In 2019 the New York Times devoted one entire issue of its Sunday magazine to its 1619 Project, whose director, Nikole Hannah-Jones, put forward a new interpretation of American history. The real founding of the United States as we know it, she argued, took place not in 1776 or 1787-9, but in 1619, when the first African slaves--she said--landed in Jamestown, Virginia. Slavery and oppression of black people by white, Jones said, were the central principles of colonial and later American society from the beginning; "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country;" and black people had always had to fight almost alone to secure their rights. Accepting Jones's claim that Americans had learned to ignore these truths since the beginning, the Times embarked upon a huge and expensive educational mission to re-educate the citizenry, promoting the book version of the project almost every week from that day to this and distributing many thousands of copies of teaching materials based upon the project. Meanwhile, several distinguished historians, as we shall see in a moment, immediately argued that Jones and her colleagues on the project had made fundamental errors of fact and perspective and asked the Times to correct them. This the editor of the magazine refused to do.
It would take a whole book to trace the controversy over the project. I am going to talk about two publications that appeared in response to it in the last two years. The first is a book published in 2021, edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman, The New York Times' 1916 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. The book, most of which had already appeared on line, was the work of the International Committee for the Fourth International ICFI), who are Trotskyites. The second is a forum from the December 2022 issue of the American Historical Review, the nation's leading historical journal, which 19 historians and one journalist (Jake Silverstein) to comment on the project. Together they paint a revealing picture of the intellectual landscape of the United States in the 2020s.
The IFCI reader begins with a foreword by David North that makes some critical points. Although at least two of the contributors to the 1619 Project were white, a December 3, 2020 Times article, "How the 1619 Project came together," included the following statement: "Almost every contributor in the magazine and special section — writers, photographers and artists — is black, a nonnegotiable aspect of the project that helps underscore its thesis, Ms. Hannah-Jones said." The idea that only black historians could write black history, the forward shows, became popular in the late 1960s, and has been developed in more sophisticated form by postmodernists who now argue that "whiteness"--a concern for white supremacy--has informed not only the whole western European intellectual endeavor of the modern era, but its artistic achievements and scientific approach as well. The 1619 Project, in short, is one highly visible part of a broader attack on the intellectual principles of our civilization.
The first article in the IFCI reader, "The New York Times' 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of American and World History," sets the tone for the whole work. Quoting Hannah-Jones on the "very DNA of this country," Niles Niemuth, Thomas Mackaman and David North write, "This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development. The transfer of this critical biological term to the study of a country--even if meant only in a metaphorical sense--leads to bad history and reactionary politics. Countries do not have DNA, they have historically formed economic structures, antagonistic classes, and complex political relationships." Quoting other similar work as well, they identify a tendency to identify black and white Americans almost a separate and perhaps irreconcilable species, and compare it quite appropriately to social Darwinism in the 19th century and National Socialism in the 20th. They then argue that slavery cannot be viewed simply in a North American context, since it has existed all over the world almost from the beginning of time, with Africa the primary supplier of slaves for several continents by the 17th century. They also focus on Hannah-Jones's two indefensible claims in her original (and since slightly amended) introduction to the project: that the American colonists fought the revolutionary war largely to preserve slavery, and that Abraham Lincoln opposed racial equality in the United States. They accuse her of ignoring the most important scholarship on these issues, and they argue instead that the whole problem of slavery and race relations after emancipation must be viewed in the context of an American class struggle in which black Americans were simply one particular part of the working class. And by barely nodding at the Civil War--the gigantic war that ended slavery--and ignoring the progress of the working class, they argue, the project ignores the great progress that all its segments have made, and the work that remains to be done. The New York Times, they suggest, blessed and promoted the project because it fit into its editors own world view, in which diversity among the elite has become a substitute for the redistribution of income and wealth.
