The 1619 Project—Valid Thesis or Sloppy History?
Declaration of Independence—by John Trumbull, 1819
The drafting committee presenting their work consisted of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman & Robert Livingston.
Congrats for the good staging; I doubt the flag assemblage on the wall there, but need we quibble?
The 1619 Project began as an earnestly presented NY Times Magazine article published in August of 2019, four hundred years following the first slave ship landing—bringing to North America the contamination of Europe’s ‘peculiar institution’ in their war against the Muslims of North Africa.
Spanish conquistadors had been enslaving Africans for their crusades in the New World, furthering their “Christian duty” to convert the New World by relieving it of as much gold and silver they could extract. So Ferdinand hoped to honor his late wife Izzi, and the King of England offered acreage he did not own to his favorite lords, when by any ethics Native Americans held ownership to the land. Thus was the moral state of Western Civilization in the 17th century.
Wedding portrait of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile
[ED: Where the hell was their make up artist and marketing staff?]
Carlos Lozada asks in his review of an updated edition of The 1619 Project essays:
“What is the project of this sprawling project; what are not just its principal conclusions and messages, but also its underlying methods and objectives? For a work of journalism—or history, or perhaps something in between—grounded in the specificity of a single date, there is also an elusiveness, almost a malleability pervading the effort…
“What might an assiduous reader conclude from all this? That 1619 is a thought experiment, or a metaphor, or the nation’s true origin, but definitely not its founding, yet possibly its inception, or just one origin story among many—but still the truer one? For all the controversy the project has excited, this muddle over the starting point is an argument that the 1619 Project is also having with itself.” [being kindly put.]
from the Washington Post’s The 1619 Project started as history now it’s also a political program by Carlos Lozada. [I’d provide the link except Wapo wants me to buy a second subscription.]
If it hasn’t been universally celebrated, The 1619 Project has become something of a touchstone in our war of words between left and right like a bad game of tennis.
I recall scanning a few of the original essays and being confused by their purpose, although one thing stood out: what John C. Calhoun argued as the white man’s destiny and what came after plagues us still—in Calhoun’s words, “a peculiar institution” and a particular instance of human tribalism.
Temple Grandin, the animal behaviorist, suggested early domestication of dogs enabled those tribes to witness the benefit of working cooperatively like the wolves. Though the lesson didn’t fully take. To what extent tribalism served to aid early humans in their survival, it has become a curse the world can’t shed, even to our own self destruction.
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I finished John McWhorter’s Woke Racism. It’s a mostly a quick rant, though with whole chunks of decent writing. I can’t recommend the book except as research.
He needed a better editor; what he’s getting at deserves it. McWhorter lets his hyperbole run away with him. He makes only a passing reference to The 1619 Project, but I suspect, were I to read this current edition of The 1619 Project, I’d find his parsing not totally off course.
There is no single path to truth and justice, just an arc bending in the general direction as Martin Luther King preached.
Lozado’s article provides a more sympathetic view of The 1619 Project essays, though he takes Hannah-Jones’s central claim as bullshit history—as do a number of professional historians. Preserving slavery was not, not, not the reason the colonists were fighting the British in the American Revolution, rhetorical arguments aside.
And so saying, then the nation’s founding wouldn’t have occurred in 1619 as her essay’s logic would have it? That’s a rather glaring flaw for a Pulitzer-winning essay. But then Joseph Pulitzer’s own newspapers weren’t known for balanced coverage. His most lasting contribution as a newspaperman was given the sobriquet of ‘yellow journalism.’
Lozado writes that even Hannah-Jones’s updated essays (she wrote the first and last essays in the book) dodge the question of origin.
I’ll admit it would be hard to walk back such a darling—as the writing advice goes, ‘kill your darlings’—when the blunt assertion gave her a voice she didn’t have previously, misleading lead declaration be damned. I had never heard of her, though that’s a low bar to pass. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance… as WC Fields liked to say.
