group of historians who work on lynchings. They get into the racialized policing and oppression of African Americans at the hands of the state, and also the very sport/activity/pastime that is running. We did interview Natalia for her work in the New York Times on the culture and the racism within the culture of running. She is now, I should mention, hosting a new podcast called Welcome To Your Fantasy. So, enjoy this brilliant episode; it’s really a propos that I’m introducing this one because it is a group of historians that I admire so much.

Natalia: Support Past Present by becoming a patron for as little as $1/month. Sign up now at patreon.com/pastpresentpodcast. 

Nicole: Welcome to the Past Present Podcast, where we look at American culture and politics today through the lens of history, and turn hindsight into foresight. It’s May 8th, 2020. On today’s show: Ahmaud Arbery, a 25 year old Black man from Georgia, was shot and killed by two white men while out for a job. Why did it take more than 2 months and a mass national protest for police to arrest his killers? In New York City, I’m Nicole Hemmer, an associate research scholar at Columbia University and author of Messengers of the Right. Also here in New York, Natalia Mehlman-Petrzela. Natalia, tell us what you do.

Natalia: I’m associate professor of history at The New School, and working on a book about American fitness culture.

Nicole: And down in Winter Park, Florida, Neil Young. Neil, what do you do?

Neil: I’m a contributing writer for The Week and author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics.

Nicole: And Natalia, where can’t our listeners find you in the coming weeks?

Natalia: Well, sadly, after about a month and a half we had a great run of Thursday intenSati Live, but I have a major stress fracture in my femur so I’m taking advantage of lockdown to heal it. I will not be teaching, but if you love intenSati even more than you love me, other teachers are teaching all week, same time, including in my time slot. A great woman is taking over named Liv Behre, so you can still go to that same channel. But I’ll catch you on the flip side, hopefully fully recovered.

Neil: Get better.

Nicole: Yes, we’re all sending you healing vibes.

Natalia: Thank you.

Nicole: Alright, let’s head right into our topic. Ahmaud Arbery, a former high school football star, went for a run on February 23rd. It was something he did often, but this time his run was noted by several white people in the neighborhood in which he was running. A few called 911 to report a Black man in the neighborhood. Two white men, Gregory and Travis McMichael, a father and son, grabbed their guns, got in a pickup truck, chased him down and shot Arbery to death. The McMichaels said they were engaged in a “citizen’s arrest” when Arbery attacked them. The district attorney did not initially press charges. But earlier this month a video of the shooting was released showing what actually happened. Following intense national outcry, the McMichaels were arrested last night. Neil, some have called Arbery’s murder a lynching. Is that the right framework here?

Neil: Yes and no. I understand why that’s the framework that people reach for when we have these incidents of vigilante anti-Black violence. It’s understandable that that’s the kind of framework or the discourse that people call upon to talk about it. But I do worry about…I have a sort of cautiousness about what it means to employ that language of a modern-day lynching. I mean, two big kind of concerns come up for me: one is that I don’t think that framework really speaks to or really accounts for the ongoing continuity of vigilante anti-Black violence. I think in some ways it almost treats lynching as this thing that happened in a discreet moment in time, and then leap forward a bunch of decades and we have these isolated events. It doesn’t speak to the ongoing problem of this. I also just think that in some ways it doesn’t account for the types of violence that are happening now. I think we have to speak to the gun violence of this and what that means as this nation continues to struggle with the gun violence epidemic. I don’t know…I think in some ways the lynching framework keeps us from really accounting for the actual violence that’s being perpetrated now.

Natalia: Yeah, I think that that’s a really good point, and the reason that I also kind of push back a bit on the lynching analogy or terminology is similar. It’s that by using what is widely thought of to be a 19th century term it makes it seem like, “Oh my god, this strange and horrific throwback to the Jim Crow south,” or something. Whereas there are definite similarities of the violent murder of an undeserving Black man, but still, exactly as you say Neil, this is about police brutality. This is about safe streets. This is about jogging culture. This is about toxic masculinity. This is about so many things that are not strange throwbacks from the past but about right now, and I think that lynching doesn’t do justice to all of that.

