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| Nikole Hannah-Jones |
The 1619 Project purports to be a historical analysis of how slavery shaped American political, social, and economic institutions. My concern is that it has spawned a high-school curriculum. While I remain all for efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to American history, my view of the project is that its displacing of historical understanding with ideology, and thus lacks credibility as historical analysis.
I concede that slavery’s legacy still shapes American
life. If used to supplement traditional curricula, I have no problem with the
project at all. What I take issue with specifically is Ms. Hannah-Jones’s essay
recounting black Americans’ struggle to “make democracy real,” and sociologist
Matthew Desmond’s essay linking the crueler aspects of American
capitalism to the labor practices that arose under slavery, thoroughly refuted
by Professor Oakes.
Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay says that “one of
the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from
Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as
abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain.
From abolitionism to the civil-rights movement, civil
rights activists have employed the rhetoric and documents of the founding era
to establish their claims to equal citizenship as in agreement with American
tradition. Colonial America’s rising anti-slavery movement was conspicuous and
had a weighty influence on the Revolution, a radical break from millennia in
which human slavery was accepted around the world. Teaching students that the Revolution was
fought in part to secure slavery promotes a basic misunderstanding not only of
what the Revolution was about, but what America has stood for since 1776. The
Revolution was sparked in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was
strongest, and the Revolution gave impetus to abolitionism in the North.
Hannah-Jones contention that
black Americans have fought for their freedom “largely alone” is a half-truth
at best. Consider anti-slavery Quakers organizing boycotts of goods produced
through slave labor, abolitionists springing fugitive slaves from prison, and union
workers participating in the March on Washington. It would appear that the
struggle for black freedom has been to some degree interracial, eventually affecting
the fight for women's rights. The problem history teachers are presented with
at present is that much of American history has been written by authors
offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. It is
the task of the professional historian to discern which claims are ideological,
and which ones are objective.
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