The Human Origin Story Has Changed Again
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story , edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman and Jake Silverstein. New York, Ane World, 2021.
An old idiom advises to never gauge a book by its cover. Yet the front end comprehend of the recently released book version of the New York Times' 1619 Projection speaks as much in a few curt words as the following 600 pages of text. The Project, the over title reads, is "A New Origin Story," that has been "Created by Nikole Hannah-Jones." The dust jacket flap adds a touch on of clairvoyance, explaining that the volume "offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present."
The Times, which wishes readers to accept the 1619 Project seriously as a "reframing of American history," has said more than it intended.
Origin stories lie in the realm of myth, not history. Premodern societies produced, but did not "create," origin stories. They were the work of whole cultures, emerging out of oral traditions that outset humanized nature and so naturalized social relations. But in mod times, origin stories have indeed been created. Closely linked with nationalism in politics and irrationalism in philosophy, origin stories aim to fuse groups of people by lifting "the race" above the material class relations of history. Indeed, from the racialist vantage point, history is merely "the emanation of the race," as Trotsky put information technology in words he aimed at Nazi racial mythmaking, but that serve just as well to indict the 1619 Project, which sorts actors in history into two categories: "white people" and "Black people," and deduces motive and action from this a priori racial classification. [one]
That the 1619 Projection was a racialist falsification of history was the central criticism the World Socialist Web Site leveled at it immediately after its release in August 2019, timing ostensibly chosen to commemorate the inflow of the first slaves in Virginia 400 years before. All of the 1619 Project'due south errors, distortions, and omissions—its insinuation that slavery was a uniquely American "original sin"; its claim that the American Revolution was a counterrevolution launched to defend slavery against British abolitionism; its selective utilise of quotes to advise that Abraham Lincoln was a racist indifferent to slavery; its censoring of the interracial character of the abolitionist, civil rights, and labor movements; its insistence that all present social problems are the fruit of slavery; its stance that historians had ignored slavery—all of this flowed from the Times' singular endeavor to impose a racial myth on the past, the better "to teach our readers to think a little bit more" in the racial way, in the leaked words of Times editor Dean Baquet. [2]
The exposure of the 1619 Project past the WSWS, and past leading historians it interviewed, has never been met forthrightly past the Times. Instead, Hannah-Jones, the Project'southward journalist-glory "creator," egged on race-baiting and red-baiting social media attacks confronting critics, while New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein demeaned them on the pages of the Times as jealous careerists, even as he surreptitiously contradistinct the Project. All the while, backers of the 1619 Projection said, "Simply wait for the book. Information technology will erase all doubts." This drumroll lasted for 2 years.
The mountains take labored and brought along a mouse.
The central achievement of the book version of the 1619 Project, released in December, appears to be that information technology is bigger. Weighing in at two pounds and costing $23, information technology is probably x times heavier than the magazine given out free by the thousands, errors and all, to greenbacks-strapped public schools. Unfortunately for the Times, the added weight lends no new gravitas to the content, which, in spite of all the lofty rhetoric about "finally telling the truth," "new narratives," and "reframing," remains unoriginal to the bespeak of banality. The volume does non inch much across the warmed-over racial essentialism that has long been the stock-in-merchandise of right-wing black nationalism, and which has always had a special buy on the guilt feelings of wealthy liberals. The late Ebony editor, Lerone Bennett, Jr., remains unmistakably the dominant intellectual influence on Hannah-Jones and the unabridged project. [3]
The Times has spared no expense to continue afloat its flagship project. This much shows. The volume is handsomely presented. The book'due south xviii capacity include seven new historical essays, interspersed with 36 poems and short stories, every bit well as 18 photographs. If anything justifies the book, information technology is these photographs, which lonely among the contents manage to convey something truthful about American order. However, in their artistic depiction of everyday black men, women, and children, the photographs really express the commonness of humanity, contradicting the 1619 Projection' racialist aims.
The balance of the volume, the poetry and fiction included, bears the fatal marks of the racialist perspective. What emerges is an even darker and more unyielding interpretation of race in America than that which came across in the magazine. The volume is replete with blatantly anti-historical passages, such as: "At that place has never been a time in United States history when Black rebellions did non spark existential fear among white people …" (p. 101); "In the eyes of white people, Black criminality was broadly defined" (p. 281.) One could keep. Every contributor engages in this sort of crude racial reductionism. There are no immigrants, Asians, Jews, Catholics, or Muslims, and only a few pages on Native Americans. The 1619 Project sees only "white Americans" and "black Americans." And these monoliths, undivided past course or whatever other textile factor, had already appeared in colonial Virginia in 1619 in their present form, prepared to act out their racially defined destinies.
A new preface by Hannah-Jones attempts to motivate the book by noting that Americans know little about slavery. She points to a Southern Poverty Law Centre study that found simply 8 percent of high school students can cite slavery as the key cause of the Ceremonious State of war. This statistic is not surprising. It would also not be surprising to learn that less than 8 percent of recent loftier school graduates know, even roughly, when the Vietnam State of war happened, or whether The Great Gatsby is a novel or a submarine sandwich. This is not the fault of students or of teachers. The public schools accept been starved of funding by Republicans and Democrats akin. History and art have been especially savaged in favor of supposedly more applied "funding priorities."
In whatever example, the 1619 Projection volition assist no ane empathise why the Ceremonious War happened. The book's overriding theme is that all "white Americans" were (and are all the same) the beneficiaries of slavery. This makes the Civil War incomprehensible. Why was the land split apart in 1861? Why did it wage a bloody war over the next four years, fighting battles whose death tolls stunned the world? Why did 50,000 men fall expressionless or maimed at Gettysburg in the starting time three days of July 1863, a half year afterwards Lincoln'southward issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation? Historian James McPherson, in works such as Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution and For Cause and Comrades, answers these questions. The 1619 Project cannot.
The 1619 Projection's denial of slavery'south role in the Civil State of war is probably clearest in the essays by Matthew Desmond, Martha Due south. Jones, and Ibram Kendi. Desmond'southward essay, "Capitalism," which appeared in the original version and now reappears in slightly longer form, argues that Southern slavery was the dynamic part of the antebellum economy, and that the wealth generated from it also congenital Northern capitalism. Desmond has it backwards. The demand for cotton in the North, and especially in Great Uk—a demand itself contingent on capitalist economic growth—gave a new impulse to Southern slavery, and non the other mode around. When the slave masters seceded and launched the Civil State of war, amidst their miscalculations was to overestimate their worth in the global economy, an fault Desmond repeats.
Over the years of 1861-1865 the Southern planters were destroyed as a grade. Withal their clients in Britain and the Northward establish new sources of cotton and emerged still richer. Desmond, a Princeton sociologist, was brought on past the 1619 Projection to pay some attention to economics. Only he winds up denying a material cause and a fabric effect of the Civil War. Desmond's theory cannot explicate why the war happened, why the Northward defeated the supposedly more than advanced slave Due south, and why it is that today we live in a world dominated by the exploitation of wage workers, and not chattel slaves.
In her essay, entitled "Citizenship," Martha S. Jones reduces the antebellum struggle for equality to the activeness of the small gratuitous black population in the Due north, focusing on the Colored Conventions movement that began in 1830. She only writes out of beingness the abolitionist movement, which was majority white and eventually reached even into pocket-size towns across the North. The abolitionist motility was undoubtedly a major political gene in the expansion of civil rights to complimentary blacks—ostensibly Jones' field of study—and in the coming of the Ceremonious War, ultimately fusing with the anti-slavery Republican Political party through figures such every bit Frederick Douglass. This counts for petty to Jones and historians similar her. They erect a wall between agitation against slavery, which they dismiss equally mere cover for white racial interest, and what they call "anti-racism," a contemporary moral-political posture they impose on history. "White Americans" of the past, even the well-nigh dedicated and egalitarian opponents of slavery, tin never pass muster before these examiners.
This "immense condescension of posterity," to borrow a phrase from the late English historian Due east.P. Thompson, reaches new depths in the essay by Kendi, whose career as an "anti-racist" has been and then challenging to the powers-that-be that he has been showered with millions of dollars past the "white institutions" of the publishing, bookish, and corporate endowment worlds. Kendi thinks he has discovered that the pioneering abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a patronizing hypocrite who "actually reinforced racism and slavery" (p. 430). No one in Garrison'south time, neither friend nor enemy, thought so. Information technology should be recalled that Garrison was himself nearly lynched by a racist mob in 1835. Frederick Douglass, in his beautiful eulogy delivered in 1879, said that Garrison
moved not with the tide, but against it. He rose not by the power of the Church or the State, but in bold, inflexible and defiant opposition to the mighty power of both. Information technology was the glory of this man that he could stand lone with the truth, and calmly await the result… [L]et united states of america baby-sit his memory as a precious inheritance, let the states teach our children the story of his life.
Later tarnishing the "precious inheritance" of Garrison, Kendi moves on to Lincoln. He rehashes the thoroughly debunked claim that the Emancipation Proclamation, the greatest revolutionary document in American history after the Proclamation of Independence, was a mere military machine tactic. In Kendi's way of seeing things, Lincoln's order only fabricated it "incumbent on Black people to emancipate themselves." He goes on, "And that is precisely what they did, running away from enslavers to Wedlock lines…" (p. 431).
