| 7.28.20

The DC: Tom Cotton calls slavery 'necessary evil' in attack on NYT's 1619 Project, and... 🛫 Would you feel comfortable flying right now?

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Welcome to Wednesday, July 29th, pins and needles....

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) has introduced legislation to prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine initiative that aims to teach Americans about the history of slavery in the U.S.

"We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country," Cotton told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in an article published on Sunday.

"As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction."

Under Cotton’s Saving American History Act of 2020, the Secretaries of Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture would be required to pro-rate federal funding to schools that decide to teach the 1619 Project.

Last week, Cotton called the 1619 Project "a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage."

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who spearheaded the 1619 Project and won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, tweeted in response to Cotton's comments:

"If chattel slavery — heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit — were a 'necessary evil' as @TomCottonAR says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end."

Should the New York Times’ 1619 project be used in school curricula?

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On the Radar

Disabilities in America

On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) into law, which extended civil rights protections to people with disabilities and looked to prevent discrimination against the disabled in the workplace and in public spaces.

Thirty years later, the most recent census data shows that there were just over 40 million Americans with a disability in the US, or 13% of the population, not including those who are in institutions like prison, or long-term care facilities.

In 2018, 14% of white, non-Hispanic people, 14% of Black people, and 9% of Hispanic people experienced some kind of physical or mental impairment.

Among racial groups, American Indians and Alaska Natives had the highest rate of disability, with 17% of the population affected by an impairment.

Under the Radar

Travelers Slowly Returning to Airports Amid Pandemic

The air travel industry has been hit hard by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, with far fewer travelers passing through airports across the country in recent months compared to a year ago.

While data from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) shows that air travel this summer is still well behind where it was in early 2020 or last summer, travelers are gradually starting to return to the friendly skies, in part because of safety measures being taken by airports and airlines.

The COVID-19 outbreak had an immediate and significant impact on air travel, as April 2020 saw ten separate days with fewer than 100,000 passengers passing through checkpoints. This chart from USAFacts shows the 7-day average of TSA screenings from March through July: