1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project

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After the election and re-election of the first African-American president, Americans might have thought that they were in a period of reconciliation. The acquisition of the top spot in American politics could be thought of as proof positive that America in the 21st century has essentially moved beyond its racist past and made good on the promise of equality.

Alas, that was not to be. America's political elites have far too much invested in identity politics and racist grievances. President Obama's acquisition of the presidency was in no small part due to fostering America's guilt about its treatment of blacks and the monolithic black vote. Democrats. The cultural bloc that control the Democrat coalition was obviously not going to give up the power of race-baiting. However, with the absence of actual racism, the cultural elite have had to play up racist hysteria to disguise the absence of real racism.

And, thus, we come to a Ministry of Truth effort to rewrite history.

Peter Wood's “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project” is an effort by the president of the National Association of Scholars (“NAS”) to respond to the pseudo-academic malpractice that is being foisted on Americans by the New York Times and the Woke activists who represent the elite bloc of the Democrat Party. The particular vehicle used by these institutions is the self-proclaimed “1619 Project” which seeks to teach school children that America's true founding date was not 1776, but 1619 when the first slaves were brought to America, thus tainting all of American history with the the agenda of preserving slavery as the raison d'etre for all Americans at all times (or as many Americans for as much time as they can safely tar with the broadest brush they can find.)

Peter Woods does an able job of demonstrating the academic malpractice involved and, more importantly, the political agenda that informs the gross academic malpractice. The 1619 project is scholarship only to the extent that cherry-picking talking points from minority opinions and then spinning the points to the desired goal is scholarship. Woods documents how shoddy the “scholarship” was behind this re-invention of history. Woods writes:

“The lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who makes some of the most audacious claims, cites no sources at all: the project as presented in the magazine contains no footnotes, bibliography, or other scholarly footholds.”

In essence, what you have is the “scholarship” found on Facebook or Twitter where assertions are stated and accepted based on how they fit the Woke cultural zeitgeist.

More importantly, Woods reveals the attacks on American historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, who in the Woke scheme of things was a bitter racist who supported slavery. Thus, the 1619 Project ignores Lincoln's clear statements of his belief in the equality of the races and the foundation of the Civil War in the issue of slavery. Woods states:

“IN HER LEAD ESSAY for the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones calls out Abraham Lincoln as a racist. Her evidence for this charge is an August 14, 1862, White House meeting between Lincoln and five black leaders in which Lincoln “informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.” Lincoln said, as Hannah-Jones quotes him: “Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”1 He seems to call for treating whites and blacks in dramatically different ways, to the disadvantage of blacks. Lincoln did not propose deporting any European Americans back to the continent of their ancestral origins. The phrase “ours suffer from your presence” certainly sounds both insulting and racist.
But there is more to the story. The questions that hang over a lot of studies of Lincoln is whether he always meant what he said, or whether he sometimes said things out of political calculation. In this chapter I explain why Hannah-Jones's account of that White House meeting is wrong, and more broadly, why Lincoln was not a racist. But we will have to give fair-minded hearings to both sides – something that Hannah-Jones herself declined to do. I will not say that her view is eyewash from beginning to end. There are historians who basically basically agree with her. But the weight of evidence is against them – and her.”

Woods sets forth his arguments about why Lincoln's conversation - with a reporter present - was for public consumption by those who may have resisted emancipation. As such, Lincoln's ploy ranks up with that of President Obama who was against gay-marriage until it was made a constitutional right by the Supreme Court.

Woods' argument turns on paying attention to details and asking questions - what about that reporter? - something that 1619 Project will not do with its Manechian projection of the good and the bad sides of the issue. This Manechian projection is something that I find with a lot of Woke history; Woke ideology is two-dimensional and simplistic, denying the interesting complexity of real people and real events.

Another example is found in the 1619 Project's efforts to make Lincoln into a white supremacist:

“The complications here are that Lincoln was a public orator known for his ardent opposition to the expansion of slavery and his belief that blacks had the same fundamental rights as whites. He was frequently in a position of threading the needle: How could he advance his principles while trying to win the support of audiences who did not necessarily support, even if they did not vehemently oppose, his agenda? The lines that Hannah-Jones quotes are masterpieces of subversive rhetoric. They sound on first hearing as though Lincoln is expressing his opposition to black equality. But look again. He asks a rhetorical question and provides an equivocal answer. His “feelings” will not “admit” political and social equality, but as Lincoln's defenders often point out, Lincoln didn't take political and social equality off the table. He just took those topics out of the debate he was in at the moment.”

Likewise, the 1619 Project relies on discredited Woke race-mongers for its support:

“Although Hannah-Jones did not cite sources in her article, in this case her source was easily identified. Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to Hillary Clinton, has been publishing a multivolume “survey of Lincoln's political life” and writing occasional pieces on Lincoln in the Washington Monthly. Blumenthal took notice of Hannah-Jones's debt to Lerone Bennett Jr., an editor at Ebony magazine who once wrote an article called “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” and who followed up with a book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (2000). Hannah-Jones “recapitulates Lerone Bennett's projection of Lincoln as an inveterate racist and committed white supremacist, and the Emancipation Proclamation as a sham.”9
In a review written for none other than the New York Times, the great Civil War historian and Lincoln biographer James M. McPherson immediately buried Bennett's wild accusations in the graveyard of incompetent and malicious books, describing it as “a tendentious work of scholarship, marred by selective evidence taken out of context, suppressive of contrary evidence, heedless of the cultural and political climate that constrained Lincoln's options and oblivious to Lincoln's capacity for growth.”10 Yet Bennett's incompetently researched tome was apparently a goldmine for Hannah-Jones.”