Kendi does not seem to fathom that the Emancipation Proclamation made these men and women legally costless when they ran to Wedlock lines, rather than runaway slaves with the property claims of their masters still operative. But and then once more, Kendi does not even inquire himself what the Spousal relationship ground forces was doing in the Southward. His essay is called "Progress." This must be meant ironically. Kendi sees no progress in history.
The bringing in of Jones, of Johns Hopkins University, and Kendi, of Boston Academy, is meant to clothe the 1619 Project in immense authority. A couple of other efforts accept been made along these lines. Here too, a law of diminishing returns seems to accept imposed itself on the Times.
Stung by criticism that she had no sources in the original publication, Hannah-Jones has plugged in, ex post facto, 94 endnotes to her "framing essay," which the editors have at present given the championship "Democracy." Non much else has changed from the original version, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in commentary—not history—for what the prize committee charitably called Hannah-Jones' "highly personal" style. The new footnotes atomic number 82 to many URLs as well as personal conversations with historians, including Woody Holton of the Academy of South Carolina, who has staked his professional reputation to the 1619 Projection.
Sent in to provide say-so, Holton is responsible for the near clamorous new error introduced into the nowadays book. Hannah-Jones quotes Holton as saying that the Dunmore Proclamation of November 7, 1775, a British offering of freedom to slaves of masters already in defection, "ignited the plough to independence" for the Virginian founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison (p. xvi), supposedly considering they feared losing their human belongings. Unfortunately for Holton, at that point Washington was already commanding the Continental Regular army in war, Jefferson had drafted his tract A Declaration of the Causes & Necessity for Taking Up Arms, and Madison, and so only 24, had joined a revolutionary organ, the Orange Canton Virginia Committee of Safety.
This is not an innocent mistake. Holton and the 1619 Project go the sequence of events wrong to back up another fiction: that the truthful, never-before-revealed (and undocumented!) motivation of the Founding Fathers in 1776 was to defend slavery. These are fatal errors. And withal there is a still larger issue. Whatever the private motives of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—even if a single letter, article, or diary entry might one mean solar day be found from among their voluminous writings demonstrating that they "staked their lives and sacred honor" to defend slavery—in assessing the significance of the American Revolution much more than this must notwithstanding be taken into consideration. Why was it that the smashing slaveless majority of colonists supported America's 2nd-bloodiest war for six long years? Why did thousands of gratis blacks enlist? And further, what was the relationship betwixt the American Revolution and the Enlightenment, whose thought contemporaries believed that it embodied? What was its human relationship to that which historian R.R. Palmer called "the age of the democratic revolution" that swept the Atlantic in its wake? What was its connectedness to the destruction of slavery in the US and elsewhere over the next century? How did information technology relate, ideologically, to subsequent anti-colonial struggles? An utter lack of marvel about these and other disquisitional questions characterizes the entire volume.
A few contributors manage to make certain valid historical points. Times columnist Jamelle Bouie provides treatment of the vociferous pro-slavery advocate, John C. Calhoun of Due south Carolina "who saw no difference betwixt slavery and other forms of labor in the modern globe" (p. 199). Khahlil Gibran Muhammad gives a useful survey of the sugar plantation organisation. But equally a whole, and Bouie and Muhammad however, the book'due south various capacity are formulaic in the extreme. They identify present-day social, political, and cultural problems in exclusively racial terms, and then, each performing the same salto mortale, impose the present diagnosis on history.
Health care, the massive prison population, gun violence, obesity, traffic jams—these, and many more problems, the Times wishes us to believe, are rooted in "endemic" "anti-black racism" get-go imprinted in a national "Deoxyribonucleic acid" in 1619. The Times, a multi-billion dollar corporation closely tied to Wall Street and the armed services-intelligence apparatus, does not want readers to consider more obvious, and much more proximate, causes for America'due south social and political ills—for example, the extreme polarization of wealth that has reduced 70 pct of the population to paycheck-to-paycheck existence, while the ranks of billionaires peachy, their wealth doubling with astonishing frequency.
As it turns out, it is all nearly wealth, and more specifically, cash, as Hannah-Jones admits in a final essay: "[W]hat steals opportunities is the lack of wealth … the defining feature of Blackness life," she writes (p. 456). This essay is entitled "Justice." A telephone call for race-based reparations for blacks—any individual who can show "documentation that he or she identified equally a Blackness person for at least ten years…." (p. 472)—it originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine on June 30, 2020, nether the title "What is Owed."