Three subsequent short, pithy contributions by Mackaman, Eric London, and Joseph Kishore flesh out many of these points. Mackaman sketches out the worldwide history of slavery, which had become very prevalent in Africa and had involved millions of white and black slaves in the Middle East and South Asia as well as the Americas. He mentions the very great natural increase of slaves in what became the United States--a sharp contrast with slave populations in the Caribbean and South America, who evidently faced much harsher conditions. He notes that indentured servants--many of whom were treated as badly as slaves--were for a long time the leading source of labor in Maryland and Virginia. He also mentions that the 1771 Somerset decision in England, which freed a slave whose owner had brought him from the Caribbean to England, denied any right to own slaves, which could only exist where laws specifically endorsed it. The founding fathers similarly omitted any endorsement or even specific mention of slavery from the Constitution, which was ratified while most of the northern states were abolishing the institution. Eric London spends most of his time attacking Hannah-Jones and 1619 contributor Matthew Desmond for arguing that slavery served both the emotional and material interests of most of the white people in the South. "According to the Times," he writes, "slavery was bad for the slaves by improved the lives of the majority of the people in the South. To put it bluntly, the Times is regurgitating the argument of the slaveholders." The penal institutions of the South imprisoned poor whites, not blacks, whose economic status was precarious indeed. London may exaggerate when he says that a majority of southern whites opposed secession, but many unquestionably did, including large majorities in West Virginia and East Tennessee and 300,000 white southerners who joined the Union army. “By
denouncing the revolutions it led—the bourgeois revolutions of 1775-1873 and
1861-65—today’s ruling class is signaling its hostility to the Declaration of
Independence, to the principle of equality before the law, to the Constitution,
to the Enlightenment and rationalist thought, and to the fundamental principle
that the people are endowed with certain inalienable rights,” he says. It is sad that we need a Trotskyite to make this point today.
Joseph Kishore makes an even stronger argument against identity politics, which, he rightly argues, has become a critique of the Enlightenment. He quotes another leading contemporary black intellectual, Ibram X. Kendi, who denigrated the Enlightenment as a "metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness. . . .Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist 'partiality,' the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other." "Today’s bourgeoisie," Kishore continues, "is repudiating any association with anything progressive in its own past. By denouncing the revolutions it led—the bourgeois revolutions of 1775-1873 and 1861-65—today’s ruling class is signaling its hostility to the Declaration of Independence, to the principle of equality before the law, to the Constitution, to the Enlightenment and rationalist thought, and to the fundamental principle that the people are endowed with certain inalienable rights.” The term "identity politics," he notes, was coined by the Combahee River Collective, a 1970s group of black lesbian feminists, who wrote that black women “have always embodied, if only in their physical
manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule. . . .This focusing upon
our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and
potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as
opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” The influential Michel Foucault, he adds, also rejected the centrality of class conflict and the Enlightenment idea of truth. Kishore also presents statistics to show that income inequality has been rapidly increasing among the black population of the US, as well as in the population as a whole. The top 1 percent of black Americans, he says, owned less than 25 percent of black American wealth in the early 1990s, but the own 40.5 percent of it now.
The reader then turns to interviews with six eminent historians and political scientists covering a center-left spectrum who share their reservations about the project. Victoria Bynum presents some of her findings about white southern society, including the thousands of poor whites who literally competed with slaves for jobs and the independent yeomen farmers who favored abolition. James McPherson, our most eminent historian of the Civil War period, criticizes the project for ignoring the huge and ultimately successful anti-slavery movement in the United States. James Oakes criticizes Matthew Desmond's argument that slavery was central to American capitalism. The Civil War, he says, was obviously a context between two very different economic systems, and the industrializing North, not the agricultural South, was driving economic development. Oakes, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, gives a revealing answer in response to a question about his relationship to proponents of identity politics on campus:
“My sense is that among graduate students the demitarians stay away from me, and they badger the students who are interested in political and economic history. They have a sense of their own superiority. The political historians tend to feel besieged. The reflection of identity politics in the curriculum is the primacy of cultural history. There was a time, a long, long time ago, when a ‘diverse history faculty’ meant that you had an economic historian, a political historian, a social historian, a historian of the American Revolution, of the Civil War, and so on. And now a diverse history faculty means a women’s historian, a gay historian, a Chinese American historian, a Latino historian.” [This]has produced narrow faculties in which everybody is basically writing the same thing.”
Gordon Wood, a prolific 89-year old historian now retired from Brown, emphasizes--as he has shown at length in books--that by 1776 or 1789 most Americans all over the colonies thought that slavery was dying. North America, he says, was the locus of the first real antislavery movement, and the ideology of the revolution put slavery on the defensive. Few now understand how revolutionary the idea of equality among citizens was--even if it was initially mostly restricted to white men. The political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. also hits the academic nail on the head speaking of the "cultural turn in academia," a synonym for identity politics. "One of its ironic entailments is this notion that doing cultural work in academia itself is a form of political practice, and that advancing certain programmatic and intellectual interests within the Academy or in bourgeois public discourse is simultaneously a political practice and an intellectual practice.” Academics, he says, simply appropriate the past to push their agenda in the present, and critical race theory is "another expression of reductionism." Asked about Hannah-Jones's idea of "national DNA," he replies, "The only place that can lead, if it's impermeable, is race war." And he revealingly adds: “The ‘legacy of slavery’ construct is also one I’ve hated for as long as I can remember because, in the first place, why would the legacy of slavery be more meaningful than the legacy of sharecropping and Jim Crow and the legacy of the Great Migration? Or even the New Deal and the CIO?” Retired British academic Richard Carwadine expresses shock that the distortions in the project will find their way into US classrooms, and, like many others, attacks Hannah-Jones for almost completely ignoring figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Clayborne Carson, a veteran and historian of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, describes his three years of intense work as one of the consultants on the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, a sharp contrast to the quick and private genesis of the 1619 project. The American Revolution, he says, combined an intellectual movement from the top down based on the idea of universal rights and a freedom movement from the bottom up. And historian Dolores Janiewski stresses that many original white settlers were not free, and that the original blacks who landed in Jamestown were not formally slaves. Even in the South, she makes clear, blacks did not fight alone against slavery and for equal rights under Reconstruction--a point also argued by Jones.
The collection continues with accounts of a letter submitted by some of these same historians (and by another one, Sean Wilentz) asking the Times to correct some of the mistakes in the project, and of magazine editor Jake Silverstein's refusal to do so, with one marginal exception. In a discussion of the Times controversy, David North and Eric London trace Hannah-Jones' view of Lincoln as anti-black to a 1968 magazine article in Ebony and a 1999 book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream by Lerone Bennett Jr., whom Hannah-Jones praised in a 2019 interview. Then it concludes with some excellent short historical pieces on the destruction of monuments of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant during 2020; on the significance of the Declaration of Independence in world history; on Abraham Lincoln's response to the Dakota Indian rebellion of 1862; on Martin Luther King, Jr.,; and on my one-time colleague, the late historian of the American Revolution Bernard Bailyn.
Before turning to the AHR forum, I would like to add two historical perspectives of my own. The first relates to the national and international stakes of the American Civil War. Thirty years before that war, Tocqueville had noted that slavery had created a very different society in the South than in the North. While the North was the quintessential democratic and egalitarian society, slavery in the South had created an aristocracy, and southern society showed all the aristocratic vices of licentiousness, violence, and gambling. When the war broke out in 1861 Europeans of all political stripes recognized it as a struggle between the democratic North and the aristocratic South, and took sides accordingly. The northern victory turned out to be a victory for European democrats as well, and Great Britain, Germany and France all took huge steps towards representative government in the decade after it was over. That is an important part of the significance of the Civil War that the 1619 Project has to ignore.
My second point also relates to the differences between the antebellum North and South, based on the reminiscences of the great Frederick Douglass. Here, in his first autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, he describes his first impressions of the thriving Massachusetts port of New Bedford, where he arrived after escaping from Maryland in 1838.
"The reader will be amused at my ignorance, when I tell the notions I had of the state of northern wealth, enterprise, and civilization. Of wealth and refinement, I supposed the north had none. My Columbian Orator, which was almost my only book, had not done much to enlighten me concerning northern society. The impressions I had received were all wide of the truth. New Bedford, especially, took me by surprise, in the solid wealth and grandeur there exhibited. I had formed my notions respecting the social condition of the free states, by what I had seen and known of free, white, non-slaveholding people in the slave states. Regarding slavery as the basis of wealth, I fancied that no people could become very wealthy without slavery. A free white man, holding no slaves, in the country, I had known to be the most ignorant and poverty-stricken of men, and the laughing stock even of slaves themselves—called generally by them, in derision, 'poor white trash.' Like the non-slaveholders at the south, in holding no slaves, I supposed the northern people like them, also, in poverty and degradation. Judge, then, of my amazement and joy, when I found—as I did find—the very laboring population of New Bedford living in better houses, more elegantly furnished—surrounded by more comfort and refinement—than a majority of the slaveholders on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. There was my friend, Mr. Johnson, himself a colored man (who at the south would have been regarded as a proper marketable commodity), who lived in a better house—dined at a richer board—was the owner of more books—the reader of more newspapers—was more conversant with the political and social condition of this nation and the world—than nine-tenths of all the slaveholders of Talbot county, Maryland. Yet Mr. Johnson was a working man, and his hands were hardened by honest toil. Here, then, was something for observation and study. Whence the difference? The explanation was soon furnished, in the superiority of mind over simple brute force. Many pages might be given to the contrast, and in explanation of its causes. But an incident or two will suffice to show the reader as to how the mystery gradually vanished before me.
"My first afternoon, on reaching New Bedford, was spent in visiting the wharves and viewing the shipping. The sight of the broad brim and the plain, Quaker dress, which met me at every turn, greatly increased my sense of freedom and security. “I am among the Quakers,” thought I, “and am safe.” Lying at the wharves and riding in the stream, were full-rigged ships of finest model, ready to start on whaling voyages. Upon the right and the left, I was walled in by large granite-fronted warehouses, crowded with the good things of this world. On the wharves, I saw industry without bustle, labor without noise, and heavy toil without the whip. There was no loud singing, as in southern ports, where ships are loading or unloading—no loud cursing or swearing—but everything went on as smoothly as the works of a well adjusted machine. How different was all this from the nosily fierce and clumsily absurd manner of labor-life in Baltimore and St. Michael’s! One of the first incidents which illustrated the superior mental character of northern labor over that of the south, was the manner of unloading a ship’s cargo of oil. In a southern port, twenty or thirty hands would have been employed to do what five or six did here, with the aid of a single ox attached to the end of a fall. Main strength, unassisted by skill, is slavery’s method of labor. An old ox, worth eighty dollars, was doing, in New Bedford, what would have required fifteen thousand dollars worth of human bones and muscles to have performed in a southern port. I found that everything was done here with a scrupulous regard to economy, both in regard to men and things, time and strength. The maid servant, instead of spending at least a tenth part of her time in bringing and carrying water, as in Baltimore, had the pump at her elbow. The wood was dry, and snugly piled away for winter. Woodhouses, in-door pumps, sinks, drains, self-shutting gates, washing machines, pounding barrels, were all new things, and told me that I was among a thoughtful and sensible people. To the ship-repairing dock I went, and saw the same wise prudence. The carpenters struck where they aimed, and the caulkers wasted no blows in idle flourishes of the mallet. I learned that men went from New Bedford to Baltimore, and bought old ships, and brought them here to repair, and made them better and more valuable than they ever were before. Men talked here of going whaling on a four years’ voyage with more coolness than sailors where I came from talked of going a four months’ voyage.
"I now find that I could have landed in no part of the United States, where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast to the condition of the free people of color in Baltimore, than I found here in New Bedford. No colored man is really free in a slaveholding state. He wears the badge of bondage while nominally free, and is often subjected to hardships to which the slave is a stranger; but here in New Bedford, it was my good fortune to see a pretty near approach to freedom on the part of the colored people. I was taken all aback when Mr. Johnson—who lost no time in making me acquainted with the fact—told me that there was nothing in the constitution of Massachusetts to prevent a colored man from holding any office in the state. There, in New Bedford, the black man’s children—although anti-slavery was then far from popular—went to school side by side with the white children, and apparently without objection from any quarter. To make me at home, Mr. Johnson assured me that no slaveholder could take a slave from New Bedford; that there were men there who would lay down their lives, before such an outrage could be perpetrated. The colored people themselves were of the best metal, and would fight for liberty to the death."
Sadly, the new woke version of American history and American race relations depends on ignoring not only the best works of scholarship that generations of historians have produced, but also the contemporary testimony of black Americans from earlier generations. Someday we must all rediscover our true history. The AHR forum, alas, shows that the contemporary historical profession will be of no use in that great national enterprise.
