On the 400th anniversary of the landing and sale of the first Africans in Virginia, The New York Times published a series of essays — the “1619 Project” — by journalists and scholars on the meaning of slavery to America. Its purpose was “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Oddly, this gesture toward questioning the national hymn of progress provoked a loud protest from both liberal and conservative academics.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, begins her introductory essay by approaching slavery and racism through her own family’s stories, and then describes the much-overlooked centrality of slavery to the economic rise of the United States. Hannah-Jones and the other essayists frame America as a nation born in the protection of slavery whose basic institutions are constructed on a racist logic. “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well-articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity,” Hannah-Jones wrote in what became the most criticized sentence in the collection.
Five distinguished historians of early America, Sean Wilentz and James McPherson of Princeton, Gordon Wood of Brown, Victoria Bynum of Texas State, and James Oakes of the City University of New York Graduate Center, responded by penning a protest letter to The New York Times. Although, they said, they applauded the 1619 Project’s goal of foregrounding the history of slavery and racism in American history, they took issue with what they alleged were “factual errors” and with an interpretation they claimed was a “displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”
While the 1619 Project ranged across a large swath of the American experience, including redlining, mass incarceration, the history of racist medicine, the white appropriation of black music, and the emergence of historically black colleges, the five historians’ letter focused obsessively on the project’s reinterpretations of the American Revolution and the abolitionist movement. With a certainty rarely found among historians, they write: “The project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue.’ This is not true … every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.” Additionally, they call the 1619 Project’s assertion that African Americans have largely had to struggle for their rights by themselves a “distortion.” The signatories to the letter demanded the “removal of these mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications.”
It just so happens that the objections center on the exclusion of white activists.
In point of fact, beyond the initial misspelling of the patriot Samuel Bryan’s name and the incorrect statement that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 (it was only approved as a final draft that day) — errors that the Times quickly corrected — all the complaints made by this gang of historians were not really about errors of fact but about matters of interpretation. As Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, noted, most of what these critics called factual errors were “more a matter of emphasis” than “correct or incorrect interpretation.”
Underneath the complaints about historical inaccuracies and exaggerations lies a deeper concern about the meaning of the American story. Wilentz, for instance, is so invested in understanding the birth of America as the progressive unfolding of Enlightenment ideals that he has proposed that the slave-owning authors of the Constitution consciously laid the groundwork for later abolitionism by excluding from the great charter the phrase “property in slaves” that would have precluded emancipation. Others seem to fear the crumbling of the clay feet of heroes such as Abraham Lincoln in an era when few agree on which national idols to celebrate.
All five of the signatories to the letter criticizing the 1619 Project are of the generation of scholars that rewrote history “from the ground up.” They were influenced by the social history that turned away from the stories of great white men and master narratives of culture. Post-civil-rights-era researchers pushed open the doors of history and ushered many marginalized groups in. But in an odd way, their putative universalism resists the project of retelling the national story around the African American experience.
From their perspective, the 1619 Project, by claiming the centrality and ubiquity of antiblack racism in the national story, silences other groups’ struggles. As Wilentz put it, “The fight for black freedom is a universal fight; it’s a fight for everyone. In the end, it affected the fight for women’s rights — everything. That’s the glory of it … To minimize that in any way is, I think, bad for understanding the radical tradition in America.” A few weeks after the 1619 Project was published, Hannah-Jones mentioned that among her earliest critics were those complaining that she “was centering black people and not spending time on Native and Indigenous people.”
Wilentz’s clutch of historians seem most upset that the efforts of anti-racist whites, like Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, or John Brown, are overlooked and the racially progressive aspects of complicated white leaders like Abraham Lincoln are downplayed. Oakes criticizes the “political culture right now,” which overlooks the role of white progressives by “erasing the American Revolution.” Wood also complains that efforts to remap America’s origins, like the 1619 Project, erase the role of white liberals. “How could slavery be worth preserving for someone like John Adams, who hated slavery and owned no slaves? … Ignoring his and other northerners’ roles in the decision for independence can only undermine the credibility of your project with the general public.” Bynum likewise objects to what she calls the 1619 Project’s “seemingly willful determination to omit virtually all interracial relationships and cooperative efforts to end slavery, combat racism, or work across racial lines.”
These are not points bearing on the course of history, because most of these scholars admit that the “small minority” of abolitionists who looked past color were outliers, unrepresentative of the great current of racist culture in the U.S., which was the focus of the 1619 Project. Absent a claim that not including this handful of characters somehow distorts the story of that mainstream culture, their complaint is actually one of fairness, or perhaps of a failure to properly venerate the new patriotic heroes they helped to discover buried in the working class. It just so happens that all their objections center on the exclusion of white activists and leaders from the national narrative.
Since then, other scholars, journalists, and activists have piled on, including a group of conservatives organized by a former American Enterprise Institute fellow, Robert L. Woodson Sr., calling themselves the “1776 Project.” Their goal, they say, is to “challenge those who assert America is forever defined by its past failures, such as slavery.” Toward this end, they have recruited a collection of conservative think-tank fellows including Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele; celebrity pundits like Clarence Page, a columnist; John H. McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University; Jason D. Hill, a philosopher; and more than a few Republican Party operatives.
The 1776 Project team largely attacks the 1619 Project on the grounds, they say, that its message disempowers people of color. They make this argument in a dozen essays mostly given to deriding “woke” liberals who dangerously deny the nation’s founding ideals by obsessively focusing on slavery. Such “perpetrators of race grievance,” according to Woodson Sr., intentionally ignore the record of black entrepreneurship, including even those “blacks who were in slavery but not of slavery — who maintained a strong moral code and a belief in self-determination” and were upwardly mobile. Some even “died as millionaires.”
To counter the revisionists who undermine the majesty of America’s founding, the 1776 Project essayists proclaim it their mission to “uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values” and to “celebrate the progress America has made on delivering its promise of equality and opportunity.” But at some point the effort to celebrate the principles of equality and democracy expressed by a founding generation that didn’t practice them tips over into historical fabrication. In the course of attacking the 1619 Project for its “focus on our victimization,” Page burnishes the nation’s founders by claiming that though they may have denied the equality they proclaimed to some, they consciously crafted “legal mechanisms to extend those equal protections to others” over time. In doing so Page overlooks such stark contradictory evidence as the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ruled that African Americans were not, and had never been, included within the phrase “We the people.” It took three amendments to restructure the American Constitution to include black Americans in that ideal. Just because James Madison and the other drafters of the Constitution included a mechanism for amending the document (though they prohibited any amendments that might restrict the slave trade for 20 years) does not mean they deserve credit for setting in motion the gears that would turn history toward birthright citizenship and equal protection of the laws.
Written before the controversy over the 1619 Project erupted, Steele’s essay — an excerpt from his new book, Shame — is the most theoretically sophisticated of the contributions, though it is not always aware of its own intellectual debts. Steele attacks those writers proclaiming “a belief in the characterological evil of America and the entire white Western world.” He lumps together Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism, Léopold Senghor’s Négritude, Islamic extremism, and Second-Wave Feminism as instances of a type of political identity that “collectivizes people … herds them into victim-focused identities and consoles them with a vague myth of their own human superiority.” Such formations, Steele says, not only survive the overcoming of historical evils, they are fed by the dominant society’s recognition, which reifies them into an axiomatic “poetic truth” for “the Park Avenue feminist, the black affirmative-action baby from a well-heeled background, and white liberals generally.” Ironically, Steele’s formulation is actually a twisted analog of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the “psychological wage,” the feeling of higher social status that compensated poor whites for their racism when it had no direct economic benefits for them.
In the hands of most of the 1776 Project’s contributors, an obsession with repudiating the centrality of American racism leads their arguments back into the shadow of Western chauvinism. Steele, for instance, recounts a trip through Africa in which he preferred the capital of Senegal to the capital of Ghana: “It wasn’t ‘negritude’ that made Dakar a little more bearable than Accra. There were still some French there, and it was their fast-fading idea of Dakar as an African Paris that meant better food and the hint of café society.”
While appearing on its face as a flap over historical facts and the meaning of a few key events, at the heart of this controversy is a clash of fundamental understandings of what New Left historians used to call the “Usable Past.” For the first time, the 1619 Project pushed into public view a theory that holds that the architecture of America is built of antiblack racism and that America’s evolution was propelled by African American struggles for liberation. To many conservatives whose patriotism is not resilient enough to withstand morally compromised founders, such a history is anathema. But it is also unusable to some scholarly progressives who pushed to expand the historical canon beyond great white men, and for whom this seems like a step away from a national story rooted more in class than in race.
Many specialists studying the construction of race and the role of racism in the making of America would agree that all of these protests, whether from conservatives or liberals, are an overreaction to interpretive innovations long established and broadly held. The retrieval of racism from the margins and footnotes of history, which is the spine connecting past and present in many of our curricula and syllabi, took place long before the 1619 Project debuted.
What the essayists of the 1619 Project pulled together was a brilliantly accessible summation of interpretive trends building within history and ethnic studies for decades — and maybe even longer, if Du Bois’s observation about “the true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America” is credited as its authentic origin.