Woods also points out that the basic assumption of the 1619 Project is tendentious. The Africans imported may not have been slaves; in fact it appears that at least one subsequently obtained his freedom, maried, and purchased slaves:

//How much less onerous is evident in the subsequent careers of some of those who endured servitude along the shores of the Chesapeake. An especially well-attested case was an individual known as Antonio, who may have been among those individuals sold by Captain Jope in 1619, though he doesn't enter the historical record until two years later when he was set to work on the Bennett family plantation.7 He was eventually freed, renamed himself Anthony Johnson, got married, raised children, became a plantation owner himself, and acquired African slaves of his own. He successfully sued one of his white neighbors in a Virginia court.8 Plainly, Virginian “slavery” was not a total institution then, nor would it ever become so in the antebellum South.”

History is surprisingly complicated. This is not the only story of Africans social mobility in the New World.

Woods prefers 1620 as the founding date of American history since that was the year that the Pilgrims arrived. What Woods finds significant about the Pilgrims is that it exemplified the self-organization and enterprise that has more to say about America than slavery.

Woods does not deny either that slavery played a significant role in American history or that there have been times when American schools have downplayed the role of slavery in American history. However, that criticism can not be laid at the feet of history education after approximately 1970.

Woods also does a nice job of debunking the King Cotton narrative which was a Southern Slaver's trope picked up by Woke activists. On this point, I really invite everyone to read “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States” by Frederick Law Olmstead. Olmstead wrote this book in the 1840s and it categorizes his observations about the detrimental effects that slavery had on Southern society.

Woods ends his book with a section on “what is to be done?” His advice is to learn and share history. I often do that but I have found that any good thing I say about American history will receive Woke responses reminding that “America was not perfect” and “what about” this or that event. It is fascinating that Americans have been trained to instintively respond to positive statements about America with automatic “Debbie Downerism.” Woods points out that this tendency has migrated to conservatives. He points to the example of an article published in National Review that kind of/sort of took the 1619 Project to task but refuses to defend any counter-narrative. Woods points out:

“It is hard to imagine that someone who thinks like that will play any constructive role in resisting the corruption of our schools in the direction of the 1619 project's slavery-is-the-foundation-of-everything-in-this-vile-white-supremacist-society curriculum. As for 1620, he scoffs, “Like English colonists elsewhere, the Pilgrims and their descendants then stripped Native populations of their land through dubious property transactions and episodic wars.”

I don't think this is an accident. If these people don't hate America, then their emotional state is one which takes pleasure in a masochistic contempt for America. Since this seems counter-intuitive, I took some reassurance in Woods' observation:

“The 1619 Project is, arguably, part of a larger effort to destroy America by people who find our nation unbearably bad. The project treats the founding principles of our nation as an illusion – a contemptible illusion. In their place is a single idea: that America was founded on racist exploitation. The form of this racist exploitation has shifted from time to time, from chattel slavery to free-market mechanisms, but its character has not changed at all. There is no American history as such, but only an eternal present consisting of white supremacy and black suffering. The 1619 Project thus consists of an effort to destroy America by teaching children that America never really existed, except as a lie told by white people in an effort to control black people. It eradicates American history and American values in one sweep.”

And what effect does this have on African-Americans?

“Insisting on mere accuracy is unlikely to sway people whose sensibility has been formed along these lines. How then is the 1619 Project to be defeated? One possible answer is the work of Robert Woodson and the Woodson Center, based in Washington, DC. Woodson is a humanitarian, a community-development advocate, and a civil-rights activist known for his efforts to stem youth violence. He is the editor of two books, Youth Crime and Urban Policy: A View from the Inner City (1981) and On the Road to Economic Freedom: An Agenda for Black Progress (1987), and the author of The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today's Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods (1998). He was also among the first national figures to criticize the Times' initiative.
Ten days after the magazine presented the 1619 Project, Woodson published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the project would hurt blacks by encouraging a sense of victimhood. He immediately discerned the core theme of the project: “Whites have always been and continue to be the beneficiaries of both slavery and its attendant institutional racism – and blacks the perpetual victims.” He anticipated the positive media coverage and the eagerness of “left-leaning politicians” to associate themselves with it. And he recognized the importance of the educational angle: “Most dangerous of all, the Pulitzer Center has packaged the Times' project as a curriculum for students of all ages that will be disseminated throughout the country.” He also called on leaders within the black community to voice criticisms of the 1619 Project, lest the idea sink in further that “blacks are born inherently damaged by an all-prevailing racism and that their future prospects are determined by the whims of whites.”4

A final takeaway from Woods:

“There is an answer to the question, “Was America founded as a slavocracy?” – an answer in actual, documented history that does not depend on surmises or interpretative leaps. And the answer is, No, it was not founded as a slavocracy. It wasn't founded as a slavocracy in Virginia in 1619, or at Plymouth in 1620, or in Philadelphia in 1776. We can perhaps conjure other dates from history that have some lesser claim to be “founding” events, but there is no plausible case for an American founding that makes “slavocracy” the beginning of the story or the main charter for what followed.”

This is an incisive, well-written book that should be read.