We are currently living in the beginning of a new dark age. Those of us who believe in the liberal values of liberty, free speech, reason, good faith debate, and academic freedom are engaged in an existential battle with the forces of darkness. A new religion, cloaked in postmodernist language, seeks to convert the masses by force. They employ shame tactics, character assassination, and defend acts of physical intimidation which compel obedience, demand fidelity to their designs, and enforce public declarations of original sin. They demand commitment to an ideological purity as they simultaneously present themselves as agents of equality, inclusion, and justice. They are a den of thieves trained in the art of a slippery lexicon where words don’t carry their original public meaning and your words are verboten. As they deconstruct you and the world around you, reducing history and science to a glowing pile of embers, they claim that your very words are violence and your very thoughts dangerous. They engage in a form of witchcraft, believing that certain words contain metaphysical power. They invoke magic spells and incantations in the form of metaphorical self-immolation and have reprised notions of transgenerational guilt. They will label you a blasphemer for daring to assert that the sky is blue. Everything is constructed and nothing is authentic, save for what they decree.
Now, they are telling you what your history is, and it doesn’t matter that what they tell you isn’t actually true, that the history is more nuanced than they claim, or that they are telling lies by omission. You will be made to bend to the agents of the new dark age. If you do not, they will burn you at the stake in the town square of public opinion they themselves manipulate and curate.
The gamble they are making is that if they use tactics of conflation and obfuscation, people will no longer recognize objective truth. They think the truth doesn’t matter—is just a matter of unjust politics—and are wagering that people will generally give up on notions of reality as a trade-off for a little bit of peace of mind.
“Maybe if we give them what they want, they will leave us alone.”
There’s no evidence for that. They’re not leaving the people who give into them alone; they’re demanding more from them. But even if they were, the point stands. The truth matters, and some of us care about the truth. Some, like myself, who work in the field of history, will not allow it to become another weapon of nihilism utilized by those who seek to manipulate the past for transparently political ends.
As soon as the first essay of the 1619 Project was published in August 2019 in the New York Times Magazine, it almost immediately faced criticism for a false historical narrative which was present at the center of its thesis. Writer and main contributor to the project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, claims in the essay that the protection of slavery was one of the key motivators of the American Revolution. She asserts that “left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere… In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.” This is a powerful assertion, and one that fits within a particular worldview that sees the United States as nothing but an oppressor, founded not only upon slavery but upon the institution’s preservation. It’s astonishing stuff, and it’s completely, historically wrong.
Jones tips her hand a bit early when she goes on to note that it “is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.”
Jones’s argument that the United States was not founded as a democracy is true. That it was founded as a so-called slavocracy less so. The United States was not founded as a democracy but as a constitutional republic. This is not hair-splitting. An entire world of scholarship in political philosophy is devoted to understanding the intellectual history and political philosophy of the framers, and their distrust of direct democracy is neither controversial nor surprising. The fact that many have come to call the United States a democracy since the Progressive Era does not diminish the fact that the United States is not, nor was intended to be, a democracy. The inability for Jones to recognize the important difference between democracy and constitutional republicanism reveals the low-grade quality of her scholarship and the political, rather than educational, aims of the 1619 Project.
In response to the first published essay, a small group of prominent historians wrote a letter to the New York Times, critiquing its broken history. The historians, which included Gordon S. Wood and Victoria Bynum, applauded the 1619 Project for what it was trying to do but nevertheless condemned the thesis central to the essay. The letter disputes “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’” The letter goes on to accuse the 1619 Project, and Jones, of committing “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”
This is no small matter. The issue has largely been ignored, despite reports in some publications. Most historians, and indeed most journalists, have remained silent. Possibly the most essential voice among critics, however, did not come from the historians who wrote to the Times but a PhD at Northwestern, Leslie M. Harris, who wrote an opinion piece in Politico titled, “I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me.” In the article, published in March 2020, Harris states, “I vigorously disputed the [preservation of slavery] claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.” She goes on, “Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay.” Perhaps most powerfully, Harris observes “the complicated picture of the Revolutionary era that the New York Times missed: white Southerners might have wanted to preserve slavery in their territory, but white Northerners were much more conflicted, with many opposing the ownership of enslaved people in the North even as they continued to benefit from investments in the slave trade and slave colonies. More importantly for Hannah-Jones’ argument, slavery in the Colonies faced no immediate threat from Great Britain, so colonists wouldn’t have needed to secede to protect it.”
It needs to be noted that Harris’s article also condemned the historians who had criticized the 1619 Project. She notes that these are historians who have generally not focused on the issues of race and slavery in the history of the United States and North America. This is a point worth noting, but it does not discount their service in pointing to the flawed thesis of the project. I share Harris’s sentiment that for too long American history ignored the role that slavery and racism played. I also agree with Harris’s assertion that the “The United States was not, in fact, founded to protect slavery—but the Times is right that slavery was central to its story.” It is simply unfortunate that Nikole Hannah-Jones did not correct her flawed thesis—a flaw pointed out to her by Harris—prior to publication. The fact Jones saw no need to make the correction, and that she and the New York Times only sought to address it publicly once criticisms became public, demonstrates a level of hubris not befitting an historian or a journalist of the esteemed publication. Jones has stated that the correction will be made in later editions as well as in the book edition published by Random House. How such a “correction” can be made when it undercuts the entire thesis of the first essay remains to be seen.