The December 2022 forum marked the second comment on the 1619 Project and its critics from the AHR. The first was a February 2020 note from the review's editor, Professor Alex Lichtenstein of Indiana University, which treated Wilentz, McPherson, Bynum, Oakes and Wood with extraordinary condescension, adding the detail that all of them were white, and cherry-picked individual pieces of evidence to suggest that Hannah-Jones and the project were more right than wrong on every contested issue. "What is odd about the letter is that it implies that the singular problem with the 1619 Project is that journalists are practicing history without a license.," he says. That is not true: while some of the historians clearly felt (and rightly) that they might have been consulted, their principle objection relates to falsehoods about the motives behind the American Revolution and Abraham Lincoln. Lichtenstein tries to refute them mainly by arguing that many people don't agree with them. That is one of the new principles of historical scholarship: if enough people assert something, their view must be respected, regardless of what an objective review of the evidence might show--all the more so since the very idea of "objectivity" has been rejected by historians as well as leading journalists now.
The introduction to the new forum by two editors, Mark Philip Bradley and Fei-Hsien Wang, makes it clear that the AHR had to no intention of trying to resolve the important factual disputes surrounding the claims of the 1619 Protect. Instead, they defined their objective as follows:
"As we conceived of this review forum, the critical question for us was what the AHR, given its global range, could uniquely bring to the conversation around the 1619 Project. Most debate over the project has been situated in an American context. But how, we wondered, might the project be viewed by scholars who work on the historical questions of slavery and race from different geographical and chronological perspectives? For example, what might historians of slavery in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East find compelling or controversial about the project and its method for rethinking the past? At the same time, we saw this forum as an opportunity to invite historians in fields too long underrepresented in the pages of the AHR to critically engage with the 1619 Project."
It was 30 or 40 years ago, I believe, that another editor of the AHR declared that it would cease to be the "NATO Historical Review," that is, focused mainly (although never exclusively) on Western Europe and the United States. That impulse has only grown stronger in subsequent years and may explain why that eminent journal has failed to review my books on the origins of the American intervention in Vietnam, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the decision to intervene in the Second World War in 1940-1. It also explains what the 16 contributors to this forum did and did not talk about and the conclusions that they reached.
Rather than take the time to analyze them one by one, I am going to try to sort the contributions into categories. Several contributors--Annette Gordon-Reed, Daniel Sharfstein and Faith Day--simply praise particular aspects of the project. Writing about the project's digital platform, Faithe J. Day says, "the 1619 Project promotes a standpoint logic, which introduces the possibility of multiple timelines and shared histories of America that change depending on one’s identity and cultural background.” The largest number of them, however, combine some praise with complaints that the focus upon black Americans was too narrow both racially and geographically. In particular, co-authors Rose Stremlau, Malinda Lowery, and Julie L. Reed, call for more attention to the subject of their own work, the indigenous natives of the American South, who also suffered from white oppression. E. M. Troutt Powell, an historian of slavery in the Middle East, makes the point that there were no abolitionists in the Ottoman Empire. Another historian of the Middle East, Rachel Schine, sticks to her own topic and provides a fine example of contemporary historical jargon: "“Thus, even as widely accepted historiography sidelined multiple groups in the Islamic world’s making, the field’s counternarratives have not posited them as apotheoses. Rather, they become emblems of “aporetic” possibility, per Mana Kia—of multimodal belonging within a transregional religiopolitical matrix rather than a delimited nation-state.” Erika Denise-Edwards, a specialist in Argentina, praises the project and adds that a similar "race-making" process took place there. Alan Mikhail suggests that the discussion of 1619 in Virginia should have included references both the the colonial war against local Indians and to John Smith's brief experience as an Ottoman slave in Eastern Europe. Indrani Chatterjee endorses the claim that African slaves were "the founders of modern American prosperity before making some comparisons with the status of South Asian slaves. Jeannette Eileen Jones praises the project fulsomely while also suggesting a few points about 1619 that might have been added. Danielle "Terrazas Williams praises Khalil Gibran Muhammad's discussion of sugar but wants more material on the Caribbean and the Haitian slave revolt.
Several contributors, on the other hand, criticize the project quite sharply from the left. "While offering astute analyses of US law and southern policy," writes Joanne Barker, "Hannah-Jones scaffolds those analyses around American (neo)liberalism. It is not America’s claims on an exceptionalist democracy that need to be challenged, just an understanding of its true protagonists. So erased within are more radical liberation movements and their demands not for recognition or inclusion but for substantive structural change. For revolution. As Glen Sean Coulthard argues, recognition or being recognized within an imperial formation or racial capitalism is a fallacy. It does not require anything about or within that formation to change or be changed." Karin Wulf attacks the project's traditional emphasis on "national politics (and economics and war)” in place of institutions like families. While calling the project "important," Sandra E. Green, an historian of Africa, says that "several chapters simplify to the point of distortion." Hannah Jones, she says, wrongly claimed that slavery wiped out African culture and ignored African-Americans who rejected the United States.
