The 1619 Project

Lyv · Aug 20, 2019

The 1619 Project in the New York Times is "The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

The link is for the New York Times interactive version, but for those who don't subscribe or choose not to go there, a non-interactive, free version is here. I'm working my way through. The list of contributors contains quite a few Black people (and a couple of white) who've helped make me a less stupid white person (a work in progress).

Vox:

The 1619 Project, as it appears online, is sprawling and interactive. Matthew Desmond writes about how slavery shaped modern capitalism and workplace management norms. Jamelle Bouie connects the early 19th century political efforts to preserve slavery to current conservative political movements like the Tea Party and its efforts to nullify federal authority. Kevin Kruse explains how the country’s history of racism contributes to Atlanta traffic.

The series has drawn praise from political pundits, scholars, and even 2020 candidate Kamala Harris. And it represents a broader shift in how the story of race is gaining traction in newsrooms. Publications across the news media are giving more space in their pages, on their programming, and among their ranks to reporting on race.

There's a lot to discuss about it as a text, but I also feel there's a broader discussion about the impact, reactions, etc. There has been an angry outpouring of criticism from conservatives. It's such a precarious time, I feel it's somehow crucial not to allow those who criticize it to protect white privilege and promote white nationalism (not just when talking about this project of course).

Not exclusively, because there was some criticism from non-black people of color, but from what I saw, that resulted in more of a discussion between Black people and non-black people of color about erasure. And that was a fraction of the criticism. A much, much greater number of conservatives reacted negatively, for very different reasons, with much anger.

The New York Times 1619 Project is reshaping the conversation on slavery. Conservatives hate it.

At the heart of both men’s criticism is that the New York Times’ focus on race is part of what they and other conservatives see as a broader decline at the newspaper. It’s the type of criticism the institution often hears from President Donald Trump, who has referred to the newspaper as the “failing New York Times.”

Yes, Newt Gingrich and Erick Erickson (and more) are upset that a project about slavery focuses on race.

Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage?

For white conservatives, accepting that the United States wouldn’t exist without slavery would mean acknowledging that the Founders were not the creators of an infallible civic religion, which sets the limits on all modern claims for justice. It would mean that liberty was, in practice, as much a matter of exclusion as inclusion, and that success and prosperity owe more to centuries of exploitation than to God’s blessing of an exceptional people.

But their political project depends on not even considering those possibilities. And so their response was equal parts furious and vague, a barrage of arguments that discussing this country’s history is the last thing this country needs: the Times was being divisive, or it was being nihilistic, or it was implementing a secret scheme to make Americans vote against Trump by claiming that racism was an ongoing problem.

Mostly, they wanted to express that they were very personally angry. The fact that they took a wide-ranging examination of slavery’s lasting ills as an attack on themselves was a fairly obvious confession.

Examples are included.

From a discussion with the lead reporter for the project, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Of course. It's not incidental that 10 of the first 12 presidents of the United States were slaveowners. This is where, at that time, this kind of very burgeoning nation was getting so much of its wealth and its power. It's what allows this kind of ragged group of colonists to believe that they could defeat the most powerful empire in the world at that time. And it went everywhere. It was north and south. We talk about the industrial revolution — where do Americans believe that the cotton that was being spun in those textile mills was coming from, was coming from enslaved people who are growing that cotton in the south. The rum industry, which was really the currency of the slave trade, that rum was being processed and sold in the United States. The banking industry that rises in New York City is rising largely to provide the mortgages and insurance policies and to finance the slave trade. The shipbuilders are northern shipbuilders. The people who are sending voyages to Africa to bring enslaved people here are all in the north. So this is a truly national enterprise but we prefer to think that it was just some backward Southerners, because that is the way that we can kind of deal with our fundamental paradox that at our beginning that we were a nation built on both the inalienable rights of man and also a nation built on bondage.

Gregg · Aug 20, 2019

Smithsonianmag.com had an article about this topic nearly 2 years ago. The author wrote:

Unfortunately, 1619 is not the best place to begin a meaningful inquiry into the history of African peoples in America. Certainly, there is a story to be told that begins in 1619, but it is neither well-suited to help us understand slavery as an institution nor to help us better grasp the complicated place of African peoples in the early modern Atlantic world. For too long, the focus on 1619 has led the general public and scholars alike to ignore more important issues and, worse, to silently accept unquestioned assumptions that continue to impact us in remarkably consequential ways. As a historical signifier, 1619 may be more insidious than instructive.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...our-understanding-american-history-180964873/

ElaineA · Aug 20, 2019

What is the point of pointing out the Smithsonian's perspective, here, Gregg? (I ask because you just left it there without comment, so I'm not sure.) If you're saying this project shouldn't have been undertaken because there are "other important points in history," that sounds to me a lot like the ways conservatives are attacking this project. Sideswipe it with "Well, but..."

Based on the blow back I've seen and read, it seems to me most conservatives would just rather pretend that black people don't exist/don't have a history/didn't have an outsized hand in the building of the institutions that made this country tick, most assuredly building the economic engine that led to today.

"Well, 1619 isn't the right year" is...quite a take. :Shrug:

Lyv · Aug 20, 2019

Looks like Smithsonian Magazine didn't read the New York Times feature either, then. Since it was written before this project was conceived, of course, but also because having done a skim it's not actually relevant. Now, I can't say I read the whole New York Times feature because it's sprawling and I am taking my time (and life interferes), but I am working on it.

Did you read it, Gregg? Like, any of it? Because your response suggests that the Smithsonian piece is about "this topic," but I don't think you're fairly representing the New York Times feature. It doesn't seem possible you did more than try to debunk it without so much as clicking on a link, which is basically what I've conservative I've seen opine about it seems to have done. But I don't want to assume too much. Did you read it? If not, will you? If not, why not? There is plenty to select from, essays and creative works from some great minds and talented writers. Seems if you went to the trouble of looking up an article to, I guess, counter it, you would read some. Did you?

Lyv · Aug 20, 2019

Oh, and I gave Gregg the respect of clicking his link, and reading as much as I had the energy and alertness for (the medical marijuana edibles I take for sleep are kicking in) but will finish tomorrow. I did think it might be worthwhile to see what the author of that piece thinks about The 1619 project. I figured he might have weighed in, but I haven't seen any of the angry conservatives slagging the NYT piece bring him up. So, I found his Twitter feed. He says The 1619 project is "fantastic." And

And here's the real point, and why I believe my work (including my blog post) is entirely consistent with #Project1619: All of this leads me to argue that the history of race and slavery is NOT "African-American History" or "Black History." Its just history -- yours and mine./

I planned to do a deeper reading of the Smithsonian piece tomorrow (I had guests, my hospice nurse is coming early in the morning, and I only had time to skim. I read things, even and often especially if I think they might express a different view than mine, or challenge my position.

And as I read the project, I want to read more of Guasco's Twitter feed. Especially after reading this (this is two complete tweets combined for simplicity. They are consecutive in a thread):

That past is what we choose to make meaningful in the present. So I'm sorry if your family didn't own slaves or if your people came here in the 1920s or if you grew up in one of the flyover states or some of your best friends are black. That's irrelevant. This is our history./14

Maybe you should be asking yourself why that is so hard to accept?/end

Indeed.

Gregg · Aug 20, 2019

Just pointing out that the 1619 project is not something new and has been discussed before.

Lyv · Aug 20, 2019

Gregg said:
Just pointing out that the 1619 project is not something new and has been discussed before.

The 1619 Project is new. It's the name of the New York Times piece. It can't have been discussed before, because they just created it. The article you posted isn't about it. The Smithsonian author, Guasco, is arguing against over-emphasizing the year 1619 when teaching students about slavery. This is why he says his work is consistent with the NYT feature. And he's having to explain that, it looks like, because conservatives saw a headline they thought would cast doubt on the NYT feature, didn't bother to read it, and ran with it. Not saying you did that, but some did, and the author has responded.

So, it definitely looks like you haven't read much if any of the NYT piece (I don't even think you read my post, frankly. The thread title, maybe). Which is fine. No reason to read a collection of writing you're commenting about. And there's already an article that has a completely different focus. There couldn't possibly be anything new or different, no insights or fresh perspectives.

Thank you for the link, though. I love finding other sources and supporting materials, though I will be working through the NYT piece for awhile.

nighttimer · Aug 23, 2019

Gregg said:
Smithsonianmag.com had an article about this topic nearly 2 years ago. The author wrote:

Unfortunately, 1619 is not the best place to begin a meaningful inquiry into the history of African peoples in America. Certainly, there is a story to be told that begins in 1619, but it is neither well-suited to help us understand slavery as an institution nor to help us better grasp the complicated place of African peoples in the early modern Atlantic world. For too long, the focus on 1619 has led the general public and scholars alike to ignore more important issues and, worse, to silently accept unquestioned assumptions that continue to impact us in remarkably consequential ways. As a historical signifier, 1619 may be more insidious than instructive.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...our-understanding-american-history-180964873/

Are we seriously having a debate about the date when the first African was brought to America in chains? That's the best argument conservatives can make against The 1619 Project?

It's not the facts we're arguing about. It's the date. It's wrong so the whole project is invalid!

Get outta here with that noise. This is some D'nesh D'souza/Larry Elder/Candace Owens level of dark-skinned stupid. :e2tomato:

There are few things more reliable in this world than whenever White conservatives get all butt-hurt and sensitive that the reality of American history is a lot of bad,evil, terrible, not-so-good, awful things occurred in the building of this country and a great deal of it was built on the backs of Black slaves. We have "this massive hang-up about slavery" because of the cowardice of Whites in general and the hair-on-fire hysteria of White conservatives specifically display in any discussion of history that places the U.S. in a less than flattering light.

The whining and hand-wringing of the White Right is as predictable as it is pathetic and the lack of substantive arguments against the project only demonstrates how intellectually defective they are.

Your great saints were child rapists. Your sacred texts are false alibis for a world-historic crime. That isn’t a hill your shining city sits upon, but the unmarked graves of men it condemned to unlived lives. The prosperity you saw as confirmation of God’s favor is actually proof of your complicity in theft; tucked beneath the bounty your fathers bequeathed you are a pile of unpaid debts. And the collective identity that gave you belonging – that freed you from the solitary confinement of your self, and commuted the death sentence that is your flesh – is a hateful lie that all non-racists are duty-bound to lay to rest.

This is, ostensibly, what the typical white conservative hears when reading (or imagining what it would be like to read) the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”

The newspaper’s ambitious effort to spotlight the centrality of slavery to the American story – by tracing genealogical lines from the forced labor camps of the antebellum South to the rapacity of modern America’s economic order, the inequities of its health-care system, the excess sugar in its diet, the huddled masses in its prisons, and congestion on its highways – should not be above criticism. All histories are reductive to some degree; reality is too complex and multifarious for human language to fully contain. And popular histories are even more so, as lay readers do not want their stories constantly interrupted with parenthetical acknowledgements of competing narratives from other corners of the academy. Thus, the 1619 Project puts forward some tendentious claims that scholars (including ones who have no reverence for our nation’s founding slaveholders) feel compelled to contest. Meanwhile, various journalists and news readers have voiced coherent (if, in my view, unconvincing) qualms with the package’s overriding concept.

But on certain segments of the right, criticisms of the package have been so histrionic, they read less as arguments than primal screams. For The Resurgent’s Eric Erickson, the “1619 Project” is nothing less than a call for insurrection:

If the nation is founded on slavery and slavery is woven into the very fabric of our society, then our society is illegitimate. The only way to overcome it is to overturn it. That would take revolution. This is the path the New York Times goes down. Once it lights this fire, it will not be able to control it. But it wants to strike the match anyway.

The Week’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry sounded an equally histrionic note, arguing that if one accepts the Times’ claims, “the only moral response is to hate America and to hate all its institutions and replace them with ones based on diametrically opposed values.” The Federalist’s Benjamin Weingarten, meanwhile, insisted that the project’s true purpose was “to delegitimize America, and further divide and demoralize its citizenry.”

These arguments are unintelligible. The 1619 Project’s introductory essay is a paean to black American patriotism, in which reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones insists not merely on the possibility of rescuing our republic’s liberatory ideals from the legacy of white supremacy, but on the necessity of doing so. As a purely logical matter, meanwhile, it’s hard to see the connection between Gobry and Erickson’s premises and their conclusions. Why would accepting the (intuitive) premise, “the monstrous economic system that prevailed in the South for more than two centuries actually left some durable imprints on American culture and institutions” obligate us to violently overthrow our government? Which is to say, why would it invalidate all concerns about the human costs of insurrection? Isn’t a foundational claim of conservatism that all human institutions are inevitably flawed, and thus, that the existence of injustice within an existing order does not constitute a persuasive argument for radically remaking society?

But if the right’s catastrophizing response to the 1619 Project is incomprehensible in intellectual terms, it’s more understandable in psychological ones. The Times’s narrative does not delegitimize the U.S. nation-state, or American patriotism. But it very much does challenge the legitimacy of white American identity – and the secular saints and potted histories that lend that identity its substance. And for many white conservatives in the U.S., the idea of surrendering that identity is quite painful.

Anyone who thinks the effects of slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation is simply ignorant of America's Original Sin and how pernicious and pervasive an evil it was. Nobody's telling Jews to "get over" the Holocaust. Why are Blacks told to "get over" slavery?

