The 1619 Chronicles
Journalism does better when it writes the
first rough draft of history, not the last word on it.
Opinion
Columnist
- Oct. 9, 2020
If there’s one
word admirers and critics alike can agree on when it comes to The New York
Times’s award-winning 1619 Project, it’s ambition. Ambition to reframe America’s
conversation about race. Ambition to reframe our understanding of history.
Ambition to move from news pages to classrooms. Ambition to move from scholarly
debate to national consciousness.
In some ways,
this ambition succeeded. The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure
to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and
probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black
freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift
obtained from benevolent whites.
It showed, in
a stunning photo essay, the
places where human beings were once bought and sold as slaves — neglected
scenes of American infamy. It illuminated the extent to which so much of what
makes America great, including some of our uniquely American understandings of
liberty and equality, is unthinkable without the struggle of Black Americans,
as well as the extent to which so much of what continues to bedevil us is the
result of centuries of racism.
And, in a
point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American
values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back
to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on
these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the
American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.
Those concerns came to light
last month when a longstanding critic of the project, Phillip W. Magness, noted in the online magazine Quillette that references to
1619 as the country’s “true founding” or “moment [America] began” had
disappeared from the digital display copy without explanation.
These were not
minor points. The deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most
controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would
mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”
That doesn’t
mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from
history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by
treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy
— of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to
be merely a part.
In a tweet, Hannah-Jones
responded to Magness and other critics by insisting that “the text of the
project” remained “unchanged,” while maintaining that the case for making 1619
the country’s “true” birth year was “always a metaphoric argument.” I emailed
her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which
she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been
merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date
metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.
She then
challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776
as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to
schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good
luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.
Here is an
excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times
Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):
“1619. It is
not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history.
Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is
the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and
unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s
true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first
came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”
Now compare it
to the version of the same text as it now appears online:
“1619 is not a
year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those
who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the
year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the
moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was
in late August of 1619?”
In an email,
Silverstein told me that the changes to the text were immaterial, in part
because it still cited 1776 as our nation’s official birth date, and because
the project’s stated aim remained to put 1619 and its consequences as the true
starting point of the American story.
Readers can
judge for themselves whether these unacknowledged changes violate the standard
obligations of transparency for New York Times journalism. The question of
journalistic practices, however, raises deeper doubts about the 1619 Project’s
core premises.
In his
introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were
born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what
is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of
Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of
liberty and equality were false when they were written.”
Both points
are illogical. A “defining contradiction” requires a powerful point of
opposition or inconsistency, and in the year 1619 the points of opposition were
few and far between. Slavery and the slave trade had been global phenomena for
centuries by the early 17th century, involving Europeans and non-Europeans as
slave traders and the enslaved. The Africans who arrived in Virginia that
August got there only because they had been seized by English privateers from a
Portuguese ship headed for the port of Veracruz in Mexico, then a part of the
Spanish Empire.
In this sense,
and for all of its horror, there was nothing particularly surprising in the
fact that slavery made its way to the English colonies on the Eastern Seaboard,
as it already had in the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
What was surprising was
that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men
are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of
Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document
would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of
reappearing tyranny and oppression.” It’s why, at the dedication of the
Gettysburg cemetery, Lincoln would date the country’s founding to “four score
and seven years ago.”
As for the
notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t
false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who
championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up
to them. Most of us, at any given point in time, are falling short of some
ideal we nonetheless hold to be true or good.
These two
flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black
racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America
exceptional,” writes Silverstein.
Nearly
everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the
spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like
Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin
airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the
polio vaccine and the moon landing? On the opposite side of the moral ledger,
to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the
brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment
of Japanese-Americans in World War II?
Monocausality
— whether it’s the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or
white supremacy and its consequences — has always been a seductive way of
looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is
complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take
account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the
adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.
This mistake
goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic
entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims
about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued
categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close
examination.
It should have
been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with
ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project
seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters
of the project and polarizing national debate.
An early sign
that the project was in trouble came in an interviewlast November with James McPherson, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president
of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the
outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what
seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and
perspective.”
In particular,
McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against
slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively
then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much
democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black
resistance.”
McPherson
demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in
the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction,
to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down
through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a
lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and
against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”
In a lengthier
dissection, published in January in The Atlantic, the Princeton historian Sean
Wilentz accused Hannah-Jones of making arguments “built on partial
truths and misstatements of the facts.” The goal of educating Americans on
slavery and its consequences, he added, was so important that it “cannot be
forwarded through falsehoods, distortions and significant omissions.”
Wilentz’s
catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed
that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But
despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in
1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it
remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay
claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave
trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began
about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American
antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s. The list goes
on.
Then there was
an essay in Politico in March by the Northwestern historian Leslie M.
Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug.
19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole
Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her
fact checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to
preserve slavery in North America.”
None of this
should have come as a surprise: The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of
evidence, not the other way around. Nor was this fire from the right: Both
Wilentz and Harris were at pains to emphasize their sympathy with the project’s
moral aims.
Yet, aside
from a one-word “clarification” issued in March — after months of public
pressure, The Times conceded that only “some” colonists fought for independence
primarily to defend slavery — the response of the magazine has been, in effect,
“nothing to see here.” In a pair of lengthy editor’s notes, Silverstein
has defended much of the scholarship in the project by citing another slate of
historians to back him up. That’s one way of justifying the final product.
The larger
problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might
have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should
have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and
include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices.
Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.
“It is finally
time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover
page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished
historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project,
had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?
Almost
inevitably, what began as a scholarly quarrel became a political one.
About a month
before the project’s publication, Silverstein reached out to the Pulitzer
Center to propose a 1619 curriculum for schools. Soon thereafter, the project was being
introduced into classrooms across the country.
It’s one thing
for a newspaper to publish the 1619 Project by way of challenging its
subscribers: After all, they pay for the product. It’s quite another to become a pedagogical
product for schoolchildren who, along with their parents, in most cases
probably don’t subscribe. This was stepping into the political fray in a way
that was guaranteed to invite not just right-wing blowback, but possible
federal involvement.
That’s exactly
what has happened. When “1619” was spray-painted on a toppled statue of George Washington, many people took angry
or horrified notice. When Hannah-Jones tweeted that “it would be
an honor” for the summer’s unrest to be called “the 1619 riots,” the right took
notice again. For many, the 1619 Project smacked of fake history coming from
the “fake news” — with results that were all too real. As unbidden gifts to
Donald Trump go, it could hardly have been sweeter than that.
Sure enough,
last month Trump suggested he would cut off federal funding to any public school
using it in its curriculum. He even proposed establishing a “1776 Commission”
to help “restore patriotic education to our schools.” Many Americans shudder at
the thought of what the president might have in mind by “patriotic education.”
But ideas have consequences. They aren’t always the ones that authors — or
publishers — anticipate or desire.
Beyond these
political disputes is a metaphysical question that matters. What is a founding?
Why have generations of Americans considered 1776 our birth date — as opposed
to 1781, when we won our independence militarily at Yorktown; or 1783, when we
won it diplomatically through the Treaty of Paris; or 1788, when our system of
government came into existence with the ratification of the Constitution?
The answer is
that, unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and
principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the
expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we
struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.
Contrary to
what the 1619 Project claims, 1776 isn’t just our nation’s “official” founding.
It is our symbolic one, too. The metaphor of 1776 is more powerful than that of
1619 because what makes America most itself isn’t four centuries of racist
subjugation. It’s 244 years of effort by Americans — sometimes halting, but
often heroic — to live up to our greatest ideal. That’s a struggle that has
been waged by people of every race and creed. And it’s an ideal that continues
to inspire millions of people at home and abroad.
For obvious
reasons, I’ve thought long and hard about the ethics of writing this essay. On
the one hand, outside of exceptional circumstances, it’s bad practice to openly
criticize the work of one’s colleagues. We bat for the same team and owe one
another collegial respect.
On the other,
the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of
avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that
columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about
outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is
to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.
All the more
so as journalists, in the United States and abroad, come under relentless
political assault from critics who accuse us of being fake, biased, partisan
and an arm of the radical left. Many of these attacks are baseless. Some of
them are not. Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The
Times a gift.