Two contributors critiqued the project from what might be called the historical center. Daryl Michael Scott says, rightly, that the text exaggerated "how scholars and our educational system have ignored slavery" and is "unabashedly presentist." "“With the participation of prominent professional historians," he writes perceptively, "The 1619 Project marks the end of a silent, unacknowledged phase—a historiographical shift from a moratorium on depicting African Americans as victims. The new sensibility is visible in the move away from referring to Blacks in bondage and the owners of human chattel as slaves and slaveholders, respectively. The 'enslaved' and 'enslaver' better convey an ongoing power dynamic that highlights the victims and victimizers.” He also attacks contributor Matthew Desmond for arguing that slavery was the reason that socialism never caught on in the US, and Jamelle Bouie's argument that John C. Calhoun would have approved of the January 6 insurrection. And James Sweet, the President of the AHA who later had to apologize for criticizing "presentism" in the historical profession, criticized the treatment of the 1619 arrivals as something unique. By that time, Sweet writes, some estimates suggest that more slaves had already crossed the Atlantic than ever reached British North America or the United States, and there were already slaves in Spanish Florida.
None of the distinguished historians who had signed the critical letter to the New York Times appear in the AHA Forum, and two of them have confirmed to me that they were never asked. More significant to me is this: not one of the contributors had anything significant to say about the politics of the United States at any moment from the Revolution up until the present day. That is the "old history" which Wood, Wilentz, McPherson and Oakes have practiced so effectively. Nor are they the only ones who might have added something: Oakes in his interview in the Trotskyite collection mentions five younger historians writing books about black voting before the Civil War, the end of school segregation in parts of the antebellum North, the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act, and the wave of manumission in the Mid=Atlantic states after the Revolution. Apparently they were not approached either.
The Trotskyite collection on the 1619 Project illustrates the value of true intellectual diversity. I am not myself a socialist, much less a revolutionary socialist, but the world view of David North, Thomas Mackaman and their colleagues has given them a broad view of history that is far more useful and accurate than the identitarian views that reign supreme on campus today. That view reminded me of the early Karl Marx, whom I studied and taught many years ago. Marx believed that both bourgeois society and liberal democracy were important historical steps forward, and that is why he, like so many other Europeans, rejoiced at the northern victory in the Civil War. He also believed that the spread of western civilization around the world fostered progress, and therefore supported European imperialism. I share the Trotskyites' view that in the long run political and economic change are more important drivers of history than race and gender. That view enabled them to write very useful analyses of the 1619 Project and some of the related historical issues. I was very sad to find that their book had not been purchased by any library in the west Boston suburbs, and only my status as a Harvard alumnus allowed me to get it from Widener Library after the librarians retrieved it from offsite storage. My return to the pages of the AHR, however, only confirmed for me how wise I was to quit the AHA a quarter century ago, and to predict that the kind of history that it was promoting was destined to die. History has become propaganda, and I am very sad that our leading newspaper has enthusiastically joined one particularly damaging propaganda effort that has had a huge impact on our politics. In the last week, another battle has broken out over Florida's new African American history curriculum. So far the outcry focuses on one small section of the curriculum, part of its treatment of slavery, which reads as follows:
"Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation). Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
This does not amount, as critics including the Vice President of the United States are claiming, to stating that slavery benefited black people. That some slaves did manage to earn their own money by hiring themselves out to perform certain tasks--occasionally even enough to buy their own freedom--is true. Unfortunately, as I have found online, many woke Americans are so desperate to portray slavery as nothing but an unremitting horror that true statements like this one are more repellent to them than false ones. I don't know that it was essential to include that provision, but I have looked through the whole curriculum. While I would suggest a few changes it strikes me as a balanced and thorough attempt to present the history of black people and race relations in the United States, slavery around the world and other related issues--one that would leave students with a far more honest picture of the ups an downs and triumphs and disasters of American racial history than the 1619 Project. It does not in the least substantiate the common accusation that Ron DeSantis and other Republican state leaders are trying to whitewash the history of race relations in the United States, and thus represents a rare hopeful sign for the future. Florida will be better off for it.
