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Slouch: Posture panic in modern America
A recent history of the 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.
Dr. Algernon Jackson, a Black physician who worked with Booker T. Washington to establish the National Negro Health Movement, once said that young African Americans “too often slump along stoop-shouldered and walk with a careless, lazy sort of dragging gait.” The parallels to contemporary respectability politics are obvious: New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s “ Stop the sag! Approximately $1.25 billion is spent annually worldwide on these devices and on exercise classes from barre to Pilates to the Alexander technique, private lessons where an instructor observes a student walk and sit while making manual adjustments to aid in posture improvement and muscle relaxation. Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation —to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.
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