New York Socially Engaged Art Project Questions About Race
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story , edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman and Jake Silverstein. New York, One Globe, 2021.
An sometime idiom advises to never guess a book by its cover. Yet the front embrace of the recently released volume version of the New York Times' 1619 Projection speaks as much in a few short words as the post-obit 600 pages of text. The Project, the over championship reads, is "A New Origin Story," that has been "Created by Nikole Hannah-Jones." The dust jacket flap adds a touch of clairvoyance, explaining that the book "offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present."
The Times, which wishes readers to take the 1619 Projection seriously as a "reframing of American history," has said more than than information technology intended.
Origin stories lie in the realm of myth, non history. Premodern societies produced, but did non "create," origin stories. They were the work of whole cultures, emerging out of oral traditions that first humanized nature and and so naturalized social relations. Just in modern times, origin stories accept indeed been created. Closely linked with nationalism in politics and irrationalism in philosophy, origin stories aim to fuse groups of people past lifting "the race" above the textile class relations of history. Indeed, from the racialist vantage point, history is merely "the emanation of the race," as Trotsky put it in words he aimed at Nazi racial mythmaking, but that serve just too to indict the 1619 Projection, which sorts actors in history into ii categories: "white people" and "Black people," and deduces motive and action from this a priori racial classification. [1]
That the 1619 Project was a racialist falsification of history was the central criticism the Earth Socialist Web Site leveled at it immediately afterward its release in Baronial 2019, timing ostensibly called to commemorate the inflow of the showtime slaves in Virginia 400 years earlier. All of the 1619 Projection's 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 abolition; its selective utilise of quotes to suggest 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 effort to impose a racial myth on the past, the better "to teach our readers to recall a little bit more" in the racial fashion, in the leaked words of Times editor Dean Baquet. [2]
The exposure of the 1619 Project by the WSWS, and by leading historians it interviewed, has never been met forthrightly by the Times. Instead, Hannah-Jones, the Project'southward journalist-glory "creator," egged on race-baiting and cherry-red-baiting social media attacks against critics, while New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein demeaned them on the pages of the Timedue south as jealous careerists, even as he surreptitiously contradistinct the Project. All the while, backers of the 1619 Projection said, "Just wait for the book. It volition erase all doubts." This drumroll lasted for two years.
The mountains have labored and brought along a mouse.
The cardinal achievement of the book version of the 1619 Project, released in December, appears to exist that it is bigger. Weighing in at two pounds and costing $23, it is probably 10 times heavier than the magazine given out costless by the thousands, errors and all, to cash-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 nearly "finally telling the truth," "new narratives," and "reframing," remains unoriginal to the point of banality. The book does not inch much across the warmed-over racial essentialism that has long been the stock-in-trade of right-wing black nationalism, and which has always had a special purchase 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 entire project. [3]
The Times has spared no expense to keep afloat its flagship project. This much shows. The book is amply presented. The book'south 18 chapters include vii new historical essays, interspersed with 36 poems and short stories, as well every bit 18 photographs. If annihilation justifies the book, information technology is these photographs, which lonely among the contents manage to convey something true about American society. Yet, in their artistic depiction of everyday black men, women, and children, the photographs actually limited the commonness of humanity, contradicting the 1619 Project' racialist aims.
The residuum of the book, the verse and fiction included, bears the fatal marks of the racialist perspective. What emerges is an even darker and more than unyielding interpretation of race in America than that which came across in the magazine. The book is replete with blatantly anti-historical passages, such every bit: "At that place has never been a time in Usa history when Black rebellions did not spark existential fearfulness among white people …" (p. 101); "In the optics of white people, Black misdeed was broadly defined" (p. 281.) One could continue. Every contributor engages in this sort of rough 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 "blackness Americans." And these monoliths, undivided by class or any other fabric gene, had already appeared in colonial Virginia in 1619 in their present form, prepared to act out their racially divers 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 Constabulary Center study that found only 8 percentage of loftier school students can cite slavery as the cardinal cause of the Civil War. This statistic is not surprising. It would also non be surprising to larn that less than 8 pct of recent high school graduates know, even roughly, when the Vietnam War happened, or whether The Cracking Gatsby is a novel or a submarine sandwich. This is not the fault of students or of teachers. The public schools have been starved of funding past Republicans and Democrats akin. History and art take been specially savaged in favor of supposedly more practical "funding priorities."