Gregg said:
Just pointing out that the 1619 project is not something new and has been discussed before.

Outside of a college classroom or a campus bar, in my entire adult life, I have never, and I emphasize NEVER, had any sort of serious, in-depth, historically accurate and intellectually honest discussion with any White person that lasted beyond 10 minutes and typically it can be summed up thusly: "Yeah, slavery was a bad deal for your people, but White folks suffered too and most of them didn't own any slaves."

Which is why I don't have discussions with White Americans about slavery any more. They either want to lecture me that it wasn't so bad because Africans got to come to America or they want to say it was long ago and far and all the slaves and slaveowners are dead, and why are we still talking about his old stuff anyway?

Yeah. I'll take a pass.

ElaineA · Aug 23, 2019

nighttimer said:
Outside of a college classroom or a campus bar, in my entire adult life, I have never, and I emphasize NEVER, had any sort of serious, in-depth, historically accurate and intellectually honest discussion with any White person that lasted beyond 10 minutes and typically it can be summed up thusly: "Yeah, slavery was a bad deal for your people, but White folks suffered too and most of them didn't own any slaves."

Which is why I don't have discussions with White Americans about slavery any more. They either want to lecture me that it wasn't so bad because Africans got to come to America or they want to say it was long ago and far and all the slaves and slaveowners are dead, and why are we still talking about his old stuff anyway?

Yeah. I'll take a pass.

*raises hand*

I was one of those people who said, "My entire family came from Ireland, we weren't part of slavery" for quite a lot of my adult life. Granted, I never diminished the horrors of slavery, or thought Black Americans "didn't have it so bad," but I didn't see how reparations would resolve anything. "History is full of bad sh**. We can't pay for everything." kinds of thoughts. It wasn't until the next generation of my family, my kids and niece & nephews, schooled me on institutional racism. As liberal as I consider myself, I simply hadn't really really LISTENED to the voices trying to educate on the effects and realities of having racism built into our system. It was easier to think of all the stories as something more along the lines of one-offs. Such a white person perspective.

I understand why you would be sick and tired of doing the labor of trying to open the eyes, and minds, of people like me, NT. It must seem so thankless from your end. But I'm damn glad my kids went to universities were these intellectual conversations did happen as a matter of course, and even more grateful that they challenged my stubbornness and complacency. I figure it's up to me now--now that I understand (and see) more--to push along that knowledge wherever, and with whomever, I can.

Lyv · Aug 23, 2019

I posted in a thread about reparations I started here that all my family came over from Ireland and Italy in the late 1800s and 1920s respectively. Never owned slaves. Lived in abject poverty and faced terrible bigotry. All those things I hear from people against reparations are true for my family. And they're why I strongly support reparations. Because in less than one full generation, my family escaped poverty and became comfortably, solidly middle class, then upper middle class. They worked hard and made tremendous sacrifices, but they worked no harder and sacrificed no more than Black families who did have the same advantages and chances we did. I fully support reparations and work to understand and dismantle the white supremacist society I grew up in, which benefited my grandparents and all their descendants from the moment their feet touched American soil.

Elaine, I don't think I ever said it as a "hands clean" argument, but it's probably because almost everyone I grew up with (Boston suburb) was Irish and Italian and had the same story, so it was just something everyone shared that was no big deal and not something you cared about much (the difference nationality sure did; the schoolyard taunts were the old slurs for Irish and Italians that were passed down). It's only when I saw people who aren't like you using it as an argument against not only reparations, but everything related to addressing racial inequality in this country. That made me think about it, at the same time I was reading and listening to Black activists and having some late but needed realizations. I've been stupid a long time, but it's think it's almost luck that I never raised my family story until I was a little less stupid (not saying you are stupid, but honestly, I have tried to be a good white person my whole life and am now seeing all the ways I did unintentional harm. I just want to be better and do the work.

ElaineA · Aug 23, 2019

Lyv said:
I fully support reparations and work to understand and dismantle the white supremacist society I grew up in, which benefited my grandparents and all their descendants from the moment their feet touched American soil.

Yep, I've come to this understanding much later than I wish I had.

Lyv said:
I just want to be better and do the work.

A damn worthy goal.

The 1619 Project

Lyv

I meant to do that.

Gregg

Life is good

ElaineA

All about that action, boss.

Lyv

I meant to do that.

Lyv

I meant to do that.

Gregg

Life is good

Lyv

I meant to do that.

nighttimer

No Gods No Masters

ElaineA

All about that action, boss.

Lyv

I meant to do that.

ElaineA

All about that action, boss.