Nicole: So, I agree with a lot of what both of you are saying, but I actually think that that is the case for calling this lynching, because lynching in the 19th and 20th centuries when it was most concentrated around Black Americans, primarily but not exclusively in the south – we think of it as death with a noose, but it actually encapsulated many more types of murder, including people being shot, this kind of extralegal vigilante violence. I think you’re absolutely right, Neil, I think there’s an unbroken line from what we think of as the era of lynching through to today of exactly that type of violence. Lynching I think as a term actually helps connect that late 19th/early 20th century violence to the murder of soldiers coming back from World War II or the killing of Emmett Till or the murders during the major parts of the civil rights movement and through to today. I think that the most important thing is that those are connected and understood as something that has not been relegated to the past but continues pretty thoroughly through this day.

Natalia: Yes, but I think most people who read that headline or that tweet of the lynching most likely don’t have as nuanced an understanding of the historical continuities of what lynching is, and that’s why I think it can do a disservice in being catchphrased to describe something that , yeah, substantively I think you’re totally right about, Nikki.

Nicole: This is something that I often argued when people wanted to throw out the term alt-right and just say “white nationalist” – I actually think that not only should we use the term, but we actually have an affirmative obligation as historians and journalists to explain exactly what that term means, that it’s about continuing to keep a word that has a lot of power and is an accurate description, and then letting people know what it actually means. But I also understand that in a Twitter-based economy of knowledge that is not always the most useful way to approach things. Natalia, you’ve surfaced a lot of different things that are going on in the Arbery case. Pick the one that you most wanna talk about and we’ll start there.

Natalia: Well, I don’t think it’s the most important one, but because it’s kind of my beat I would be remiss not to bring up the kind of running culture aspect of this, and the fact that something that I have often thought about in writing this book about fitness culture and kind of existing as an amateur runner in the world is this big disconnect between often universalist, almost judgey language of “Everybody can go running! Why don’t you just get up and go for a run?” – the disconnect between that language and which bodies have sort of access to the public space to do so safely.

I know I’ve talked on this podcast before in particular about street harassment, but something that comes up almost as much throughout history is the sometimes fatal mistake of running while Black, that a Black man in particular running through the streets is read by a public who often thinks of runners as white and of Black people running as being criminals, as a signal, like in this case, 2020, got Arbery killed. That kind of thing has happened before, and I think that’s really important to remember. There’s a kind of grassroots activism going on on social media right now of runners running 2.23 miles with Maud, which was his nickname, and also calling on Runner’s World to speak out about this and to kind of push back and take a stand against white supremacy in running culture.

Nicole: Yeah, I think there’s been a real tendency in the history of popular jogging – which, correct me if I’m wrong, is sort of happening in the 1970s and 1980s – a democratizing language around it, like, this is something that’s accessible to just about anyone. All you need are a pair of sneakers and you can go out and you can jog and be healthy. I think that this gets at exactly the limits or the blind spots in that language around jogging. I’m certainly not the first to tie these two things together, in the same way that the hoodie became a very rich symbol during the time of Trayvon Martin because it was this piece of clothing that when white people wear it it’s just a hoodie, and when Black people wear it it's a sign of being a hoodlum or being in a gang or being up to something shady, and that way of taking things that are treated sort of universally through the white lens and showing the inherent racism in how they’re viewed is really fascinating.

Natalia: Yeah, just maybe one last piece on this running thing and race. In much of the coverage of jogging culture throughout the 80s, particularly of course in the case of the Central Park jogger, race is all over that. But it's usually a white jogger who is under threat of being accosted by a Black man. You see that even tossed aside in articles about other things – “the jogger who has to dodge homeless men on Skid Row.” So I think that racist history of jogging is something that plays into this case that we see today.

Neil: A lot of that was directed at white women joggers, right?

Natalia: Yeah, totally.

Neil: The story I was thinking about, them as running through the world and the precautions they had to take or that they were being told that they ought to think about. I think what has been really upsetting to watch play out in the last week or so is all the African American joggers who have come forward and talked about, on Twitter especially, all the precautions that they take every single time they exercise, like the time of day they run. Arbery was jogging on a Sunday afternoon, you know, we should note. But lots of people are saying they think about the time of day they run, they think about the neighborhoods they run through, they think about what they wear when they're running. One woman said she always puts on her Harvard sweatshirt because that's the sort of armor of protection, or it sends a sort of message about who she is and what’s she’s doing.