In any case, the 1619 Project will help no 1 understand why the Civil War happened. The volume's overriding theme is that all "white Americans" were (and are nonetheless) the beneficiaries of slavery. This makes the Civil War incomprehensible. Why was the country carve up apart in 1861? Why did information technology wage a encarmine war over the next 4 years, fighting battles whose death tolls stunned the world? Why did 50,000 men fall expressionless or maimed at Gettysburg in the first iii days of July 1863, a one-half yr afterward Lincoln's 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 Projection cannot.
The 1619 Projection'south denial of slavery'south role in the Civil State of war is probably clearest in the essays by Matthew Desmond, Martha S. Jones, and Ibram Kendi. Desmond'due south 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 economic system, and that the wealth generated from it also built Northern capitalism. Desmond has it backwards. The demand for cotton in the Northward, and particularly in Great United kingdom—a demand itself contingent on capitalist economical growth—gave a new impulse to Southern slavery, and not the other manner around. When the slave masters seceded and launched the Civil War, among 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 equally a grade. Yet their clients in Britain and the North constitute new sources of cotton and emerged still richer. Desmond, a Princeton sociologist, was brought on by the 1619 Projection to pay some attention to economics. Merely he winds upwardly denying a textile cause and a cloth effect of the Civil State of war. Desmond's theory cannot explain why the war happened, why the Due north defeated the supposedly more avant-garde slave 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 South. Jones reduces the antebellum struggle for equality to the action of the small costless blackness population in the North, focusing on the Colored Conventions movement that began in 1830. She simply writes out of being the abolitionist movement, which was majority white and eventually reached even into small towns beyond the Northward. The abolitionist motion was undoubtedly a major political factor in the expansion of civil rights to gratis blacks—ostensibly Jones' subject—and in the coming of the Civil War, ultimately fusing with the anti-slavery Republican Party through figures such as Frederick Douglass. This counts for picayune to Jones and historians like her. They erect a wall betwixt agitation against slavery, which they dismiss equally mere embrace for white racial interest, and what they call "anti-racism," a gimmicky moral-political posture they impose on history. "White Americans" of the past, fifty-fifty the most dedicated and egalitarian opponents of slavery, tin can never pass muster before these examiners.
This "immense condescension of posterity," to borrow a phrase from the late English historian E.P. Thompson, reaches new depths in the essay past Kendi, whose career as an "anti-racist" has been and so challenging to the powers-that-be that he has been showered with millions of dollars by the "white institutions" of the publishing, academic, and corporate endowment worlds. Kendi thinks he has discovered that the pioneering abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a patronizing hypocrite who "really reinforced racism and slavery" (p. 430). No one in Garrison's time, neither friend nor enemy, thought so. Information technology should be recalled that Garrison was himself nearly lynched past 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 building or the State, just in bold, inflexible and defiant opposition to the mighty power of both. Information technology was the celebrity of this man that he could stand lone with the truth, and calmly wait the result… [L]et the states guard his memory equally a precious inheritance, let us teach our children the story of his life.
Afterward tarnishing the "precious inheritance" of Garrison, Kendi moves on to Lincoln. He rehashes the thoroughly debunked claim that the Emancipation Proclamation, the greatest revolutionary certificate in American history afterward the Proclamation of Independence, was a mere armed forces tactic. In Kendi'south mode of seeing things, Lincoln's order only made it "incumbent on Black people to emancipate themselves." He goes on, "And that is precisely what they did, running away from enslavers to Matrimony lines…" (p. 431).
Kendi does not seem to fathom that the Emancipation Announcement made these men and women legally free when they ran to Union lines, rather than runaway slaves with the property claims of their masters nevertheless operative. Only then once more, Kendi does not even ask himself what the Marriage army was doing in the S. His essay is called "Progress." This must be meant ironically. Kendi sees no progress in history.
