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(Messer-Kruse told me he was working on this article.)
Chronicle of Higher Education
What the 1619 Project Really Means
Its liberal and conservative critics both miss the point.
By Timothy Messer-Kruse March 05, 2020 PREMIUM
On the 400th anniversary of the landing and sale of the first Africans
in Virginia, The New York Times published a series of essays — the "1619
Project" — by journalists and scholars on the meaning of slavery to
America. Its purpose was "to reframe the country’s history by placing
the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at
the very center of our national narrative." Oddly, this gesture toward
questioning the national hymn of progress provoked a loud protest from
both liberal and conservative academics.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine,
begins her introductory essay by approaching slavery and racism through
her own family’s stories, and then describes the much-overlooked
centrality of slavery to the economic rise of the United States.
Hannah-Jones and the other essayists frame America as a nation born in
the protection of slavery whose basic institutions are constructed on a
racist logic. "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,
as does the belief, so well-articulated by Lincoln, that black people
are the obstacle to national unity," Hannah-Jones wrote in what became
the most criticized sentence in the collection.
Five distinguished historians of early America, Sean Wilentz and James
McPherson of Princeton, Gordon Wood of Brown, Victoria Bynum of Texas
State, and James Oakes of the City University of New York Graduate
Center, responded by penning a protest letter to The New York Times.
Although, they said, they applauded the 1619 Project’s goal of
foregrounding the history of slavery and racism in American history,
they took issue with what they alleged were "factual errors" and with an
interpretation they claimed was a "displacement of historical
understanding by ideology."
While the 1619 Project ranged across a large swath of the American
experience, including redlining, mass incarceration, the history of
racist medicine, the white appropriation of black music, and the
emergence of historically black colleges, the five historians’ letter
focused obsessively on the project’s reinterpretations of the American
Revolution and the abolitionist movement. With a certainty rarely found
among historians, they write: "The project asserts that the founders
declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure
slavery would continue.’ This is not true … every statement offered by
the project to validate it is false." Additionally, they call the 1619
Project’s assertion that African Americans have largely had to struggle
for their rights by themselves a "distortion." The signatories to the
letter demanded the "removal of these mistakes from any materials
destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications."
It just so happens that the objections center on the exclusion of white
activists.
In point of fact, beyond the initial misspelling of the patriot Samuel
Bryan’s name and the incorrect statement that the Declaration of
Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 (it was only approved as a final
draft that day) — errors that the Times quickly corrected — all the
complaints made by this gang of historians were not really about errors
of fact but about matters of interpretation. As Alex Lichtenstein,
editor of the American Historical Review, noted, most of what these
critics called factual errors were "more a matter of emphasis" than
"correct or incorrect interpretation."
Underneath the complaints about historical inaccuracies and
exaggerations lies a deeper concern about the meaning of the American
story. Wilentz, for instance, is so invested in understanding the birth
of America as the progressive unfolding of Enlightenment ideals that he
has proposed that the slave-owning authors of the Constitution
consciously laid the groundwork for later abolitionism by excluding from
the great charter the phrase "property in slaves" that would have
precluded emancipation. Others seem to fear the crumbling of the clay
feet of heroes such as Abraham Lincoln in an era when few agree on which
national idols to celebrate.
All five of the signatories to the letter criticizing the 1619 Project
are of the generation of scholars that rewrote history "from the ground
up." They were influenced by the social history that turned away from
the stories of great white men and master narratives of culture.
Post-civil-rights-era researchers pushed open the doors of history and
ushered many marginalized groups in. But in an odd way, their putative
universalism resists the project of retelling the national story around
the African American experience.
From their perspective, the 1619 Project, by claiming the centrality
and ubiquity of antiblack racism in the national story, silences other
groups’ struggles. As Wilentz put it, "The fight for black freedom is a
universal fight; it’s a fight for everyone. In the end, it affected the
fight for women’s rights — everything. That’s the glory of it … To
minimize that in any way is, I think, bad for understanding the radical
tradition in America." A few weeks after the 1619 Project was published,
Hannah-Jones mentioned that among her earliest critics were those
complaining that she "was centering black people and not spending time
on Native and Indigenous people."
Wilentz’s clutch of historians seem most upset that the efforts of
anti-racist whites, like Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, or John
Brown, are overlooked and the racially progressive aspects of
complicated white leaders like Abraham Lincoln are downplayed. Oakes
criticizes the "political culture right now," which overlooks the role
of white progressives by "erasing the American Revolution." Wood also
complains that efforts to remap America’s origins, like the 1619
Project, erase the role of white liberals. "How could slavery be worth
preserving for someone like John Adams, who hated slavery and owned no
slaves? … Ignoring his and other northerners’ roles in the decision for
independence can only undermine the credibility of your project with the
general public." Bynum likewise objects to what she calls the 1619
Project’s "seemingly willful determination to omit virtually all
interracial relationships and cooperative efforts to end slavery, combat
racism, or work across racial lines."
These are not points bearing on the course of history, because most of
these scholars admit that the "small minority" of abolitionists who
looked past color were outliers, unrepresentative of the great current
of racist culture in the U.S., which was the focus of the 1619 Project.
Absent a claim that not including this handful of characters somehow
distorts the story of that mainstream culture, their complaint is
actually one of fairness, or perhaps of a failure to properly venerate
the new patriotic heroes they helped to discover buried in the working
class. It just so happens that all their objections center on the
exclusion of white activists and leaders from the national narrative.
Since then, other scholars, journalists, and activists have piled on,
including a group of conservatives organized by a former American
Enterprise Institute fellow, Robert L. Woodson Sr., calling themselves
the "1776 Project." Their goal, they say, is to "challenge those who
assert America is forever defined by its past failures, such as
slavery." Toward this end, they have recruited a collection of
conservative think-tank fellows including Hoover Institution’s Shelby
Steele; celebrity pundits like Clarence Page, a columnist; John H.
McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University; Jason D. Hill, a
philosopher; and more than a few Republican Party operatives.
The 1776 Project team largely attacks the 1619 Project on the grounds,
they say, that its message disempowers people of color. They make this
argument in a dozen essays mostly given to deriding "woke" liberals who
dangerously deny the nation’s founding ideals by obsessively focusing on
slavery. Such "perpetrators of race grievance," according to Woodson
Sr., intentionally ignore the record of black entrepreneurship,
including even those "blacks who were in slavery but not of slavery —
who maintained a strong moral code and a belief in self-determination"
and were upwardly mobile. Some even "died as millionaires."
To counter the revisionists who undermine the majesty of America’s
founding, the 1776 Project essayists proclaim it their mission to
"uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values" and to
"celebrate the progress America has made on delivering its promise of
equality and opportunity." But at some point the effort to celebrate the
principles of equality and democracy expressed by a founding generation
that didn’t practice them tips over into historical fabrication. In the
course of attacking the 1619 Project for its "focus on our
victimization," Page burnishes the nation’s founders by claiming that
though they may have denied the equality they proclaimed to some, they
consciously crafted "legal mechanisms to extend those equal protections
to others" over time. In doing so Page overlooks such stark
contradictory evidence as the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott
v. Sandford, which ruled that African Americans were not, and had never
been, included within the phrase "We the people." It took three
amendments to restructure the American Constitution to include black
Americans in that ideal. Just because James Madison and the other
drafters of the Constitution included a mechanism for amending the
document (though they prohibited any amendments that might restrict the
slave trade for 20 years) does not mean they deserve credit for setting
in motion the gears that would turn history toward birthright
citizenship and equal protection of the laws.
Written before the controversy over the 1619 Project erupted, Steele’s
essay — an excerpt from his new book, Shame — is the most theoretically
sophisticated of the contributions, though it is not always aware of its
own intellectual debts. Steele attacks those writers proclaiming "a
belief in the characterological evil of America and the entire white
Western world." He lumps together Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism,
Léopold Senghor’s Négritude, Islamic extremism, and Second-Wave Feminism
as instances of a type of political identity that "collectivizes people
… herds them into victim-focused identities and consoles them with a
vague myth of their own human superiority." Such formations, Steele
says, not only survive the overcoming of historical evils, they are fed
by the dominant society’s recognition, which reifies them into an
axiomatic "poetic truth" for "the Park Avenue feminist, the black
affirmative-action baby from a well-heeled background, and white
liberals generally." Ironically, Steele’s formulation is actually a
twisted analog of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the "psychological wage,"
the feeling of higher social status that compensated poor whites for
their racism when it had no direct economic benefits for them.
In the hands of most of the 1776 Project’s contributors, an obsession
with repudiating the centrality of American racism leads their arguments
back into the shadow of Western chauvinism. Steele, for instance,
recounts a trip through Africa in which he preferred the capital of
Senegal to the capital of Ghana: "It wasn’t ‘negritude’ that made Dakar
a little more bearable than Accra. There were still some French there,
and it was their fast-fading idea of Dakar as an African Paris that
meant better food and the hint of café society."
While appearing on its face as a flap over historical facts and the
meaning of a few key events, at the heart of this controversy is a clash
of fundamental understandings of what New Left historians used to call
the "Usable Past." For the first time, the 1619 Project pushed into
public view a theory that holds that the architecture of America is
built of antiblack racism and that America’s evolution was propelled by
African American struggles for liberation. To many conservatives whose
patriotism is not resilient enough to withstand morally compromised
founders, such a history is anathema. But it is also unusable to some
scholarly progressives who pushed to expand the historical canon beyond
great white men, and for whom this seems like a step away from a
national story rooted more in class than in race.
Many specialists studying the construction of race and the role of
racism in the making of America would agree that all of these protests,
whether from conservatives or liberals, are an overreaction to
interpretive innovations long established and broadly held. The
retrieval of racism from the margins and footnotes of history, which is
the spine connecting past and present in many of our curricula and
syllabi, took place long before the 1619 Project debuted.
What the essayists of the 1619 Project pulled together was a brilliantly
accessible summation of interpretive trends building within history and
ethnic studies for decades — and maybe even longer, if Du Bois’s
observation about "the true significance of slavery in the United States
to the whole social development of America" is credited as its authentic
origin.
Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the School of Cultural and
Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University.
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