"Lack of wealth" is not the defining feature of "black life" in America. It defines life for the vast majority of the American and world population. But Hannah-Jones is not calling for any sort of grade redistribution of wealth. On the reverse, if her proposal were put into effect, the federal government, which has not authored a substantial social reform since the 1960s, would inevitably direct money away from the petty that remains to support students, the poor, the ill, and the elderly of all races. The proceeds would go to blacks regardless of their wealth, including to people such equally herself, for whom "lack of wealth" is not a "defining feature" of life. Only recently, for instance, Hannah-Jones charged a California community higher $25,000 for a ane-60 minutes, virtual engagement—this being the charitable disbelieve rate of her speaking fees.
In putting its imprimatur on a call for race-based reparations, the Times could not have come with an "upshot" more than benign to the Trump-led Republican Party than if it had been dreamed up by Stephen Bannon himself. Hannah-Jones, of form, claims that her proposal is not meant to pit races against each other. She simply takes it for granted that "the races" have separate and opposed interests. On this, blackness nationalists and white supremacists take ever agreed. Indeed, Hannah-Jones appears to be completely oblivious to the dangerous implications of "the federal regime," which would distribute the money, dividing Americans upward by race (p. 472). The categorization of people into races past the state has been the starting point of some of history's worst crimes—the Third Reich's annihilation of Federal republic of germany'southward Jews existence only the well-nigh horrific example.
The existence of chattel slavery is likewise one of history's monumental crimes. But it was a offense in an unusual, premodern style. Slavery was inherited blindly, without questioning, from the colonial past. It was the most degraded condition in a earth where personal dependency and unfree labor were the dominion, and non the exception—a world of serfdom, indentured servitude, penal labor, corvée, and peonage. The American Revolution, for the kickoff fourth dimension in world history, raised slavery up as a historical problem —in the sense that it could at present be consciously identified as such, both because its existence was obnoxious to the revolution'due south assertion of human equality and because slavery stood in contradistinction to "costless" wage labor, which grew quickly in its aftermath. These contradictions breathed life into various attempts to cease slavery peacefully. Such efforts came to naught. In a cruel paradox, the growth of capitalism, and its insatiable need for cotton, nurtured the development of what historians have called a "2nd slavery" in the antebellum. Historical problems as deep-rooted equally slavery are not given to simple solutions.
Notwithstanding, "four score and seven years" later on, the Ceremonious War, the 2d American Revolution, ended American slavery, hastening its demise in Brazil and Republic of cuba as well. In the longue durée of slavery's history, which reaches back to the ancient world, this is a remarkably compressed menstruum. At that place are many people alive today who are 87 years old, a time span that separates us from 1935. That year, the high-water marking of the social reformism of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Wagner Act was passed, securing the legal right for workers to form trade unions of their ain choosing. The New Deal never did succeed in securing a national wellness care system, a relatively minor reform that has since been realized by many nations, but which has eluded the US for the intervening 87 years. Past way of comparison, in the 87 years separating the Announcement of Independence from the Gettysburg Address, the U.s. destroyed slavery, an entire system of private property in man. It did and then at a terrible cost. Lincoln was not far off when he said in his Second Inaugural Address that "every drop of blood drawn with the lash" might be "paid past another drawn with the sword." Some 700,000 Americans had already died when he said those words.
Lincoln's political genius lay in his unique chapters to link the enormous crisis of the Civil War to the American Revolution, and to the still larger question of man equality—that is, to extract from the maelstrom of events the true, the essential. He did this virtually famously at Gettysburg, when he explained that the war was a exam of whether or not the founding principle "that all men are created equal … shall perish from the earth." Lincoln knew well, equally he put it in some other spoken communication, that "the occasion is piled high with difficulty, and nosotros must rise—with the occasion," earlier chop-chop calculation, "We cannot escape history."
Our fourth dimension is besides "piled high with difficulty," and we can no less escape history than those alive in the 1860s. Nearly i million Americans have at present died in the COVID-xix pandemic, function of a global death toll of some half dozen meg, co-ordinate to the official counting. There is a clear and present danger of war with nuclear-armed Russia and China. Social inequality has reached most unfathomable levels. Basic democratic principles are under assault. Manmade climatic change threatens the environmental, and ultimately the habitability, of the planet. These are major historical problems, to say the to the lowest degree. It was once commonplace—and certainly non unique to Marxists, as Lincoln'southward words prove—to capeesh that major problems cannot even be understood, let alone acted upon, without an objective, truthful, approach to history.
[1] "Leon Trotsky: What Is National Socialism? (1933)."
[ii] "Inside the New York Times Boondocks Hall." Slate. Accessed Feb 8, 2022.
[three] Hannah-Jones has repeatedly acknowledged Bennett'due south influence. See Earlier the Mayflower: A History of Blackness America. Chicago, Ill.: Johnson Pub. Co., 2007; and Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream. Chicago: Johnson Pub. Co., 2007.
Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/02/21/proj-f21.html
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