The 1619 Project

[garbon]

Moving to its own thread as this isn't really about Trump's presidency.

Do you have proof of these assertions? The people you talk about in your 2nd paragraph can't have been adversely affected by the 1619 project as it only launched in 2019.

For some people, any critical view of their country is seen as Raz describes it.

Racism is still well alive in this country and never far from the political mainstream.

The 1619 Project had flaws in how it told history, centering everything on slavery was certainly wrong, but we can't ignore that it played a large role in shaping the United States of today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/inclusive-case-1776-not-1619/604435/
https://byebyepaywall.com/en/

I don't know if you and Raz know this but in the 1619 Project book (I've just started reading it), Nikole Hannah-Jones (the author) has a preface where she explains what she was attempting to do.

As a bit of early background prior to being an adult and creating the 1619 project:

My favorite subjects in school were English and social studies, and I peppered my teachers with questions. History revealed the building blocks of the world I now inhabited, explaining how communities, institutions, relationships came to be. Learning history made the world make sense. It provided the key to decode all that I saw around me.

Black people, however, were largely absent from the histories I read. The vision of the past I absorbed from school textbooks, television, and the local history museum depicted a world, perhaps a wishful one, where Black people did not really exist. This history rendered Black Americans, Black people on all the earth, inconsequential at best, invisible at worst. We appeared only where unavoidable: slavery was mentioned briefly in the chapter on this nation's most deadly war, and then Black people disappeared again for a full century, until magically reappearing as Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech about a dream. This quantum leap served to wrap the Black experience up in a few paragraphs and a tidy bow, never really explaining why, one hundred years after the abolition of slavery, King had to lead the March on Washington in the first place.

We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.

Then she establishes some background to our ignorance:

A 2018 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) called Teaching Hard History found that in 2017 just 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors named slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, and less than one-third knew that it had taken a constitutional amendment to abolish it. The majority of high school students can't tell you that the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass had once been enslaved; nor can they define the Middle Passage, which led to the forced migration of nearly 13 million people across the Atlantic and transformed—or, arguably, enabled—the existence of the United States.

Considering the confusing and obfuscatory way school curricula tend to address the institution of slavery, this is unsurprising. Myriad examples exist. As recently as six years ago, a McGraw-Hill world geography textbook referred to African people brought to the Americas in the bowels of slave ships not as the victims of a forced migration who were violently coerced into labor but as "workers," a word that implies consensual and paid labor.

Within the last decade, Alabama social studies courses for second graders listed Harriet Tubman, the woman who became famous for escaping slavery and then helping others do the same, as an "exemplary" American without ever mentioning the words "slave" or "slavery." In Texas, which, because of its large population, plays an outsized role in shaping the content of national textbooks, the Republican-led state board of education approved curriculum standards that equated the Confederate general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, who fought against the United States government, with Douglass as examples of "the importance of effective leadership in a constitutional republic."

School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery. Individual enslaved people, as full humans, with feelings, thoughts, and agency, remain largely invisible, but for the occasional brief mention of Douglass or Tubman or George Washington Carver.

One of the reasons American children so poorly understand the history and legacy of slavery is because the adults charged with teaching them don't know it very well, either. A 2019 Washington Post–SSRS poll found that only about half of American adults realize that all thirteen colonies engaged in slavery. Even educators struggle with basic facts of history, the SPLC report found: only about half of U.S. teachers understand that enslavers dominated the presidency in the decades after the founding and would dominate the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate until the Civil War.

She then quotes a scholar as to why this is a problem:

"We are committing educational malpractice," says Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a historian at Ohio State University. Jeffries served as chair of the advisory board that produced the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Hard History report. "Our preference for nostalgia and for a history that never happened is not without consequence," Jeffries writes. "Although we teach [students] that slavery happened ... in some cases, we minimize slavery's significance so much that we render its impact—on people and on the nation—inconsequential." This, Jeffries continues, "is profoundly troubling" because it leaves Americans ill-equipped to understand racial inequality today, and that, in turn, leads to intolerance, opposition to efforts to address racial injustice, and the enacting of laws and policies detrimental to Black communities and America writ large. "Our narrow understanding of the institution ... prevents us from seeing this long legacy and leads policymakers to try to fix people instead of addressing the historically rooted causes of their problems," he notes.

And then precisely what she hoped to do with the project:

I made a simple pitch to my editors: The New York Times Magazine should create a special issue that would mark the four-hundredth anniversary by exploring the unparalleled impact of African slavery on the development of our country and its continuing impact on our society. The issue would bring slavery and the contributions of Black Americans from the margins of the American story to the center, where they belong, by arguing that slavery and its legacy have profoundly shaped modern American life, even as that influence had been shrouded or discounted. The issue would pose and answer these questions: What would it mean to reframe our understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as our country's origin point, the birth of our defining contradictions, the seed of so much of what has made us unique? How might that reframing change how we understand the unique problems of the nation today—its stark economic inequality, its violence, its world-leading incarceration rates, its shocking segregation, its political divisions, its stingy social safety net? How might it help us understand the country's best qualities, developed over a centuries-long struggle for freedom, equality, and pluralism, a struggle whose DNA could also be traced to 1619? How would looking at contemporary American life through this lens help us better appreciate the contributions of Black Americans—not only to our culture but also to our democracy itself?

Far from becoming nihilists who hate America, she recalls this reception from students:

Black students, especially, told me that for the first time in their lives, they'd experienced a feeling usually reserved for white Americans: a sense of ownership of, belonging in, and influence over the American story. Arterah Griggs, who attended a public high school in Chicago, the first district in the country to make the project part of its curriculum, told a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times what the project helped her realize: "We were the founding fathers. We put so much into the U.S. and we made the foundation." Another student, Brenton Sykes, said, "Now that I'm aware of the full history of America without it being whitewashed or anything, it kind of makes me see things in a different light. I feel like I have to carry myself better because I have what my ancestors went through."

She also deals with the backlash as accepted ideas in academia met the world. I'll just post a little bit:

The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.

The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.

...

But some who opposed the 1619 Project treated a few scholars' disagreements with certain claims and arguments as justification to dismiss the entire work as factually inaccurate, even as other equally prominent scholars defended and confirmed our facts and interpretations.

In truth, most of the fights over the 1619 Project were never really about the facts. The Princeton historian Allen C. Guelzo, a particularly acerbic critic, published several articles that denounced the 1619 Project for treating "slavery not as a blemish that the Founders grudgingly tolerated ... not as a regrettable chapter in the distant past, but as a living, breathing pattern upon which all American social life is based." Guelzo then made clear that the source of his antipathy was not just what the project was saying but who was saying it: "It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers."

...

The legacy of 1619 surrounds us, whether we acknowledge it or not. This is why, in assembling this book, we have described the history it offers as an origin story. Like all origin stories, this one seeks to explain our society to itself, to give some order to the series of dates, actions, and individuals that created a nation and a people. In doing so, we argue that much about American identity, so many of our nation's most vexing problems, our basest inclinations, and its celebrated and unique cultural contributions spring not from the ideals of 1776 but from the realities of 1619, from the contradictions and the ideological struggles of a nation founded on both slavery and freedom. The story of Black America cannot be disentangled from the story of America, and our attempts to do so have forced us to tell ourselves a tale full of absences, evasions, and lies, one that fails to satisfactorily explain the society we live in and leaves us unable to become the society we want to be.

I'll let you know what I think about it as I read on - but from the preface, it all sounds a lot more complex and nuanced than the caricature I've seen lambasted here.

[viper37]

I'll let you know what I think about it as I read on - but from the preface, it all sounds a lot more complex and nuanced than the caricature I've seen lambasted here.

I've read part of the NY Times piece when it was published.

I don't have a problem with a literary essay who takes liberties with history.  Any great author who has written an historical novel has taken liberties with history.  I am fond of many historical movies and they all take liberties, some more than others, with history.

But what would you say if Ridley Scott's Gladiator was used as the basis for a class on the mid Roman Empire, the gladiatorial life, or simply a biographical account of the Emperor Commodus?

There arise the problem with the 1619 project, imho, when it is used as the basis of a school project despite its many historical mistakes.

Read The Atlantic piece, with the proxy I provided, it alludes to this problem very perfectly, without going all in on the conservative bashing like Raz.  It explains why some historians refused to sign on the project.  I don't agree with everything in it, some things are very silly, but there's a part that is interesting.

Slavery as THE cause of the 1776 rebellion, we've discussed it before.  It was one of the reason, but not the sole factor.

[viper37]

thanks G

[garbon]

I've read part of the NY Times piece when it was published.

I don't have a problem with a literary essay who takes liberties with history.  Any great author who has written an historical novel has taken liberties with history.  I am fond of many historical movies and they all take liberties, some more than others, with history.

But what would you say if Ridley Scott's Gladiator was used as the basis for a class on the mid Roman Empire, the gladiatorial life, or simply a biographical account of the Emperor Commodus?

I'm not sure that is warranted. I think she was aiming for something more noble that the director when questionned about historical accuracy in Napoleon said: "Were you there? Oh you weren't there."

So far I'm not sure if the literary pieces in the book are my favourite but I can understand how different styles of content can be helpful for capturing attention/imagination.

There arise the problem with the 1619 project, imho, when it is used as the basis of a school project despite its many historical mistakes.

Read The Atlantic piece, with the proxy I provided, it alludes to this problem very perfectly, without going all in on the conservative bashing like Raz.  It explains why some historians refused to sign on the project.  I don't agree with everything in it, some things are very silly, but there's a part that is interesting.

Slavery as THE cause of the 1776 rebellion, we've discussed it before.  It was one of the reason, but not the sole factor.

But isn't that throwing the baby out the bath water?

Yes it is unfortunate that she has persisted with that particular claim (which she also mentions in her preface, I just didn't copy fully - I'm also interested to see what her 'toned down' version of the claim is in the book) but I don't think that means it serves no purpose at all. There is still value in broadening/complicating how we think about our history and at a glance it feels like the 1619 project helps with that even if we shouldn't uncritically accept all of its claims.

It isn't like schools that don't use things from the 1619 project are instructing students in the unvarnished truth. As far as I know the vaunting up of the pilgrims and the omissions/obsfucations of America's sins are ongoing.

[viper37]

But isn't that throwing the baby out the bath water?

I never said the entire project should be discarded!

I applaud the effort, like many others.

Without looking at the stats the author provided, you can simply take a look at popular culture to see how the Secession war is portrayed in American minds.  Black people were conspicuously absent until most recently.  Glory must be the only movie where Black Men fight for their freedom.  Otherwise, it's always White men vs White Men fighting to free the Black Men (while it wasn't the case at all).

I've never heard of the Tulsa riots until very recently.  Never heard of many such things, actually.

I think she had a very good idea, a good concept, but she failed in the execution and she should have corrected herself, at least admitted her errors.

I understand the passion, I understand the aims of the work, but it is no excuse to rewrite the history.  As Malthus would often say, two wrongs do not make a right.