I’m a centrist when it comes to the politics, but on the history I don’t accept that one should stray from facts as known to make a point, or lob a bomb as it seems she’s done. And to the NY Times Magazine editor, the following letter was sent:
“21 Dec. 2019
“Dear Mr. Silverstein,
“I have read your response to our letter concerning the 1619 Project. I have no quarrel with the idea behind the project. Demonstrating the importance of slavery in the history of our country is essential and commendable. But that necessary and worthy goal will be seriously harmed if the facts in the project turn out to be wrong and the interpretations of events are deemed to be perverse and distorted. In the long run the Project will lose its credibility, standing, and persuasiveness with the nation as a whole. I fear that it will eventually hurt the cause rather than help it. We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.
“I have spent my career studying the American Revolution and cannot accept the view 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.” I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776. If southerners were concerned about losing their slaves, why didn’t they make efforts to ally with the slaveholding planters in the British West Indies? Perhaps some southern slaveholders were alarmed by news of the Somerset decision, but we don’t have any evidence of that. Besides, that decision was not known in the colonies until the fall of 1772 and by that date the colonists were well along in their drive to independence. Remember, it all started in 1765 with the Stamp Act. The same is true of Dunmore’s proclamation of 1775. It may have tipped the scales for some hesitant Virginia planters, but by then the revolutionary movement was already well along in Virginia.
“There is no evidence in 1776 of a rising movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, as the 1619 Project erroneously asserts, nor is there any evidence the British government was eager to do so. [emphasis added] But even if either were the case, ending the Atlantic slave trade would have been welcomed by the Virginia planters, who already had more slaves than they needed. Indeed, the Virginians in the years following independence took the lead in moving to abolish the despicable international slave trade.
“How could slavery be worth preserving for someone like John Adams, who hated slavery and owned no slaves? If anyone in the Continental Congress was responsible for the Declaration of Independence, it was Adams. And much of our countrymen now know that from seeing the film of the musical “1776.” Ignoring his and other northerners’ roles in the decision for independence can only undermine the credibility of your project with the general public. Far from preserving slavery the North saw the Revolution as an opportunity to abolish the institution. The first anti-slave movements in the history of the world, supported by whites as well as blacks, took place in the northern states in the years immediately following 1776. [emphasis added]
“I could go on with many more objections, some of which I mentioned in my interview with the World Socialist Web Site. But for now this may be enough to justify some correction and modification of the project. Again, let me emphasize my wholehearted support of the goal of the project to demonstrate accurately and truthfully to all Americans the importance of slavery in our history.
“If you are willing to publish this letter, you may.
“Sincerely, Gordon S. Wood”
Gordon Wood—photo included on WSWS.org webpage
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In his book, McWhorter is screaming, ‘Let me be a complete person! I have more to say than against racism. All I’m asking.’ Black men from a long time past have been accused of ‘uncle tom’ if they so much as stray from the bible lesson. What’s bugging McWhorter is the new Greek chorus.
“For example, black philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has written widely and artfully about the value of individualism over simplistic balkanized ‘identities.’ However, under the Elect zeitgeist, Appiah is wrong. This Ghanaian British gay man is to perceive himself primarily, and we are to perceive him primarily, as a ‘black man’ just like Chris Rock, Samuel Jackson, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, despite that he has nothing in common with any of them. We are to fashion this caricatured sense of him mainly because he is a touch more likely that Steven Pinker to have trouble with cops…”
from Woke Racism by John McWhorter
Granted, the ‘touch more likely’ could have used an editor’s red pen, but I’d agree with what he holds to be more important.
“The problem here is not only that of how black people are urged to conceive of themselves, but what they are even to consider interesting, what they are to engage in during the short time on earth, during which any human lives. When ‘identity’—i.e., against the white hegemon—is thought of as central to intelligence, aesthetics, and moral significance, one’s range of interests inevitably narrows. As such Electism discourages genuine curiosity.”
from Woke Racism by John McWhorter
He doesn’t discount racism; just that it can’t be the sole issue in anyone’s life. For someone like McWhorter, living among well-educated, affluent people affords distance from, say, living in Anacostia or Petworth where life isn’t so secure. But McWhorter isn’t blind to the black on black violence in those places. Poverty, a lack of good work, poor education, broken families, drugs and ready weapons don’t add up to a healthy environment. In Petworth nor in Appalachia.