All these sort of thoughts, it really just strikes me when you’re saying, Natalia, about the history of running. The public message behind it was, as you said, you just need a pair of shoes and to go outside, and that’s not the case at all as we’re hearing from so many African American runners. I think that conversation has been extended in the last couple of days to basically every realm of public life. When we look back at the long list of African Americans who have been killed in the last couple of years, and people saying, okay, it’s for carrying a cellphone, it’s for trying to buy cigarettes, it’s from crossing a street, from walking through a public park – that there’s no realm of public space, there’s no aspect of public living in which anti-Black violence doesn't happen. “This is all the work that I have to do to exist in the world, and it’s exhausting.” 

Natalia: Yeah, there’s a great article that we’ll link to by sociologist Rashawn Ray who has studied this in a very systematic way, the way that Black men kind of have to self-present when going out in the street. He writes specifically about in the case of running…I think you’re right, Neil; I too am so happy that this is being amplified, because there has been…Whenever I talk about this in sort of academic or niche settings, even there there’s often a kind of, “Oh, really? I hadn’t thought about that” – certainly in dominant, mainstream, commercialized writing culture. There was a moment a few years ago after Ferguson happened where I had a small piece of citizen activism around this, where in the window of Equinox there was a t-shirt, an expensive t-shirt, that says, ‘Run like you stole something’ and I was like, are you kidding me? Who in the world would have the kind of hubris or tone-deafness to wear something like that? They ended up taking it down, but I say that just to emphasize how tone-deaf you can be to put that in a window, right? And sell it.

Nicole: And we should say, Jelani Cobb on Twitter – and I hope he’s working on a piece for the New Yorker about this – has been tweeting about his own experiences as a runner and why he doesn’t run at night, and really digging in to some of the nuances of this issue. The other thing that I have been thinking a lot about, and this also ties back to Trayvon Martin, is this kind of long history of vigilantism and the ways in which it is celebrated and codified. You certainly have the history of vigilantism in the 19th century, particularly in the American west which is presented as this very American kind of thing that when you’re outside of the long arm of the law that people have to take justice into their own hands.

This is often against Indigenous people, but that sort of celebrated history gets, in the 20th century, turned into things like neighborhood watch – which came up in the Trayvon Martin case because George Zimmerman saw himself as somebody who was “protecting the neighborhood” and that idea of protecting the neighborhood and all the many ways that that idea gets reworked has been one of the justifications used for anti-Black violence. I think it’s particularly important in this case because George McMichael had been a law enforcement officer and was protected by the police in this town until this became a national story, and many members of the district attorney’s office had to step aside because they had longstanding relations with him. That kind of white power structure that is in particular embedded in law enforcement is a really important part of the story.

Neil: Yes. I think what’s also really telling in a series of district attorneys recusing themselves of the case in this Georgia town is that they didn’t merely recuse themselves from the case, they put out public statements essentially exonerating him based on their reading of stand-your-ground law, and I think we have to bring that into this conversation about vigilantism because you’re right in thinking about how an American white power legal system has codified elements of vigilantism through several centuries, and yet I think that has almost turbo-charged that tradition through these recent stand-your-ground laws that are in particular states. Here in Florida, Trayvon Martin was shot down not very far from where I sit right here in central Florida, and also in Georgia where Arbery was killed. So the stand-your-ground law is striking to me, if you think about the American legal tradition as…I mean, I think the criminal justice system has predicated itself, if it hasn’t often acted this way, and certainly has made arguments about legal systems are in place to reduce violence and to be a sort of drag on people’s violent impulses. The stand-your-ground law does the opposite, it puts violence into the hands of citizens and basically trusts them to do as they will and then provides them with what we see as an almost unending clause for that violence – if it’s perpetrated by white men, usually.  

Natalia: Yeah, I think that’s so interesting, the kind of facilitation of violence that stand-your-ground laws allow. Also, I think if you look at the kind of Anglo-American history of these laws and the fact that precisely the opposite type of sensibility used to prevail, that the law dictated you had to retreat, essentially unless you were in your own home and then you then could act in self-defense. You couldn’t act in self-defense and have that be defensible. Then as you had the kind of rise of individual rights and to protect yourself as being a kind of higher value than protecting human life more broadly, you get the kind of intellectual foundation of I think this kind of twisted individualism. 

Nicole: The ability to flip or blur the lines between defender and aggressor has been such an important part of how this sort of wiggle room for white people shooting Black people has worked. This is true not only of these cases of vigilantism but also with police themselves, that the police who have a right to violence from the state, who are heavily armed, who are heavily protected, can say they are in fear of their lives and that then gives them the right, basically, to shoot whoever they want. I mean, I think that that idea that there’s a reasonable fear inherent in any sort of interaction with a Black person is a real problem, but it’s the basis for a lot of these acquittals.

