The 1619 Project
The Controversy
A week ago in writing the piece about A Better Country I mentioned the 1619 Project and that I’d get back to it the next day. Then Judge Alito, his wife, and his (or her?) flags happened and I got sidetracked. Perhaps you followed the NYT’s The 1619 Project when it was published in August, 2019. 1619 was the year that Africans were brought to the American British Colonies beginning a 246 year period of enslavement and a 400 year period of racial strife and inequity. The project links the era and practices of slavery to certain aspects of the society that we live in today. It’s definitely a different, deeper take on the residual, systemic after-effects of enslavement than anything I’d ever read before. Eventually the Times created a curriculum from it and offered it free of charge to schools.
I found the project and the information to be fascinating. I think I’m drawn to the side of history that we tend not to celebrate. Or teach. Probably because it’s usually more interesting than the stuff we gloss over or ignore. But I was drawn to this series for some unacknowledged something that I didn’t even realize was rolling around in my head.
The series created a lot of buzz, not all of it positive. Trump was outraged as were many in the far-right MAGA camp at this “outrageous downplaying” of the sole greatness of White Americans and the audacity to suggest that Black Americans and slavery played a prominent role in the development of this country as well, and that the legacy of slavery continues to negatively affect America. Trump quickly signed an Executive Order establishing the 1776 Commission to develop a counter-narrative that would promote “A more patriotic understanding of American history.” He then promised to withhold federal funding from any school that taught from the 1619 curriculum.
In short order at least 36 states have banned or attempted to ban education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics. As of early 2023, only seven states have not sought to create any ban whatsoever: only California, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Vermont.
But it wasn’t just the MAGA crowd that objected to this new twist on “settled” American history. When a group of five prominent historians wrote a letter to the NYT editor challenging the veracity of some of the information and claiming that the Times had skewed or replaced history with ideology, the NYT Editor-in-chief wrote a very public and very astonishing a response. He held his ground. I thought that the letter and the rebuttal both held water. And even if I didn’t, who am I to doubt what prominent historical scholars or the NYT Editor claim is true? Even if their truths are in conflict. But still…there was something below the surface that poked at my brain a bit, but that I couldn’t identify. It seemed like there was some unidentifiable thing that was about more than was this or that fact or was the interpretation of that fact legit and accurate.
Eventually The Atlantic got involved and wrote a piece about the letter and the controversy and bingo… the author, Adam Serwer, put his finger directly on what the controversy is likely all about. History is always written, or at least taught, from the perspective of the victors. We all learned about George Washington’s childhood integrity and cherry tree episode years before we learned that he owned humans and forced them into bondage in order to increase his net worth. The make believe story reinforced his life-long commitment to integrity and greatness. The fact of his enslavement of humans…less so.
We learned what a wonderful invention the cotton gin was in increasing cotton production and southern wealth. We didn’t learn that it directly resulted in increasing slavery from a ‘mere’ few hundred thousand tortured souls to some 6 million. If we’d learned history from the African American perspective, we’d likely have learned a different version.
Serwer’s point is that the historians – all White - who protested much of the 1619 project, weren’t so much questioning the veracity and accuracy of the history as they were protesting the assault on The Great American Story. The story that portrays the country - although not yet perfect - as being led by great, insightful, trustworthy, patriotic, White men, guiding the country in an unwavering straight line towards eventually perfecting that union. All we have to do is wait. The centuries long fight for racial justice has always been sincere, and that under their guidance, we’ll get there…someday. America’s “arc of moral universe may be long, but it always bends towards justice.” The 1619 Project interrupts that questionable narrative.
Yeah...someday. Martin Luther King was skeptical of the good intent from outwardly well-meaning people. “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the White moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Serwer’s take on the project and hence the controversy is that what the authors actually object to is portraying the history of slavery and the Civil Rights movement that it spawned not from the White victor’s position, but from the point of view of African Americans. Those are never going to align. The project’s creators and writers question the sincerity of the White effort and the optimistic bend of the moral arc that Martin Luther King mentioned.
159 years after the end of the war that assured the end of forced labor – 158 or years or so after the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments assuring all people equal rights and equal citizenship – 70 years after Brown v Board of Education assuring equal education – and 60 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act once again assuring all people equal rights and treatment – why is the country still struggling to achieve racial equality? Possibly because it’s not a national priority. That’d be my guess anyway.
It’s rewarding to me that The 1619 Project is trying to do exactly what The Civil Conversations Project is trying to do and simply change the story that America tells itself about race and history. The Times must have a pretty smart editorial staff! No doubt there are those who will always find changing the national narrative offensive.
Related essay from The Civil Conversations Project: https://waynehare.substack.com/p/a-tribute-to-school-teachers?utm_source=publication-search
Sources:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/critical-race-theory-ban-states
https://time.com/6266865/critical-race-theory-data-exclusive/
Is it true, as you say, that the right-wing advocates too often seek to paper over or bowdlerize unattractive and vile parts of American history? Absolutely. No doubt about it.
But, if we are to ever establish sufficient comity between the competing political tribes to engage in a constructive conversation together it is also important for the left-wing to acknowledge that it too often seeks the mirror-image of sanitizing race, namely, over-catastrophizing white perfidy.
Your embrace of the Hannah-Jones 1619 article in the New York Times, and your rejection of the historians critique may be a good illustration of this last counter-point.
She maintained that racism and the evil efforts to enforce slavery infected every part of the American Revolution, not the demand for democracy, and the historians argued her supporting citations failed to show that. Could I explain why I found them largely right, and why that is important to acknowledge to establish credibility with the right?
I read the historian's objections to the 1619 story, and I checked their footnotes. Nowhere do they say, suggest or imply, as you concluded, that there aren’t many dark parts of America’s past, or that George Washington did not have a sordid side in his slave holdings.
Indeed, they lead by saying the opposite, “Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s past and present, as The 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent public service.”
I understand that you might respond, “perhaps, but their real intent is to nit-pick as a back door way of discrediting Hannah-Jones’ essay.”
Yes, that sort of devious tact is often done, but the facts that I can see do not sustain that cynical view of those historians here. What they challenge is not that America has had checkered past, but Hannah-Jones top-line claim that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery [as abolitionist sentiment rose there].”
Going through the historian’s response to Hannah-Jones’ footnotes show, to my mind, that they seem to be essentially right. Even though, yes, most Southern states’ leaders were slave holders, who had no intention of freeing their slaves just because the Declaration of Independence asserted that “all Men are created equal,” the evidence Hannah-Jones cited for her leading argument that racism infected every part of the American Revolution does not hold up.
Some of her citations fall of their own weight, such as supporting her view that the American Revolution was permeated by fear of English anti-slavery sentiment if we remained as a colony of Britain based upon the first meeting in London of 12 people who formed the first anti-slave trade group, but which didn’t occur until 1787, eleven years later, and didn’t attract substantial public support in England until decades’ after that.
Another referenced an obscure English court case that received scant attention in the colonies, which hardly could be assigned responsibility for igniting a revolution. The only reference that could possibly be confused with the issue related to the British tactic, after the Revolution had already reached the boiling point, of threatening the Southern colonies to offer freedom to their slaves if they didn’t submit. But when these threats were hurled, the revolution had already effectively started. Also, the threats were only said to have infuriated one state, South Carolina, and certainly had no relationship to unfurling events in the North.
Finally, the reality on the ground was that the anti-slave sentiment in the North was not only more intense, it was 4,000 miles closer than London across the sea. If it were true that the animating force in the South had been to avoid anti-slavery pressure from England, the South would have been better put not joining with the hostile North, and remaining a colony.
Hannah-Jones other stories about Lincoln and the civil rights movement seemed similarly infirm to me.
Without dragging this comment out far too long, similar, neither was there any support for lumping the historians’ critique into the moderates view that African Americans should just be more patient, 160 years and counting after the Civil War. Neither was that in any way connected to their concerns.
I went on at some length because Hannah-Jones’ overcatastrophizing (and remember that is not in any way meant to say that discrimination is not reprehensible, but that, bad though it in fact is, there has recently been a predominant tendency to characterize it as much worse than even that).
Examples are rife through the new race vernacular. The word discrimination, as an example, has replaced by privilege to describe the wrongs done by the white population. But when I get stopped by a cop for a broken tail light, the reason I am not afraid of being shot is because the right to not be deprived of life without due process of law is written right there in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, not because I’m somehow privileged (i.e. singled out for special protections). The reason that black men too often do not enjoy that right is because they are discriminated against not because I’m privileged.
I could go on and on like this, but that would be too much for a comment. Words have been manipulated with the actual purpose of making these appear worse and to magnify guilt, possibly out of anger (understandable anger!) or possibly notoriety or political advantage.
But for your purposes, which is to encourage conversation between those two hostile tribes, coming down in support of the gambit cannot but hurt like the dickens as it signals to the right that there is no fairness here, just more left-wing bull shit ...aimed at tearing down America etc.
Further, that feeds into the whole diversity, equity and inclusion project today, with its you’re either an oppressor or someone oppressed. All the reliable research shows that it doesn’t work, but it keeps on going diverting resources away for effective efforts to overcome our divides.
There are ways to effectively address discrimination that has been proven by 75 years worth of research and that is inter-group contact theory, in which one engages with folks from the other side until we come to see each other as people.
If we want to actually see civil conversations, that is the direction I hope would receive serious consideration.