When the more affluent population gets a cold, a few rungs down the ladder poor blacks and whites catch pneumonia.
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Watching the video of George Floyd’s murder by an expressionless policeman is chilling, and it does nothing to disprove racism’s most murderous extreme. Seeing a police officer so seemingly indifferent to the murder he’s doing should give no one, white or black, any reassurance of safety with such villains with badges.
Hearing it is one thing, but seeing an actual photo of the white couple in St. Louis Missouri, standing sorta armed and dangerous as the protesters marched by their house, could be almost comical. Felony Charges Filed Against St. Louis Couple Who Pointed Guns at Protesters, The accompanying photograph of the well-fed middle age white couple, he in bare feet and she needing advice as to pointing her pistol—not so threatening, really.
Rittenhouse, on the other hand?
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This last Sunday’s Wapo review of McWhorter’s book was written by another angry black man, this time from the left—Elle Mystal, a Harvard-educated ex-lawyer now writing for The Nation—who rants at a high volume about McWhorter’s rant. Perhaps McWhorter’s book is fair game to go after, but the review was hardly useful to Wapo’s readers.
Figuratively, McWhorter is a big boy—but had I landed on Mystal’s review with no prior knowledge, I might have dismissed this book. As it is, there’s value in Woke Racism even if you need to dig for it. And Elle needs to calm the fuck down.
“John McWhorter’s new book, ‘Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,’ is a standard-issue tirade against ‘cancel culture,’ a Bill Mayer routine without the jokes or a Tucker Carlson segment without the bow tie and smirk…
“He [McWhorter] just seems to believe that making culturally conservative arguments while Black is inherently thoughtful, or at least provocative. It’s not.”
from the Washington Post’s The perspective may be fresh but the argument is still tired by Elle Mystal
My, my. Clever enough for you? Sorry, but that too easy to phone in, let alone pass an editor to warrant publication. The article doesn’t move off that single note. So here we go, like a dull tennis match, pat, pat, pity-pat, pat.
If Bezos weren’t busy getting launched into space, he’d have time enough for his other new toy and get his editors to do their work. I’d love to match Lozada’s article up against Mystal’s, but I googled it, and Wapo wanted another subscription, so I won’t.
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Setting the tennis match aside, to realize the passage of four centuries and still find the stench remaining is newsworthy—though claiming nothing’s changed in that time is not.
The great white man, no sarcasm here, Thomas Jefferson, recognized the nation’s dilemma, and if he didn’t succeed at setting a course correction, he tried, and most certainly pointed toward the need for one. John and Abigail Adams abhorred slavery; would their shunning Jefferson have been better? Another great white man, Abraham Lincoln, did the hard work, died for the work that his forefathers hadn’t accomplished.
Were I black, I could be as angry as Mystal and Hannah-Jones, but regardless, they owe the practice of journalism more than diatribe.
There’s a theory about history that single individuals are not the responsible parties for change. But it strikes me that’s more logic splitting than fact. That some 620,000 white and black men died to settle the issue of slavery, surely their lives should be honored, but without Lincoln, we living in Virginia might well be looking across the Potomac at another country.
In Washington, DC, Lincoln’s monument and Jefferson’s flank Washington’s. None were perfect men, nor were the people they led, but the country owes the path we’re on to them and the people who supported them.
As a piece of architectural art, I prefer the Jefferson Memorial over Lincoln’s; there is no front nor back to it, so it seems the universal Greek temple. Jefferson was a Greek Revival man himself, which the architect John Russell Pope knew very well.
It’s probable that some whites—white historians even—have deliberately overlooked Jefferson’s personal story about his children born of Sally Hemings, and it’s also probable folks to the left of center view him as evil for the same reason. I have no explanation of the man, other than to read what he wrote and wonder at what kind of personal conflict he lived as a slaveholder who slept with his daughter’s maid. His daughter freed Sally after Jefferson’s death, and where do you suppose that came from if not from her father?
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I’d hang with McWhorter. I like frank folks, contrarians even, who have something to say. And I might correct him at times, calling a spade a spade—he uses the term, so I’m working to lose some of my own unnecessary wokeness.