Author: Tammy Dinh

Before registering for this class, I did not know what the Civil Rights Movement was. My initial choice for the History 201 class was the Holocaust, but for some reason that course was taken off. There were three other options: History of the News, Body in Chinese Traditions, and American Conservatism, but I ended up with this one for one main reason: it was unfamiliar.

I first learned about the Civil Rights Movement through my SAT writing crash course, where we covered potential examples for the essay. The course was taught by an American professor. Guess who we covered? Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. I think that that is the most any typical Vietnamese student would know about the Black Freedom Movement. I was by no means a well-versed person, but compared to my Vietnamese friends, I would say that I did take a particular interest in history and global affairs. I had also been learning English ever since I was 6 and was quite exposed to American popular culture (since I was going to study abroad here anyway). Therefore, I think it is fair to say that my knowledge of the CRM was quite representative of, or even broader than other Vietnamese of my age and background. Yes, that is how ignorant we are. And any exposure to this subject in Vietnam, I suspect, would be through the traditional framework of the classical phase. I readUncle Tom’s Cabin back when I was in middle school, and watched 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, and Lincolnin high school. They were all set during the 19^th century period, and even today, I still cannot name one popular movie of the CRM period.

So what is the problem? When I started writing this, I had to actually call my mom and had her go through my old history textbooks to see how Vietnam’s education covers America of the period. There were two lessons on the United States post 1945. One line of the text was dedicated to the CRM. This really puzzled me. Could it be because we are Communist? Possibly. But we know that there was some intersection between communism and the Civil Rights Movement, and along with the CRM, the Vietnam War was another highlight in the 1960s period of American history. Why wasn’t there more on the topic?

I talked to a fellow Vietnamese Wooster friend about what she knew about the CRM. She said Nelson Mandela. I was not surprised. In one of our English textbooks, there was a reading on Nelson Mandela and his anti-apartheid activism in South Africa. Of course, he was not American, nor was he in any way related to the CRM. But we learned a lot about him, and that was all we knew, and what many of us still associated with the CRM.

In Vietnam, there is only one centralized education system. Textbooks are written by the Ministry of Education, and all public schools follow the same framework for all the subjects. What we learn (or not) has been carefully selected (and censored) by the government. The popular representation of the Black Freedom Movement, or rather my perception of it, deals largely with the earlier period of the 19^thcentury rather than the 1950s and 1960s movement. Before this class, I essentially knew nothing. I still know nothing now, but that is what I love about doing History here in the States. It takes you a course like this for you to finally know that you can actually be that ignorant.

I recently read an article about structural segregation in the healthcare system and its effects on black expecting mothers. According to the article, “black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — 11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies”. The mortality rate among black infants is higher today than in the 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery. This says a lot about how structural segregation impacts the living conditions of African Americans, especially when it comes to the matter of life and death.

Further investigation shows that this is not a class problem. In fact, many well-educated middle-class African American women find themselves struggling with pregnancy-related problems. Research on maternal mortality has shown that black mothers are prone to suffer from chronic stress as a result of societal and systemic racism, leading to issues such as hypertension and pre-isclampsia. However, taking a step further from the seemingly de facto personal racism, de jure practices of segregation in the healthcare system prevent black women from receiving the help they need in order to cope with problems during their pregnancy. The racial bias in healthcare is manifested in the tendency of doctors to dismiss concerns and symptoms of black mothers on the grounds that they are self-inflicted. They tend to blame the high mortality rate on the women, who are often seen as poor and uneducated. This inevitably leads to the assumption that problems with her pregnancy are because of bad habits like smoking, drinking, drug abuse, and other issues traditionally associated with being black.

This is just one of the many examples of how structural segregation still effects the lives of African Americans in an era often considered as post-segregation. The importance of acknowledging de jure segregation rather than brushing it off as personal prejudice ultimately lies on the fact that we can always do something more, rather than resting on our laurels and gloating on the perceived victory of the past.

Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis