The New York Times has caught a lot of grief for its “1619 Project”, which claims to explain all of American history in terms of slavery. And much of it is justified. Damon Linker, writing in The Week, gives a reasonable overview: “The New York Times surrenders to the left on race”, Damon offers praise where praise is due:
Now, there is a lot to admire in the paper's presentation of the 1619 Project — searing photographs, illuminating quotations from archival material, samples of poetry and fiction giving powerful voice to the black experience, and gripping journalistic summaries of scholarly histories. Much of it is wrenching, moving, and infuriating. The country's treatment of the slaves and their descendants through the century following emancipation and, in some respects, on down to the present was and is appalling — and the story of how it happened, and keeps happening, is extremely important for understanding the United States. Bringing this story to a wide audience is a worthwhile public service.
But there is a whopping downside as well:
Throughout the issue of the NYTM, headlines make, with just slight variations, the same rhetorical move over and over again: "Here is something unpleasant, unjust, or even downright evil about life in the present-day United States. Bet you didn't realize that slavery is ultimately to blame." Lack of universal access to health care? High rates of sugar consumption? Callous treatment of incarcerated prisoners? White recording artists "stealing" black music? Harsh labor practices? That's right — all of it, and far more, follows from slavery.
In fact, I found the packaging so off-putting—so portentous, condescending, and cheesy—“Everything you learned about slavery in school is wrong!”—as if we were all a nation of Homer Simpsons stretched out in our lazee-boys before our beloved wide screens shoveling honey-glazed pork rinds into our gaping Caucasian maws with both hands for fourteen hours a day—all of us who don’t work for the New York Times, that is—that at first I skipped the whole goddamn thing, only to go back and discover the same mixed bag that Damon described.
Many of the articles were good, but, shockingly—so shocking, in fact, that Timesfolk may not even believe me—I knew a lot of it already. When I was a boy, which was waaayyy back in the fifties, I read Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, a book about slavery written by someone who’d actually been a slave, inspired to do so after first reading a “Classic Comic Book” version of Washington’s story. Later, in the tenth grade, I stumbled across Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, just sitting there on the library shelf, where any dumb ass could pick it up. (I thought it might be like H. G. Wells. As it turned out, it was even better!)
And what about James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”? How about The Autobiography of Malcolm X? Or Soul on Ice? These were all works that received immense publicity decades ago—before, I suspect, many Timesfolk were even born. And what about “today”? I remember several decades ago a black woman telling me she thought interracial couples were crazy to expose themselves to the sort of hatred they received from both blacks and whites. Today, interracial marriage is (almost) passé. Recently, the Times own Thomas Edsall published a long piece examining the impressive gains in both education and income levels for some (but not all) blacks. But the 1619 Project isn’t interested in “good news.” Over a century ago, House Speaker Thomas Reed congratulated Theodore Roosevelt on this “original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” One could offer similar praise to the New York Times.
I was intrigued in particular by the “Everything you learned about slavery in school is wrong!” pitch. Well, if so, New York Times, tell me, what are our kids learning, not 60 years ago, when I went to school, but today? Nikita Stewart fills us in: ‘We are committing educational malpractice’: Why slavery is mistaught — and worse — in American schools.
Nikita begins her piece by quoting a text book written in 1863 (not a misprint) in the South. Guess what? It’s totally racist! Totally! Who could have imagined? Also guess what? Things haven’t changed that much! How do we know? Nikita tells us so.
Stewart follows the pattern used in many of the pieces, taking an egregious example from the past and then “explaining” that things haven’t changed much. For the meat of her article, she relies almost entirely on a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has done good work in the past but now is largely a solution (and a very well funded one, at that) in search of a problem. Of course the SPLC is going to find that America’s school books don’t adequately teach the role of slavery in American history. How could they not?
Part of the problem, Stewart says, is this: “Unlike math and reading, states are not required to meet academic content standards for teaching social studies and United States history.” She’s presumably referring to the “Common Core” standards, but states are not “required” to meet them, and in fact the whole “standards” movement, pushed by the Obama administration back in the day, has since fallen into considerable confusion, in conjunction with the entire Trumpian revolt against “experts”.