There has indeed been plenty of discussion regarding the 1619 Project over the past year. The matter became more relevant, however, when Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in May 2020. More than this, the Pulitzer Center (which is not associated with the Pulitzer Prizes) is now working in partnership with the 1619 Project in “educational programming” to “engage students,” according to the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project website. Thus an essay published by the New York Times, which got the central thesis of its opening essay wrong, has won a prestigious award and is being used to create curriculum for students. This is history education in 2020. The Pulitzer Prize administrator, Dana Canedy, acknowledged that “perhaps most historians” would disagree with the central premise of the 1619 Project that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery. Amazingly, as Canedy admitted this, she stated she was nevertheless “very proud of this selection” and that its “fresh political perspective, provocativeness of the argument, and engaging writing” is what was being awarded. You catch that? The 1619 Project won the Pulitzer Prize for its prose, not for its historical analysis.
The matter of history education has grown more complex in the wake of recent protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Protests have (d)evolved from a legitimate response to an epidemic of police brutality to a cultural revolution that seeks to topple all monuments related to America’s racist and slave-driving past. It is a response I empathize with greatly, yet the kind of conflation and obfuscation seen in the work of the 1619 Project can now be seen in the defacing and toppling of monuments across the United States. Such a moment may well be necessary, but it is times like these when intellectual nuance and historical literacy is most needed. A robust and difficult debate can and should be had regarding what historical figures should continue to be revered and which should not. Any nuance, however, is currently lacking. A monument of Matthias Baldwin was defaced with red paint in Philadelphia. The vandals evidently assuming the nineteenth-century white man to have been a slave owner. Baldwin was, in fact, an abolitionist who helped open a school for African American children and donated a fair amount of his fortune to the Union North during the Civil War. The John Greenleaf Whittier statue in Whittier, California’s Central Park was also vandalized. Whitter too was an abolitionist. Not all monuments defaced, toppled, or facing removal are as clear-cut as confederate monuments or memorials to abolitionists. For example, I understand the proposed removal of the Theodore Roosevelt monument which has been located in front of the Natural History Museum in New York since 1940. In this case it is the monument itself that appears to be primarily the problem. The statue includes a Native American and an African American flanking Roosevelt, on foot, as he gallantly rides a horse. It isn’t lost on anyone who sees the image that it casts the Native American and the African American into servile positions. That said, it is important to maintain fidelity to the historical record, including monuments which evoke sentiments we as a nation no longer embrace. The Roosevelt monument, instead of being simply removed, could be included in a wing of the museum which wrestles with how Americans struggle to make sense of their own past, and the need to remember it.
Monuments of the American founders, specifically the Virginia dynasty of slaveholding figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and James Madison are more complicated. Some are calling for the removal of these figures in the public square as well. A slaveowner is a slaveowner, so the argument goes. Nuance be damned. However, it is not just the fact that these are the nation’s founders—and not traitors to the United States like the Confederacy—but also that it should matter as to why a monument was put up in the first place. A George Washington monument was pulled down in Portland, Oregon, recently. And why not? He was a slaveowner after all. Here is the rub, and this is why historical literacy and intellectual nuance becomes so important: the Confederate monuments put up, primarily in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were erected to reassert white cultural dominance during the Jim Crow era. This distinction matters. Understanding that Confederate monuments were built because they memorialized slaveowners while monuments to Washington and Jefferson were established despite their participation in slavery is important for understanding what exactly the given monument was intended to symbolize and celebrate. The need for civic engagement, then, is important for both sides of this debate. The issue is not merely whether certain monuments should be taken down. It is also a matter of how they are to be taken down and by what means. Accepting mob violence as the means to do so flies in the face of the greatest of America’s liberal values. If monuments come down, it should through dialogue and reasonable debate and the votes of duly elected representatives and not through illiberal intimidation and force.
Some may wonder why I am discussing the 1619 Project’s bad history along with the broader epidemic of historical illiteracy we currently see. Do I claim Nikole Hannah-Jones to be responsible for the nation’s lack of historical knowledge and penchant for conflation? Of course not. She has merely exploited it. She continues to do so in recent interviews with the legacy media. In an interview with CBS in early June of this year, she defended the looting of rioters as “symbolic taking” because African American communities “have been looted for decades.” Apparently, stealing from big box stores and small businesses, for Jones, is a political act. In a now-deleted tweet, she subscribed to a conspiracy theory that New York police were using fireworks upon black and brown protesters to “disorient and disrupt the #BlackLivesMatter movement.” After deleting the tweet she apologized, stating that her remarks were “irresponsible” and beneath her own standards. When professor of government, Charles Kesler, wrote an op-ed in the New York Post, criticizing the toppling of monuments, arguing that perhaps the recent vandalism should be referred to as the “1619 Riots,” Jones tweeted a link to the article with the comment “It would be an honor. Thank you.” The article’s image was of a toppled Thomas Jefferson monument in front of Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon. Thus the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of a supposedly history-related project, who didn’t win her award for her scholarship but for her “engaging writing,” is celebrating the unlawful vandalism and mob removal of historical monuments.
It needs to be said that I share many of the concerns and supposed aims of the 1619 Project, as I do with historians like Leslie Harris. One only need to look at a history book from the nineteenth century or first-half of the twentieth-century to see the hero worship, whitewashing, and lies by omission which posed as history. This tendency to distort our history in the service to some ideological mythology about ourselves is yet another ugly part of our history, and this forces us to wonder why we’re trying, with projects like 1619, to repeat that mistake now, as though two blatant distortions make a true account. There has been an imperial impulse from the beginning of the formation of the United States, and to ignore such a fact is unethical. It expressed itself through the practice of the slave trade, the cultivation and amplification of a particularly brutal form of chattel slavery, and an expansion westward which removed the Native populations from their ancestral lands, killed ninety percent of their population—mostly through disease—and eroded their culture and ways of life. Following ninety years of slavery in the United States was a century of Jim Crow, black codes, and subjugation of African Americans under legal fictions that betrayed the promise of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s did much to correct the laws, but concerns regarding a culture of racism that remains in the United States in the form of unfair police practices and a broken criminal justice system remain warranted.
Reform is a part of the American project. It always has been and always should be. The American project is one of creating a more perfect union. To want to make things better is itself a quintessentially American precept. To act, then, that reform can only happen by obliterating the system, ridding the nation of due process, subscribing to race-based notions of sin and purity, and assuming that all monuments were created equally evil, is a betrayal of the American mission itself. It’s time for liberals to defend liberalism again. The American mission to continually improve itself is a liberal ethos. Conservatives make the mistake of ignoring sins of the past that may linger in another form in the present. Progressives are good at highlighting continued inequalities but fail at recognizing how far we have come. Observing the progress of the American mission while relentlessly pushing for improvement has always been the prerogative of liberals.
The liberal position requires the same attention to nuance and appreciation of complexity that is required of an historically literate polity. Thus, a liberal nation requires historical literacy for its very survival. Reforms are only possible when they are facilitated by liberal principles. Conservative principles hold fast to tradition for tradition’s sake. Progressive ideology contains within it no limiting principle. Good intentions may obscure tragic results. It is up to liberals to champion the broadminded mission of history education, for the sake of a better future and for the preservation of the republic.
With that in mind, let’s make things very clear:
- The 1619 Project is bad history facilitated by bad journalism, given accolades by bad actors who appear to care nothing for the truth.
- We need only to ask the important questions, which is what good historians (and good journalists) are expected to do.
- Why did the 1619 Project ignore the corrections recommended by a respected PhD who has a deep understanding of the relevant history?
- Why were they more interested in going to print with bad history than with the truth that is more difficult to reduce and simplify?
- Why did the New York Times allow an essay that got its history so wrong at the outset to continue to publish when such a thesis wouldn’t receive a favorable grade in a first-year college history class?
- Why was the New York Times not embarrassed for being progenitors of false history?
- Why was this behavior rewarded? Why, after all of the controversy came to light of the broken history involved, was the New York Times and the 1619 Projected awarded a prize—often associated with integrity—when it was clear by the spring of 2020 that the 1619 Project got some of America’s most basic, most fundamental history, wrong?
- What does this say, at its core, about the integrity of the 1619 Project, the New York Times, and the Pulitzer board? What does it say about their fidelity to a proper, disciplined, and apolitical approach to understanding the past? What does it say about their devotion to liberal values?
- How can a group of people, who got it so wrong, be trusted now to teach to the young?
This is the greatest ramification of the distribution and accolades heaped upon the 1619 Project. It now offers curriculum to public schools and educators. Now broken history is not limited to the readers of the New York Times. It is being spread far and wide to America’s young. This is academic malpractice.
The 1619 Project is merely one great example of how history education in the United States is failing its liberal mission to inform and educate the public, especially the young. By prioritizing a politicized narrative that doesn’t even get the basic facts of the American Revolution right, the project, the New York Times, and the Pulitzer committee have revealed that history is not their main concern. It’s time for those of us who believe in the liberal mission of history education to reassert ourselves and act as an important counterweight to illiberal ideologies polluting the historical field.
If the history killers win, it will be because the liberals let them.
44 comments
George Mason IV is actually one of my relatives, and due to my father always being honest and open about things with me, I learned a lot about my families history-
Not all of the founding fathers were evil and focused on evil-doing.
George Mason refused to sign the Constitution because it refused individual rights.
I’m quoting this, and trust me, I understand he was not a perfect man, and he did make moral mistakes, but he did what he could to protect the people and widely and publicly fought the government for the people.
I spend most of my days thinking of ways that will impact positively towards the Natives of this Land, and to correct those ill morals and right the wrongs of my ancestors. I fight immensely for human rights, and equality through and to all ethnicities globally.
I don’t just pay attention to past history, but I heavily observe and focus on maintaining a positive and successful history for our future children.
Often the argument is between ethnicity, and culture, but truly, that is no longer the root of the issue, in this modern society your financial and political status hold more of a weighted chain to your ankle than your race does.
We need to stop fighting and arguing with eachother, we need to stop focusing on who is wrong, and who is right- and start listening to our peers, all of them; and remember that our civilians are not the enemy, our neighbours, our brothers and sisters- not of blood, but of heart and faith.
The civilians are not those who hold these limited standards, the government is not the people.
The politicians, the governers and the judges- They are the enemy, the ones who allow this prejudice and racism to proceed without lifting a finger to change it.
Your neighbours more than likely stand with you; but how do people expect someone to want to stand up, put their life on the line; their name on the line and fight for you and your equality in this world when you’re holding a gun to their head, telling them that they are the ones who are behind the white-mans trigger finger.
When you’re attacking your neighbors and physically hurting them, for something they are not accountable or responsible for, how are we supposed to work together as one society if we allow the governments to tear us apart with their fear-mongering and manipulation; with their hostile labels to separate us.
Why do we focus on what happened and use it as an excuse to become more chaotic and volatile instead of using the history as a reminder of what not to do, we could take that history and show where it is we messed up and where we need not go again.
As a strong believer of faith, and someone who holds immense hope for our future generations- I just cant help myself but to see the light that can come from acknowledging the failures of our history. the history of the countries, the possibilities of future success.
With Death also comes Rebirth, and one cannot achieve this without first succumbing to life itself.
We have an opportunity here directly infront of us to take history and use it to replenish and rejuvenate a broken society, I see so much potential in our society if we’d just take a moment to breathe and appreciate all those who are breathing with us.
We all share the same blood, we all bleed the same and we all live and die the same.
Don’t let them take us back to a time we need not go, do not fall for the manipulations of those above us, their hold on us only remains when we do what they want, because that is what takes away your power, don’t fall for their psychological mind games.
I understand many are not religious or believers, but one man said it, Jesus himself, our saviour- he who gave his life, the one and only Son of God, sacrificed to prove of our salvation, and heaven beyond earth, to replenish us of our sin- and I will forever hold onto this :
“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” Matthew- 22:37-39
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“Many of us feel trapped by the narrow framework of the dominant liberal and conservative views of equality in America. Many of us feel worn out, intellectually debilitated, morally disempowered and personally depressed. To love is hard, and if we are to love our neighbor as Christ taught, it will require sacrifice, inconvenience and emotional and physical pain in order to ensure every person in America is provided fair and equitable treatment under the law and in our communities.”
here are the quotes from
George Mason I spoke of in the text above:
“At the Constitutional Convention, Mason vigorously opposed the provision that allowed the enslaved people trade to continue until 1808 (despite being a slaveholder himself), referring to the enslaved people trade as “disgraceful to mankind. What really sets Mason apart from the other founding fathers, and what keeps him in a sense less well known than many others, is that he also vehemently objected to powers granted to the new government, which he believed to be ill-defined and overzealous. (In fact, he said, “I would sooner chop off my right hand than put it to the Constitution as it now stands.”)”
–
“Mason continued to voice his concerns at the Virginia Ratification convention. Joined by Patrick Henry and Edmund Randolph, Mason and the anti-federalists nearly derailed ratification of the Constitution in Virginia. Though the anti-federalists lost the battle, they won a greater victory. A deal was struck by both sides to adopt suggestions for writing protections of individual rights when the first Congress convened. James Madison would later lean heavily on Mason’s earlier work when he drafted the Bill of Rights.”
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“In all our associations; in all our agreements let us never lose sight of this fundamental maxim—that all power was originally lodged in, and consequently is derived from, the people. We should wear it as a breastplate, and buckle it on as our armour.” – George Mason, 1775 ”
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“Mason spent the last years of his life fighting to ensure that the newly minted Constitution would guarantee the rights of the people. Though the Bill of Rights was eventually approved, Mason was unsatisfied, believing that it failed to protect the people’s rights adequately. Faithful to his principles, he retired to his plantation a defeated man, choosing not to serve as Virginia’s first senator to avoid joining a government he feared could be the beginning of the end of liberty in the United States.”
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https://bri-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/FC-008-HandoutE-1.pdf
Quotes : https://www.biography.com/political-figure/george-mason
I’m a conservative, and if the liberals who are expected to stop this false history are as milquetoast, passive and equivocating as the writer of this piece, then they are going to get steamrolled by the woke.
We conservatives are here willing to fight this woke disease. I believe, as the writer does that wholeness could condemn us to a new dark age. But in all these articles the liberals trying to set things right accept the one premise that will condemn them to not have enough critical mass to win. They accept the woke assumption that conservatives are no longer to be regarded as human, but only as untermensch who must be excised from society. And if you agree with the woke there, your already too infected by them to have any hope of stopping them.
Align with conservatives to fight this bs, or as the saying goes “may your chains rest lightly upon you”.
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed that…
“Conservative principles hold fast to tradition for tradition’s sake.”
Has the author ever met a conservative?
Personally, I hold a combination of “liberal” and “conservative” beliefs because I believe they are accurate reflections of reality, not because the latter are “traditional.” American conservatism is deeply rooted in “traditions,” like classical liberalism, that have wrought massive, positive change around the world, particularly for the people “liberals” pride themselves in protecting. Such traditions hardly seem the preserve of unreconstructed fossils.
I would we in fact ought to protect even statues of Confederate generals and unapologetic slave owners on free speech grounds. Freedom of speech means literally nothing if it is defense of speech one agrees with. Defending speech one agrees with is a content free tautology. The real challenge is to defend speech one doesn’t agree with.
Ironically, the significant errors this author commits are almost entirely the result of how deeply the CSJ narrative has sunk into our discourse.
US History has not ignored slavery and racism, nor is there an “epidemic” of police brutality. Offering up some unnamed textbooks from a century or more ago as evidence of the former is one dubious and hardly convincing data point; while making statistically false claims about the latter paints an unflattering self-portrait.
Both of these narratives are major CSJ talking points right now, and their inclusion follows a tedious pattern by writers on the subject to offer up a sort of intellectual sacrifice to ward off the barbarians at the gate.
It mars an otherwise excellent piece.
Loury & McWhorter said this in far fewer words and long before this current moral panic besieged us.
«the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police» – I see no reason to comment this article
My anecdote goes the other way around. I went to watch “Little Women” with a millennial friend, “woke” of course, the film (which she chose) was meant to express the new feminism of her generation. I am gen X and more a traditional feminist. But this isn’t relevant.
After watching the film (and I should say, I read the books as a child and seen all the films, while for my friend this was new material altogether), I don’t know why, I observed that the father was fighting in the American Civil War, and I mentioned the issue of slavery and race in passing. She had no idea of what I was talking about. I asked her if she hadn’t been taught in school about the American Civil War. I said “The Yankees in the North, and the Confederates in the South?” Blank stares. “Amistad? Abraham Lincoln?” More blank stares. “Gone with the wind?” Clueless.
Not only was there no recollection of anything in the school curriculum, but no idea about basic cultural references of the (very recent) past. I referenced 4 Hollywood films there. I was stunned. We are talking about someone with a fairly good education, good enough to get her into a doctoral program at a top British university.
I’ve encountered this phenomenon more and more in her generation: young adults with a very shallow understanding of what’s gone before the turn of the millennium, interested only in the here and now, with a decidedly philistinistic streak, and self-persuaded of the goodness of their own beliefs and with no understanding of history, or wider culture, at all. It’s like a kind of cultural tabula rasa.
This occurred with a British friend, but I’ve had glimpses of this with American visiting students (at Oxford, so we are not talking about the lowest of the lowest). I am sorry this is a bit of an extreme example (but I swear it’s accurate), but the trend worries me. It’s impossible to have a discourse or even a debate if people are willfully ignorant.
In the internet age where more and more knowledge is easily accessible, I find it dumbfounding that so little (other than dogma) seems to penetrate the minds of the younger generation. Is it due to an overload of information? The decline of reading books? The social media age?
It is great to see that James M. Masnov is another rational voice at arguably one of the epicenters a “woke” – Portland State University, along with the great Dr. Boghossian!
On a side note, as others have pointed out, I too noticed the “epidemic of police brutality” observation. There is certainly enough of an issue with police malfeasance to warrant focus, however considering the number of police-to-people interactions on any given day, to characterize it as an epidemic is a bit “wokish.”
epicenters *of “woke”
The “News and Information media of popular culture do not often invite the public to the exercise of discriminating intelligence. On the contrary the popular media thrive on hype, propagandized states of emotion and mind, and nondiscriminating responses to advertised goods, persuasions, and results.
Until the media that (mis)inform the masses of humanity begin to invite the individual to exercise discriminating intelligence in all matters, and until human beings in general become founded in the Higher Wisdom-Culture and the intimate politics of authentic face-to-face human existence, then there can be no true wondering about the Madness we inherit in the daily bad News.
Although it pretends to do otherwise this site also thrives on hype and does not in any way provide an intelligent alternative to the madness of the daily News.
There is of course not even a hint of anything like a Higher Wisdom-Culture to be found on this site. Because such a Wisdom Culture can only be created and sustained by Esoteric Spiritual Religion.
Atheism is intrinsically incapable of creating a Wisdom Culture.
To be enthusiastic and also false is the hypocritical core of the “American Way”.
Indeed Western culture as a whole was founded on religious lies, political exploitation and manipulative propaganda of all kinds (including its “official” his-torys). And these means are yet to be overcome
Really great article. I’m glad to know there are people out here throwing the wrench of nuance into the gears of pseudoreligious certainty.
I think the debate about the circumstances of this nation’s founding is ridiculous in-and-of-itself, quite frankly. The Gilded Age (~1870-1900) has had far greater influence on the America of today, and resembles our contemporary situation much more closely. Charles Calhoun has written extensively about this, and his edited volume, “The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America,” is a wealth of information. The Gilded Age saw the enormous technological advances that made the US a world power. There was extreme partisanship and growing income inequality. There was also the birth of modern labor unions and the passing of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which made merit, not political patronage, the basis of federal appointments–a major blow to cronyism (thank you, Messrs. Garfield & Arthur).
It’s not surprising that everyone from the 1619 Project to your average high school history class is more interested in reciting bromides about slavery ad the Revolution than delving into a period with more direct relation to the contemporary US, it’s just unfortunate.
There is also a counter-project with African American scholars, 1776unites.com
Good article, and good thoughts in the comments section! I agree with the basic premise of the article. I’m also glad the last section gave an overview of US treatment of BIPOC. We can talk about free speech/Twitter mobs,/cancel culture and object to the way intersectional themes and emotion rather than reason and data have apparently taken over conversations about race. However, we also have to be willing to look at ways we individually are/have been racist (or sexist or homophobic). I cringe about some things I did in the past. This does not mean I also don’t think we should be able to have a nuanced discussions. I’ve been glad to stumble upon people like Lindsay, Pluckrose, Weinstein, McWhorter and Haidt bc they seem to say you can object to some parts of the current climate and still keep your “liberal card.” However, being a “liberal contrarian” can entail paying a price: being called a Nazi by other liberals and one of their own by those on the right. In the meantime, are we doing concrete things to improve the lives of those in poverty (like increasing job and educational opportunities) or just superficial gestures (“theater,” as some have said)? Hopefully, we’ll do both.
Thankfully the economic engine that was purring so smoothly prior to the Covid situation was helping those in poverty, by creating more economic opportunities for them. I pray we can recover that improvement soon.
We can agree Black JEM that Barack Obama’s economic policies nearly eviscerated the wealth of African Americans who are descended from American chattel slavery (which Obama is not).
We can also agree that my private and public education system that was in a predominately White suburb in California was poorly constructed.
What we will have to agree to disagree on is everything else except how your children were treated because they shouldn’t have been treated that way.
I was called a Nigger in my high school. But I’m not about playing the oppression olympics because I have tough skin. And I don’t buy into the DiAngelo arguments—I chose not to read books like that because I am not incompetent and neither is anyone else.
Hearts and minds are not going to change because we have not made a concerted effort in this country to discuss race in an honest and complex manner.
And MLK’s speech was much more than colorblind ideology—it was about the economy—The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is what his speech intended to address and he was assassinated because part of his mission was to correct the economic inequity that African Americans experienced because of racists policies. Read Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law and Mersha Baradaran’s The Color of Money.
We all have work to do and I am optimistic about it but we need to recognize that while laws were passed to end formal segregation—we still have to address the equity issue.
You have a good day. I have to go to work so I will no longer respond after this post.
I appreciate your kind reply – and understand your position (and your inability to respond) – but what you ask is not possible, for I too suffered economic harm because I, and many others, paid the price of having our opportunities curtailed through affirmative action policies meant to redress the equity issues you noted.
At some point, it is impossible to fully determine who is owed and what. We must accept the way forward, and move on. If affirmative action was not enough, no one will believe whatever equity recommendation you feel is necessary will be the end of it. I cannot fix what happened before I was born. I have already been charged for the sins of my forefathers.
Once again, thank you for your reply, and I hope that you had a good day, and a better one tomorrow.
I am an African American who is 34 years old.
After reading this opinion piece, I wonder how is United States history taught in elementary school?
From what I remember I learned about the founding fathers; Christopher Columbus; examined the Declaration of Independence; sang the national anthem and other patriotic songs; learned about the first thanksgiving and the slaughter of the pilgrims.
After learning all of this history particularly in my first grade class—I never felt that I was included in the history of the United States because slavery—as I am a descendant of enslaved African Americans were not discussed—race was not discussed.
By the time I entered my sophomore year in high school that was the first time I learned about history that included multiracial narratives—African Americans, Native Americans, and Latino Americans. However all of that multiracial history was learned in 1 week and all of the history was on 3 pages in my school’s textbook. And this was the early 2000s.
I get that we need a nuanced history that shows the complexity of the United States, but the fact remains is that at the elementary school level history continues to prioritize a selected view that delegitimizes African Americans’ existence and humanity.
How do we as a nation reconcile this fact? We want to preserve the republic, but what does that mean at the elementary school level when children are not being taught the complexity about American history and are still given narratives that place African Americans and other multiracial peoples that have given their lives to this republic in service a denial of the right to be deemed American?
If we are really concerned with how history is taught then we need to make a concerted effort to be objective on all fronts because I’m still seeing history particularly shared with our youth as whitewashed and that continues to perpetuate a racial caste system in the United States whether those that identify as white want to believe it or not.
The early history taught is always on the highlights, and at a young age the warts are not easily explained or understood. I do not understand at your age how you were not introduced to those warts in middle school, as I was almost 50 years ago, growing up in a very non-diverse rural community.
If I was exposed to that history in middle school at a time earlier than your own school attendance, which was more greatly expanded once I reached HS, how did you miss it then?
Once my children went through school, the focus on race was even more pronounced, in fact it had begun to overshadow the actual learning of the history of this country. Perhaps your story is just showing another failure in our public educational system. I don’t know. But your closing statement strikes very closely to those who accuse those of racism whom they do not know, and whose only sin appears to have born white. The only racial caste system in the US is the one our modern day racists maintain through concepts such as white privilege and fragility. These are non-serious, poorly argued emotions masked as real fields of inquiry.
I understand that not all hearts are willing to accept others who do not look like themselves, or worship the same way, or have the same ethnic background. We are a tribal people, this human race of ours. This feeling is not isolated to those we would call white. Nor is it a uniquely American trait. In fact, it is more pronounced in almost every other place in the world. But when all you can see when you look at the world is a prism of race, it would suggest the racists are often more likely the accusers, not those whom they accuse.
Myself and especially my white children were subject to overt racist verbal attacks by black people just because of the color of our skin. Our sin, being white, not that we had done anything to them or their family or friends. Dr. King’s exhortations are lost on the modern SJW adherent. What a shame. From the breaking of state sanctioned racialist policies in the South in the 50’s, to the codifying of federal law on race and sex in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to affirmative action in the 1970s, to the increase in interracial personal relations, etc.; we saw improvement in American’s willingness to see each other as people – not black or white or yellow or whatever. It wasn’t without bumps and failures on the way. But the march was persistent.
Then came the more pronounced use of hyphenated American descriptors. And then our first black president was elected, and it all went backwards. To disagree with his policies, which were mostly awful and detrimental to the population at large, was to be called a racist. He was a black man, and arguing with his political proscriptions was not an act of political disagreement, but racist. He sat in a hideously racist church for 20 years and no one thought that was a problem. But arguing with policies (that did great economic harm to black communities by the way) was racist. Hmmm. Excuse me if I cry foul.
You might see where this makes your final statement ring quite hollow. Seeing and identifying people by their race, and providing to them characteristics or opinions based solely by their race, is a racist act. An unwillingness to accept the weak arguments to be made for institutional racism which you presented does not make one a racist. I’m tired of being accused of something I am not, by people who think they are not, but act as if they are.
So I will close, by asking a question I have begun to pose to people involved in this current debate on racism. “What won’t you accuse of being racist?”
I would like to reaffirm your experience with history. I, too, went to school in a very white suburb. (I graduated in 2001, so this is roughly the era we’re taking about.) I also majored in global history so I have a lot of perspectives on the study and framing of topics like in the article.
Yes, in grade school, we started with simple concepts about George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Abe Lincoln, etc. as is appropriate for small children to get an overall grasp of main themes in our past. By middle school we were learning about the horrors conquistadors wrought in the Americas, giving me an unnuanced, lifelong hatred of them. We learned about the oppression of the Jews, particularly in Nazi Germany. We learned about the slaves. By junior high and high school, we were mainly learning all our nation’s dirty secrets. The repeated suffering and losses of the Native Americans. The decimation of the buffalo. The lives of slaves. The labour abuse of the Irish and Italians. The Civil War and Sherman’s destruction of the old South. How America was founded on Native land. The oppression of women. Chinese rail workers. Japanese internment camps. Slavery. Jim Crow Era. How rights were denied to blacks. Slavery. The slave trade, the Amistad. The ethnicity of Crispus Attucks. Harriet Tubman. Slavery. Every Black History Month was celebrated despite it being a 98% white community.
It was to the point that I don’t really remember important national events or dates; it was all social history centering on oppression and crime.
By the time I was 14, I was totally ashamed of my heritage as an Anglo descended white girl. I still struggle with the shame tbh. No one said it directly, but I was made to feel that being white and English-descended was nothing to be proud of. And to be honest, I think a lot of whites of my generation went through the same thing–I think this is actually a major part of these racial issues we’re having in the country. Some rebel against this shame and become white nationalists. Others try to atone by becoming “good” whites and eradicating the racism in others that they’re afraid is inherent in them. I swear this is what’s going on and the source of a lot of the social craziness we’re dealing with.
Now obviously, my school isn’t everyone’s school. The “American school system” is largely dependent on individual states and may be implemented very differently depending in location. But in think this teaching and understanding of history is far from unique to my school district.
I will share a further anecdote. I have lived in Asia for many years. As a history major, I love visiting museums. Most museums in Asian countries will have a central narrative of the nation’s history, and various exhibitions with their own theme.
When I come back to visit the states…I once stopped by Philadelphia to see the historic stuff. Everything was so buried under slave narratives and the narratives of the working poor that I don’t even remember what it was we were visiting. I thought it was really strange that when I visited Washington’s house that I learned almost nothing about Washington, but was subjected to hours of footage about his slaves.
It’s not necessarily a complaint–I love social history and find this stuff helps bring it alive. I think it’s really important to help connect history to minority groups who might otherwise not see their history represented. We don’t need to rely solely upon “great man history”.
But I do kind of wonder what else we can do? We’re not excluding blacks from the narrative here! White Americans of my generation and younger feel the weight of history on their backs already. We know all the dirty secrets of our history and have been made to feel almost personally responsible for it. What more should we do? What more CAN we do? What is good enough?
Why would everything be about you when the United States has been 90% white for the vast majority of its existence? Contrary to popular belief, southern cotton plantations are not the backbone of the modern United States power and white people most of whose ancestors came here after 1865 owe you NOTHING.
I recently watched Steven Crowder interview historian David Barton about this very topic. IIRC, it was President Wilson who completely wiped Black heroes and figures from public school history books. It’s been a couple weeks since watching it the interview, but I recommend you consider watching it. It was very interesting and educational…. Link: https://youtu.be/n_KlDf-Wgoc
Lavada Samuels,
You are correct that history should be nuanced and fairly cover as many people groups as possible, but within reason. Obviously there are limitations due to time and space. Presidents and significant events should be covered, and after that there is a lot of flexibility. The primary black Americans who definitely deserve coverage would included Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, MLK, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Clarence Thomas, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Jack Johnson, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Jackie Robinson, Emmett Till, Madam C. J. Walker, etc. That far outnumbers notable Latino, Asian, and perhaps Native Americans. Which Latino Americans would be included? Cesar Chavez, Junipero Serra, Pio Pico, and who else?
@Lavanda Samuels,
I’m White and 24 years old. I heard about slavery, taking Native American land, and African American history in history class. People recognize it.
Let’s say before the 1960s when America said racism was bad, America did ignore the perspective of African Americans and Native Americans. This was dishonest and probably intentional sometimes. White People didn’t want to recognize that we pretty much took North America from native people. They didn’t want to recognize slavery.
Now we have recognized it. Yet, at the same time it is also true that the United States was originally a western extension of Europe. In other words, yes the United States was originally a White country. Not just that but it was specifically an ethnically British/English country.
America is definitely no longer a White country. But we have to be honest about the history. So I wouldn’t really say the traditional depiction of American history is false. It is false in that it ignores the African American side of the history. But we have to be honest, the main part of American history was the White perspective.
@Samuel Isaac Andrews
I’m curious as to how you were informed how American history was taught. Your characterization of it is more a caricature than anything remotely accurate. Your position here is reflective of a CRT-infused historical revisionism.
The Black and Indian perspectives were taught and well-known prior to the 1960s and were the subject of strong political and cultural commentary that dates back uninterrupted to the founding of the country. To say that “white people didn’t want to recognize slavery or how the US acquired its land” is preposterous. I could spend paragraph after paragraph refuting this claim, but I’ll settle for the easiest. If whites didn’t recognize the evils of slavery, then I’m not sure what motivated millions of white men to take up arms, resulting in several hundred thousand casualties in the early 1860s.
Contrary to this unfortunate narrative, America’s dirty laundry has been aired in its school system for decades, and given this fact, someone in your shoes might want to question why his own education omits or mischaracterizes this misinformation.
As best I can tell, it derives from a neo-segregationist approach to teaching history (various ethnic-history months as only one clear example), rather than the more traditional approach of teaching history as a whole to give the student a broader understanding of what happened and – more importantly – why it happened. It is complex, nuanced and gives a student a much better intellectual framework for making connections and forming opinions.
Instead, we are now treated to lectures from the young and misinformed about what history was and how it was taught, because they have been trained to view things purely from a racist perspective, whether they realize it or not.
I sympathize with what you are saying.
But I did watch an 1952 Disney episode on American expansion West. It gave a pretty dishonest depiction of how the Western land was won.
I don’t know much about how people perceived history before 1960.
And I have become aware that a lot of my perceptions of what people were like in the past was fed to me by “experts” with Left-wing perspectives and agendas. As a society we have to unlearn a lot of what we’ve been led to believe.
Thanks for your response.
Of course a single Disney production is not representative of how history was taught. Disney’s agenda was about branding, and not exactly intellectual honesty. Their 1958 wildlife “documentary” White Wilderness also took liberties with the truth.
I first heard of the history of Native Americans from my mother and grandmother, both of whom were educated in rural Mississippi well before 1960. Their understanding of the treatment of Native Americans was no less than that of today. Indeed my mother’s resentment of their treatment is as strong as it ever has been.
Good commentary and assessment. I feel this project is unrelated to what we see today in Politics that divide Congress and the Executive branch, but has found a convenient and timely nook to seem useful and relevant at the moment. Over the last 15 or 20 years, it seems the NYT has spearheaded media progressivism and Ms Jones’ commentary (and employment position) fit well in the narrative of promoting a democratic society. Today is merely their perfect storm.
You should check out Matt Taibbi’s excellent recent article on his substack platform titled “Year Zero.” In it, he explains the NYT’s purpose in running the 1619 Project despite all the relevant criticisms based on editor Dean Baquet’s own words. Here, Taibbi sums it up:
“It is impossible to disentangle this profoundly negativistic portrait of the American experiment from the admitted context of the 1619 Project: an effort by the nation’s leading elite media organ to explain the Democratic Party’s loss to Trump. Would this have been published if Hillary Clinton had won the White House? As journalism, 1619 read almost exactly like the paper’s post-mortems on the 2016 election – probably not an accident, since Baquet told us it was conceived identically as an effort to “understand the forces that led to the election of Donald Trump.” In both cases history was reduced to a simplistic showdown between evil racists and oppressed peoples.”
This project was not an honest attempt by NYT to showcase history, but a politically motivated sham to desperately try to explain why they got Donald Trump’s victory so wrong.
“One only need to look at a history book from the nineteenth century or first-half of the twentieth-century to see the hero worship, whitewashing, and lies by omission which posed as history”
A country needs patriotic heroes to hold iself together. Why does the author think dissolving national mythology should stop at some ideal centrist mid point of historical accuracy? It paves the way for 1619.
I don’t think the author understands the extent to which this bit is accurate:
“If the history killers win, it will be because the liberals let them.”
Agreed
The author seems to try too hard to convince the reader he has no ideological issues with the movement he is clearly writing a critique against. Perhaps they do not recognize the full implications of such a destructive movement?
With all due respect, the author never called for – or even implied to call for – “dissolving” a “national mythology” for the United States.
Knowing the founding fathers of the United States were flawed individuals doesn’t mean the death of our shared national heritage. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. It makes our national mythology that much richer and deeper.
I’d say the author understands perfectly well the extent to which the sentence you quoted is accurate.
The difficulty I have with the author’s perspective is his unwillingness to separate his 20th/21st century view of morality with the reality that was the 18th. Slavery was not central to the United States founding. Slavery was central to the world at that time. While political winds were beginning to change as abolitionist movements began to expand, the world wasn’t quite yet there. But in the US in fact, some states were among the first political entities in the world to legally outlaw the practice. So we were at the forefront in its abolition as well as continuing in its use.
What happened in the face of slavery’s official demise in the South after the bloodshed of the civil war, is a textbook in how democrat politicians have always behaved when their interests are deemed not in favor. Violence on both the physical and political level occurs. And all the grand democrat presidents following Grant governed on that basis – including the revered FDR.
And lest we think slavery is gone, it is alive and well in Africa and Asia, especially in China, where our very liberal corporate moral posturers utilize slave labor to earn their billions, a very interesting stance for board room philosophers who cast arrows at others but are doing more to continue slavery as a worldwide phenomena than the southern democrats did after the Civil War.
The 1619 project is a historical sham, written to destroy US history, not to fine tune it. I have no problem with working to understand our founding with all its warts included. There are many, and our role in slavery is one of them. But I have little time for those who would make the US the sole sinner for the human scourge of slavery over the ages, a sin that has touched every race at some point, and unfortunately, still does.
Yes. It is is morally fallacious to judge actions of the past according to ethical conventions of the present. Sadly, however, this moral fallacy proliferates in nominalistic ethical systems, which have come to preeminence in modern (post-Enlightenment) thinking. Postmodern deconstruction of these conventions will, I believe, help us overcome this error.
To me, it’s not even that we need hero’s, the author fails to realize that history did not begin with the discovery of the new world. Slavery plagued almost every culture in every part of the world since the agricultural revolution. That slavery was brought to America is not what was remarkable; what was remarkable was that the US and England put an end to the practice that existed for 1000s of years. This is what critics of the US fail to see.
Great article!
I must have missed the ‘epidemic of police brutality’.
That’s right! The so-called epidemic of police brutality is another total fabrication with statistics to back it up! The writer is a Liberal and a great deal of these folk’s are aiding and abetting the Marxist Left and their agenda’s! He does not appear to address that fact as he notes the failures of both Conservatives and Progressives! But this was, overall, a decent and honest article about the 1619 Project!
Yes, I agree it is basically a good article. It just jumped out at me.
I was just going to address the same issue. Seems ironic to assert this narrative within such an article while actually disregarding data, objective truth, and a nuanced understanding.
So did I. That’s a crock, and it makes me wonder how the author could have been right with so much of his criticisms but so glaringly wrong on this one point. Perhaps he felt (cowardly) felt the need to bow to the “wokesters.” I also do not agree that slavery is “central” to the history of the United States. It is a part of it, yes, but central?
My understanding is that the black character in the Theodore Roosevelt statue is NOT African-American, but African, to celebrate Roosevelt’s work IN AFRICA as a naturalist. The Native American figure represents the work he did in the American West with support from Native Americans. Whether the postures of the Native American and African figures is racist is a matter of opinion, and probably reflects changing mores, so would not have been racist at the time.
“Conservatives make the mistake of ignoring sins of the past that may linger in another form in the present. Progressives are good at highlighting continued inequalities but fail at recognizing how far we have come. ”
This is one of the most succinct and balanced critiques I have seen in a long time.
“Conservative principles hold fast to tradition for tradition’s sake.”
Conservative “principles” see a reason for traditions and need a reason to change them that is demonstrably superior to the original reason behind them. Conservatives all too often today are seeking to conserve the constitution and rule of law. Many conservatives today would be viewed as liberals in any other time.