The bringing in of Jones, of Johns Hopkins Academy, and Kendi, of Boston University, is meant to clothe the 1619 Project in immense authority. A couple of other efforts accept been fabricated along these lines. Hither too, a police of diminishing returns seems to have 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 take now given the title "Commonwealth." Not much else has changed from the original version, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in commentary—non history—for what the prize commission charitably called Hannah-Jones' "highly personal" style. The new footnotes lead to many URLs as well as personal conversations with historians, including Woody Holton of the University of S Carolina, who has staked his professional reputation to the 1619 Project.
Sent in to provide authorization, Holton is responsible for the about insatiable new error introduced into the nowadays volume. Hannah-Jones quotes Holton every bit maxim that the Dunmore Declaration of November vii, 1775, a British offer of freedom to slaves of masters already in revolt, "ignited the plough to independence" for the Virginian founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison (p. 16), supposedly because they feared losing their human property. Unfortunately for Holton, at that point Washington was already commanding the Continental Army in state of war, Jefferson had drafted his tract A Annunciation of the Causes & Necessity for Taking Upwardly Artillery, and Madison, and then only 24, had joined a revolutionary organ, the Orange County Virginia Committee of Safety.
This is non an innocent error. Holton and the 1619 Project get the sequence of events wrong to support another fiction: that the true, never-before-revealed (and undocumented!) motivation of the Founding Fathers in 1776 was to defend slavery. These are fatal errors. And yet in that location is a still larger result. Any the individual motives of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—fifty-fifty if a single letter, commodity, or diary entry might 1 day be establish from among their voluminous writings demonstrating that they "staked their lives and sacred accolade" to defend slavery—in assessing the significance of the American Revolution much more than than this must all the same be taken into consideration. Why was it that the great slaveless majority of colonists supported America's second-bloodiest war for six long years? Why did thousands of gratuitous blacks enlist? And further, what was the relationship between the American Revolution and the Enlightenment, whose thought contemporaries believed that it embodied? What was its relationship to that which historian R.R. Palmer called "the age of the autonomous revolution" that swept the Atlantic in its wake? What was its connexion to the destruction of slavery in the U.s.a. and elsewhere over the next century? How did it relate, ideologically, to subsequent anti-colonial struggles? An utter lack of marvel about these and other critical questions characterizes the unabridged volume.
A few contributors manage to make certain valid historical points. Times columnist Jamelle Bouie provides handling of the vociferous pro-slavery advocate, John C. Calhoun of Due south Carolina "who saw no difference between slavery and other forms of labor in the modernistic world" (p. 199). Khahlil Gibran Muhammad gives a useful survey of the sugar plantation system. But equally a whole, and Bouie and Muhammad notwithstanding, the book'due south various chapters are formulaic in the farthermost. They identify nowadays-day social, political, and cultural problems in exclusively racial terms, and then, each performing the same salto mortale, impose the present diagnosis on history.
Wellness intendance, the massive prison population, gun violence, obesity, traffic jams—these, and many more than problems, the Times wishes usa to believe, are rooted in "owned" "anti-black racism" beginning imprinted in a national "DNA" in 1619. The Times, a multi-billion dollar corporation closely tied to Wall Street and the war machine-intelligence appliance, does non desire readers to consider more obvious, and much more proximate, causes for America's social and political ills—for example, the extreme polarization of wealth that has reduced 70 percent of the population to paycheck-to-paycheck existence, while the ranks of billionaires peachy, their wealth doubling with astonishing frequency.
As information technology turns out, information technology is all near wealth, and more specifically, greenbacks, as Hannah-Jones admits in a concluding essay: "[W]hat steals opportunities is the lack of wealth … the defining characteristic of Blackness life," she writes (p. 456). This essay is entitled "Justice." A call for race-based reparations for blacks—whatsoever individual who tin can show "documentation that he or she identified every bit a Blackness person for at least ten years…." (p. 472)—it originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine on June 30, 2020, under the title "What is Owed."
"Lack of wealth" is non the defining feature of "blackness life" in America. It defines life for the vast majority of the American and world population. Merely Hannah-Jones is not calling for whatever sort of class redistribution of wealth. On the contrary, if her proposal were put into effect, the federal authorities, which has non authored a substantial social reform since the 1960s, would inevitably direct money away from the footling that remains to support students, the poor, the sick, and the elderly of all races. The proceeds would go to blacks regardless of their wealth, including to people such as herself, for whom "lack of wealth" is non a "defining feature" of life. Only recently, for case, Hannah-Jones charged a California community college $25,000 for a ane-hour, virtual engagement—this being the charitable discount rate of her speaking fees.
In putting its imprimatur on a call for race-based reparations, the Times could not have come up with an "result" more beneficial to the Trump-led Republican Political party than if it had been dreamed up past Stephen Bannon himself. Hannah-Jones, of course, claims that her proposal is non meant to pit races against each other. She simply takes it for granted that "the races" have split and opposed interests. On this, blackness nationalists and white supremacists have always agreed. Indeed, Hannah-Jones appears to be completely oblivious to the dangerous implications of "the federal government," which would distribute the money, dividing Americans upward past race (p. 472). The categorization of people into races by the country has been the starting betoken of some of history'due south worst crimes—the Third Reich'south annihilation of Germany's Jews being merely the virtually horrific example.
The being of chattel slavery is also one of history'south monumental crimes. Only it was a law-breaking in an unusual, premodern way. Slavery was inherited blindly, without questioning, from the colonial past. It was the about degraded status in a globe where personal dependency and unfree labor were the rule, and non the exception—a world of serfdom, indentured servitude, penal labor, corvée, and peonage. The American Revolution, for the first fourth dimension in world history, raised slavery upwards equally a historical trouble —in the sense that it could now be consciously identified as such, both because its existence was obnoxious to the revolution's assertion of human equality and because slavery stood in contradistinction to "gratuitous" wage labor, which grew rapidly in its aftermath. These contradictions breathed life into various attempts to end slavery peacefully. Such efforts came to nil. In a roughshod paradox, the growth of capitalism, and its insatiable demand for cotton, nurtured the development of what historians have chosen a "second slavery" in the antebellum. Historical problems as deep-rooted equally slavery are not given to simple solutions.
Yet, "four score and vii years" later, the Civil War, the Second American Revolution, ended American slavery, hastening its demise in Brazil and Cuba besides. In the longue durée of slavery's history, which reaches back to the ancient world, this is a remarkably compressed period. There are many people alive today who are 87 years old, a fourth dimension span that separates us from 1935. That twelvemonth, the high-h2o marking of the social reformism of Franklin Roosevelt'due south 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 health care system, a relatively modest reform that has since been realized by many nations, only which has eluded the Us for the intervening 87 years. By style of comparison, in the 87 years separating the Declaration of Independence from the Gettysburg Address, the United States destroyed slavery, an unabridged system of private property in man. Information technology did then at a terrible price. Lincoln was not far off when he said in his Second Inaugural Address that "every drop of claret drawn with the lash" might be "paid by another fatigued with the sword." Some 700,000 Americans had already died when he said those words.
Lincoln's political genius lay in his unique capacity to link the enormous crisis of the Civil War to the American Revolution, and to the still larger question of human equality—that is, to excerpt from the maelstrom of events the true, the essential. He did this near famously at Gettysburg, when he explained that the war was a examination of whether or not the founding principle "that all men are created equal … shall perish from the earth." Lincoln knew well, as he put it in some other spoken language, that "the occasion is piled loftier with difficulty, and we must ascension—with the occasion," before apace calculation, "We cannot escape history."
Our time is also "piled high with difficulty," and we can no less escape history than those alive in the 1860s. Well-nigh i one thousand thousand Americans have now died in the COVID-nineteen pandemic, function of a global death price of some half dozen million, co-ordinate to the official counting. There is a articulate and nowadays danger of war with nuclear-armed Russian federation and China. Social inequality has reached nearly unfathomable levels. Basic democratic principles are under assault. Manmade climate change threatens the environmental, and ultimately the habitability, of the planet. These are major historical problems, to say the least. It was in one case commonplace—and certainly not unique to Marxists, every bit Lincoln's words evidence—to appreciate that major problems cannot even be understood, let alone acted upon, without an objective, true, arroyo to history.
[one] "Leon Trotsky: What Is National Socialism? (1933)."
[two] "Within the New York Times Boondocks Hall." Slate. Accessed February 8, 2022.
[iii] Hannah-Jones has repeatedly acknowledged Bennett's influence. See Before the Mayflower: A History of Black 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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