Speaking of her own schooling, Stewart tells us, “I was lucky; my Advanced Placement United States history teacher regularly engaged my nearly all-white class in debate, and there was a clear focus on learning about slavery beyond [Harriet] Tubman, Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, the people I saw hanging on the bulletin board during Black History Month.” How does she know she was “lucky”? Doesn’t she “mean” “My own experience was contrary to my thesis and therefore it must be exceptional”?
Instead of selectively quoting a handful of “experts” she chose to tell her what she wanted to hear, why didn’t Stewart do some actual leg work, or chair work, by reviewing the textbooks used in, say, California, Texas, New York, and Florida, the four largest states, containing about one third of the entire U.S. population, and including two states from the Confederacy? Isn’t that what the “1619 Project” is supposed to be about?
Because we most definitely need to examine the way the history of slavery and the Civil War is taught and understood in today’s USA. Nothing is more obvious than that leading figures, or “would be” figures, in the Trump Administration, starting most obviously with Donald Trump himself, and including former chief of staff/four-star Marine General John Kelly and dumped (dumped and disgraced) putative Federal Reserve Board appointee Stephen Moore, all cling to the absurd and disgusting notion that the North was the “bad guy” in the Civil War. As Moore “explained”, “The Civil War was about the South having its own rights”—you know, the right to enslave and oppress millions of human beings.
But it isn’t only the Trumpians who still maintain a soft spot—and a grossly meretricious soft spot it is—for the “Lost Cause”. Poor David French, who gets it from both the left (for being a conservative and, worse, an evangelical Christian) and the right (for being insufficiently bad ass), is going to get a little for me. There’s good Dave, as in this excellent article in which he both describes his laudable efforts to prevent the muzzling of “wicked” Christian groups on campus and denounces proposals on the right to restrict the First Amendment rights of those on the left (largely “the media” and “Big Tech”):
Never in my life have I seen such victimhood on the right. Never in my life have I seen conservatives more eager to rationalize passivity and seek the aid of politicians to make their lives easier. They look to politicians — even incompetent, depraved politicians — and cry out, “Protect us!”
Admirable words. But here are some not so admirable, in an unfortunate piece with the unfortunate title “Don’t Tear Down the Confederate Battle Flag”.1 After launching into a scarcely objective account of the South’s motivation for succession—scarcely better than Moore’s—French falls into total small-boy, flag-waving, saber-waving mode:
Those men [the southern armies] fought against a larger, better-supplied force, yet — under some of history’s more brilliant military commanders — were arguably a few better-timed attacks away from prevailing in America’s deadliest conflict.
So yay Team Dixie, right? If only “we” had won. Then slavery forever! Is that what French dreams of? That southerners could continue to exercise their “right” to whip millions of black men, rape millions of black women, and sell their children for profit? If only those few attacks had been better timed! Damn it!
Couldn’t the Germans say the same thing about World War II? If only we had won. Then the Master Race forever!
These “brave men” at whose shrine French worships, wantonly murdered all black Union troops they captured, in utter violation of the most basic “laws” of war. When Robert E. Lee (French’s “gallant” hero, of course) marched into Maryland and Pennsylvania, he captured black American citizens and impressed them into slavery, sent them south to labor in defense of their own oppression. Mr. French fancies himself a Christian. But sometimes, it seems, Christians forget.
Afterwords
It’s “interesting” that both Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist and Supreme Court Justice Antonine Scalia felt somehow compelled to parade their opposition to Brown v. Board of Education, Scalia “explaining” that liking the sort of judicial thinking that produced Brown because it produced Brown was like liking Hitler because he developed the Volkswagen—which by the way is entirely untrue,2 but whatever, Brown equals Hitler, got it?
1. French says “battle flag” because as a true southerner he knows that the familiar “stars and bars” was not the flag of the Confederacy.
2. The Volkswagen was largely designed by an Austro-Hungarian designer named Béla Barényi in the mid-twenties and then “modified”, sans credit to Barényi, by Ferdinand Porsche a few years later. Hitler planned to put the car into production as a "people's car" but, unsurprisingly, the cars that were built were all for military use. After the war, an enterprising British major thought the bombed out VW factory could be repaired and used to create jobs for workers in a shattered Germany.