Natalia: Yeah, and lest I have sounded too universalist myself in talking about individual rights, I think it’s important as you push back, Nikki, on saying yeah, who has a right to these self-defense laws in terms of them creating an opportunity or a loophole where white people can retaliate sometimes fatally against Black people. I also can’t help but think about domestic violence situations where you have those women who go to jail for murdering their husband, even though they’ve beaten them within an inch of their lives for their entire life, right? So it really is a kind of sleight of hand to say this is about self-defense or sort of individual liberties writ large – it’s a pretty narrow swathe of who is seen as credible for acting in self-defense and being legally defended when they do so.

Neil: You know, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is this tragedy actually happened near the end of February, so I think before we were really in our pandemic moment. Yet obviously the attention has been drawn in recent weeks, and I’ve just been thinking about how there’s this narrative out there that I think has gained a lot of traction which is in this moment of lockdown and pandemic there’s these silver linings, like the earth is able to restore itself because there’s not as much pollution, school shootings are down because no one’s at school. There has been this break, this disruption in kind of the worst elements of human existence. I’m just hearing that conversation a lot, and yet here we have an example where actually we know that through the pandemic the data shows us that police shootings of unarmed Black individuals has not abated, that it’s remained fairly consistent. So I think it’s important for us to think about, you know, we’ve been talking about historical continuities, about this conversation, and it seems really important to think about the continuity of this own moment and what is being disrupted and what hasn’t been.

Nicole: I think that’s uniquely important because there has been a conversation about the way that the pandemic has really affected Black people and people of color much more than it has white people, just in terms of health outcomes – the people who are dying vs the people who aren’t dying. Then you have alongside that a conversation here in New York City about the fact that it’s Black people who are being stopped for social distancing violations, it’s Black people who are being told to put masks on, that there’s much more police interaction with people of color than there is with white people. Those disparities…That Black-owned businesses are much more likely not to get PPP loans. One of the things that has been so striking is that there is, again, this optimistic narrative that nothing matters anymore, we’re all in this together. You look at it and you’re like, actually this has done a really good job of exposing how structural racism is structural, right? Everything else has been overturned, and yet here the structures of racism are continuing to assert themselves, and perhaps even assert themselves more strongly in this moment of crisis.

Natalia: Yes, see also: last week’s episode on meatpacking and Latino workers, right? Yeah, every time I see #InItTogether hashtags I’m like, nice idea, but are you serious about yourself right now? Because I think if anything we’ve just highlighted disparities that continue to persist, and this whole idea of a pause…Pausing is a real privilege, right? Not to have to go to work, feeling like you can take a break from real life, I mean, yeah. I co-sign that sentiment. 

Nicole: Alright, well, we should leave it there. Listeners, if you have thoughts on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, come chat with us on Facebook at facebook.com/pastpresentpod or over on Twitter @pastpresentpod. Now, onto our closing segment: what’s making history. Natalia, what is making history for you this week?

Natalia: What’s making history for me this week is the announcement of J Crew declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I know…Nikki’s pouting over there! 

Nicole: So sad!

Natalia: I’m sad too, though, short-term thinker, taking advantage of those sales, I suppose, if we ever have a place to wear anything again. The reason that it’s making history for me is on the one hand this is part of a broader retail meltdown – Neiman Marcus, Pier 1, Modell’s, a lot of stores, obviously, are taking a huge hit in the pandemic, particularly ones with a lot of brick and mortar locations really are feeling the squeeze. So I think we’re going to see a really changed retail environment, particularly because even if they can power through this time it's hard to imagine how brick and mortar will look anything like it did when we get back – trying on clothes, packing in in malls, etc. But J Crew I think is special among all of these, because I’m not alone based on informal Twitter research and other conversations in having – dare I say – a little bit of like a pull on my heartstrings when I found this! Because I think J Crew, to a certain kind of mall-going kid who grew up in the 1990s, really emblematized a whole kind of wannabe-preppy-fancy lifestyle that I recall feeling very strongly as someone who didn’t feel too pretty, certainly didn’t feel pretty and preppy. I remember those rugby shirts…It was the first clothing that was in my reach – sort of, I saved up for them – that felt kind of fancy and aspirational. It was funny, I had been tweeting about this and someone last night sent me a screenshot that Dawson’s Creek, which was a show of that era, the whole cast was outfitted by J Crew!

Neil: Huh!

Natalia: Yeah, it really was kind of part of that moment. Now, I say all of this, and some of our listeners who hopefully have a broader life experience than myself are maybe rolling their eyes. It reminds me about, yeah, this fragmentation of our consumer and emotional experiences. It reminds me of Kate Spade, when there was this total outpouring of emotion when – different circumstance – Kate Spade, the designer, committed suicide. But a lot of people were like, “Ugh, fancy handbags? What a privilege to be kind of broken up about that.” But I think it does kind of speak to a particular segment of aspirational mall fashion in America that was certainly part of my experience. So I hope J Crew gets bailed out – I bet you it probably will in some other form, but until then, hit those sales, people!

Nicole: Huh! I did in fact hit those sales, and I also have that same strong memory with J Crew of it being aspirational and one of those things that I felt like I had achieved something in being able to go there and buy clothes even though they were probably still outside of my price range. But I’m also struck by…You may remember in 2009 or 2010, Michelle Obama went on a talk show and she wore J Crew and the whole point was to be like, look at her in accessible fashion. I was like, accessible fashion!? We are coming at this from two very different pocketbooks. 

Neil: Yeah, it’s still like an $80 cardigan, right? That’s not accessible to a lot of people.

Natalia: Yeah.

Neil: I appreciate your very specific caveat of the particular segment that this represents, because in some ways I think we might be saying more about ourselves than we’re saying about J Crew, or maybe that’s one and the same. It’s funny, I think I probably started wearing J Crew in college but I really associate it with my first professional life of moving to the city and buying that young professional look from them, like the pants and the button-up, but also the weekend clothes. I just really associate it with the kind of first years of living in New York and being able to buy them, especially when they were on sale, on markdown. They were like you said just within reach, but they also represented a sort of early adult moment of my life of stepping into a different…Not a different aesthetic, it wasn’t all that different from what I grew up wearing all along, I’ve kind of conformed to a pretty preppy uniform throughout my life, it just has varied where I’ve gotten it from.

But when it comes to the buying thing I made the mistake of clicking on J Crew that first week of lockdown and putting a couple things in my basket because everything was marked down so much, I just thought it would be really nice to buy all these clothes and feel good about something for a moment, then realizing maybe now is not the time for me to acquire new clothing when I’ve been wearing the same outfit for the last four days. [laughter] But because of the wonders of the internet now I’m getting like eight emails a day from them because I think once you open up that shopping cart it triggers an algorithm that makes them reach out to you time and time again. So all of this is to say there’s clearly lots of deals to be had, so maybe that's the takeaway.

Natalia: I think we need a sponsorship while they still have ad dollars to give. [laughing]

Nicole: That's right.

Neil: Just bottom out that advertising budget now.

Nicole: Neil, what’s making history for you this week?

Neil: I’m gonna return to the content endorsing game, or at least the content sharing game – I’m not sure this is an endorsement, but I’ve just started a new Netflix series called Hollywood. This is the latest from Ryan Murphy, it’s a 7-part series. I’m only about three episodes in. It’s set in post-World War II/late 1940s Hollywood and it’s a historical look in the sense that a lot of the characters are real-life figures including Rock Hudson and George Cukor and Anna May Wong, and also obviously a cast of fictional characters to round out this world. It really has foregrounded the history of Hollywood in terms of sexuality and race in a way that I think is really interesting and timely. I think he’s really digging into a lot of this history that I think historians of Hollywood know but probably not the average American; those aren’t the things they think about when they think about the rise of Hollywood and the birth of this industry. A lot of it is about closeted gay figures who made and built Hollywood and the struggles they had over their sexuality, and also similarly nonwhite actors and workers in the movie industry and what it meant to not be white in these years. I think that’s been really interesting to watch in the handful of episodes I’ve seen.

I did a little bit of reading just to see what the kind of thinkpieces on this series were, hoping I wasn’t spoiling the rest of the show for myself. I was disappointed to learn the response has been quite critical, because apparently it kind of starts to become more fantasy than history and there are some storylines that develop that are I guess progressive or hopeful or optimistic in a way that paint this kind of fairytale ending, I guess you could say, on this chapter in history that is actually not how these stories played out at all. I find that disappointing to know that that’s what I’m moving into in some of the later episodes, but I still kind of think it’s worth watching. But if you do watch it maybe make sure to read some of these really good thinkpieces that are talking about how this is not in the end all that historically accurate even as it taps into a lot of history.

Nicole: I mean, it’s historically accurate for the arc of any Ryan Murphy show, it feels like. [laughs]

Neil: Well, that’s true, yeah.

Natalia: I have a hard time with ‘fast and loose with historical accuracy but feels history-ish’ because as someone who like you guys consumes so much history content, so many memoirs, so many books, it’s very hard to, like…I don’t need more distraction from what’s real! To be like, “Where did I learn that? Is that real or not?” So I think I’m gonna sit that one out.

Nicole: Alright. I might dip my toes into it because I’m always looking for more content during the pandemic. 

Neil: It’s beautifully made. I mean, it’s worth it to see the sets and the costuming and all that stuff. But again, pinch your nose or at least go read a good historical takedown of it when you’re done.

Nicole: I do love a good historical takedown. Alright, what is making history for me this week is, I think, a really touching story about the Choctaw Nation and the Irish. It’s a story about how during the potato famine in Ireland the Choctaw Nation send $170 to starving Irish families – this is about $5000 in today’s money, and it came on the heels of the Trail of Tears. So at this point in time when people of the Choctaw Nation had been through an extremely traumatic event, but they had heard this story of what was happening in Ireland. We were at the very beginning of global media in which these kinds of stories were being circulated, and in hearing about the plight of the Irish people the Choctaw Nation took their resources and sent this money to Ireland. It comes back around 170 years later because recently hundreds of Irish people raised money for the Navajo Nation and the Hopi reservation, a fundraiser which has raised more than $1.8 million to help make sure that there’s clean water and food during this time of pandemic.

So trying to reach out in support re-emphasizing these historical ties that…It’s a story I didn’t know about, but that Irish people know about, right? That it's this story that is still told in Ireland and that kind of connection has persisted over more than a century, and that idea of connection of struggling people reaching out to help each other in times of crisis, it just…I don't know, it's one of those stories that as I read it was like, there are good people in the world! Humanity is maybe not going to be okay, but parts of it are going to be okay. That sort of show of solidarity and reference back to history was really moving. There's a really great piece about it in the New York Times if you wanna check it out. It’s called Irish Return an Old Favor, Helping Native Americans Battling the Virus. 

Neil: That is fascinating, I mean, that is very heartwarming to hear. I’m struck that this is a story that Americans don’t know and it's interesting to think about American history being known in other countries or the sorts of histories that other countries might know of each other and what that says.

Natalia: Yeah, totally. It’s so weird, I feel like we’re in this moment of a lot of Irish culture making it into media. I just started watching Normal People the other day and before that I started listening to West Cork. I mean, we might be in a kind of Irish golden age. I really like Kerry Gold butter. [laughter]

Nicole: I wanna return to what Neil said about American, right? That these are stories that are known within the Choctaw Nation, but aren’t the stories that are told in…A history textbook is going to give a couple of paragraphs to the trail of tears, but it’s not going to give this history, so it was really lovely to see this story surface. It was…I dunno, I keep saying lovely, but I feel so heartwarmed.

Natalia: More happy news! This is what we should focus on. That’s our new podcast.

Nicole: I think John Krasinski might get mad at us for intruding on his beat.

Natalia: True, true.

Nicole: Well, that’ll do it for this episode of Past Present. Thank you, Natalia.

Natalia: Thank you.

Nicole: Thank you, Neil.

Neil: Thank you.

Natalia: You can help us out by heading right over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a rating, which helps other people find us. When you subscribe, new episodes of Past Present will download right to your listening devices every Tuesday. You can also become a patron of Past Present on Patreon at patreon.com/pastpresentpodcast. Head on over to pastpresentpodcast.com to find show notes and sign up for our newsletter. Share all your favorite historical photos on Instagram with us by tagging @pastpresentpod, and come continue the conversation at facebook.com/pastpresentpod. Be sure to follow the show on Twitter also @pastpresentpod. You can tweet at us individually. Neil is @neiljyoung17, Natalia is @nataliapetrzela and you can follow me @pastpunditry. And with that, this show is history. See you next week.

Shelby Weldon