Recent years have seen eruptions of violence and hate in America: riots, looting, the tearing down of statues. Often those rioting are privileged white youth. One wonders, why are self-described "anti-racist" riots happening now? Today's African Americans have power and wealth that would have been unimaginable to their ancestors. Americans have elected a black president, a black vice president, and there are many current and former black governors, senators, congressmen and women, SCOTUS justices, professors, journalists, entrepreneurs, millionaires and billionaires, bestselling authors, A-list film stars, influencers, trend-setters and adored entertainers and athletes. Interracial marriage is an accepted feature of American life; indeed, Prince Harry, Kim Kardashian, John Legend, Tiger Woods, Candace Owens, Clarence Thomas, George Lucas, Robert DeNiro, Serena Williams and Heidi Klum are just a few of the celebrities in current and former interracial love matches. Why then has race-informed rage inflamed so many?
One excellent guide through America's
agonized spasms is Peter W. Wood's "1620:
A Critical Response to the 1619 Project." Peter W. Wood
has a Ph.D. in anthropology and was a tenured professor at Boston University. He
is president of the National
Association of Scholars. He has written an easy-to-read guide to the 1619
Project. Almost like a pop-up book, "1620" expands into an anthology
if one follows the many references to online essays that Wood provides.
Wood is never anything but courteous and
cool-headed, but he also refuses to walk on eggshells. His prose is direct and
unapologetic. For example, Wood writes that the 1619 Project is "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." This effort
to destroy America by distorting American history is of great import. "American
history is important because … We Americans have so little to substantiate our
common identity." Similarly, Wood cites numerous scholars who are equally
plainspoken. Allen Guelzo, for example, said "The 1619 Project is not
history; it is ignorance." Gordon S. Wood called the project "perverse
and distorted."
At the same time, Wood acknowledges that
taking on the 1619 Project is a quixotic quest. "Criticisms of the 1619
Project seem as futile as moths beating their wings against a porch light."
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a celebrity and is "exempt from ordinary forms of
accountability." Regarding the 1619 Project's slickly-produced advertisement, aired
during the Academy Awards, Wood wrote, "Historians publishing articles
that detail the numerous inaccuracies in the Times' pseudohistory are up
against a famous, popular, and distinctive singer-actress and a soundtrack that
dictates what your feelings should be. It is no contest."
The New York Times premiered the
1619 Project in August, 2019. The Project consists, inter alia, of newspaper
and magazine articles, school curricula, live events, and a podcast. The 1619
Project, Wood notes, has, in a precious touch, its
very own font. The goal of the 1619 Project is "to reframe the country's
history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black
Americans at the very center of the United States' national narrative." The
1619 Project is promoted by the National Education Association, The Zinn
Education Project / Rethinking Schools, and The Pulitzer Center, among others.
Iowa-born, 45-year-old Nikole
Hannah-Jones, the daughter of a black father and a Czech-American mother,
is the driving force behind the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones worked as a
journalist with the Oregonian, the Raleigh News and Observer, and
ProPublica before moving to the New York Times in 2015.
Hannah-Jones said it would be "an
honor" for her to accept responsibility for the riots and looting in
the summer of 2020, and to accept the name "The 1619 Riots."
As Wood records in his book, Hannah-Jones has repeatedly contradicted herself,
made comments she later denied making, and deleted extreme tweets, including
one that accused her scholarly black critics of not caring about enslaved
children. In response to these black critics, Hannah-Jones expressed contempt for
them by tweeting a photograph of her pointing to her gold teeth. Hannah-Jones
won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her introductory essay to the
1619 Project.
Wood summarizes the 1619 Project's main points:
America began, the 1619 Project argues, not with the traditionally celebrated
date of July 4, 1776, commemorating the Declaration of Independence. Rather,
America began when the White Lion, a pirate ship, brought "slaves" to
Virginia in August 1619. Further, "the primary purpose of the colonists
who declared independence from Britain in 1776 was to preserve American slavery
from the danger of Britain's outlawing it; the Southern planation system of
growing cotton with slave labor is the foundation of modern American
capitalism; Lincoln was a racist who had no interest in conferring real
citizenship on those who were enslaved … The nation's history is best
understood as a struggle by American blacks against white supremacy … Black
Americans fought back alone against discrimination … without this struggle [by
blacks] America would have no democracy at all."
Wood says that entire books could be
written in opposition to any one of these main points. "The 1619 Project
simply ignores the abolition movement … It likewise ignores the huge role of
white Americans in the post-Civil War constitutional amendments, and in the
civil rights movement." Another claim of the 1619 Project is that slavery
has been ignored by American historians. In fact, Wood writes, "One would
be hard pressed to find another historical subject that has produced a greater
volume of scholarship."
1619 Project rhetoric implies that slavery
was an American invention; in fact slavery has existed across the globe for
thousands of years. It implies that 12.5 million Africans were shipped to
America. In fact the real number is 388,000. The remainder were shipped to the
Caribbean and Central and South America. The arrival of Africans in 1619 "inaugurated
a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years …
it is the country's very origin." False on two points, Wood argues. The
Africans who arrived in 1619 landed in a colony that was not comparable to the
antebellum, plantation-era South. Rather, they landed in a colony where
indentured workers could earn their way to freedom and go on to purchase their
own slaves.
"Slavery was not recognized by
English common law; once the captives landed their status became fuzzy … None
were recorded as slaves … many of the captives were, after a term of indenture,
set free … the colony at the time had no system of slavery as such," writes
Wood. Records of "slaves" refer to Englishmen who had been convicted
of crimes and who were punished by a period of involuntary servitude. If you
missed church services you would "be a slave for the following week."
Indentured servants, including these Africans, had rights under law and a
chance to work their way out of servitude.
Those released from bondage in
mid-seventeenth-century Virginia acquired property and married, often to white
settlers. Wood quotes Ira Berlin, an historian of American slavery. "At
least one man from every leading free black family – The Johnsons, Paynes, and
Drigguses – married a white woman." Before 1640 "blacks and whites
mingled freely." "The summer workweek was five and a half days with
holidays off " and discipline was often meted out through the courts.
This is not mere rhetoric. The 1619
Project implies that Virginia in 1619 was comparable to, say, a plantation in
Mississippi in 1855. Any such understanding is false, and refuses the complex
and changing realities of American slavery. Wood does not linger on this point,
but this review will.
One need only read of black slaves who
totally defy our concept of slavery, and black slave owners, to understand how
different experiences of American slavery could be, varying from time to time, place
to place, and person to person. On this point, historian Leslie
M. Harris wrote that conditions "vary widely depending on the era and
the colony … [the 1619 Project's] characterizations of slavery in early America
reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial
times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first
generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619."
That forced labor in America varied is
no minor point. One of the current anti-racist movement's dogmas is that white
people per se are essentially evil in a way that "black and brown"
people are not. White people, because of their unique evil, were destined to
produce the chattel slavery of the antebellum South. The historical record
shows that that is not the case. Forced labor in the Americas varied because
historical conditions varied. Blacks and whites married in seventeenth-century Virginia.
Later such marriage was outlawed, and then, again, made legal. The dogma of
unchanging, essential white evil, essential white supremacy, is false.
Reading even brief biographies of black
slave owners confounds current anti-racism dogma. Consider Anthony Johnson,
John
Carruthers Stanly, William
Ellison, Dilsey
Pope, Nathaniel
Butler, the
Pendarvis family, Justus Angel,
Marie
Therese Metoyer, Antoine
Dubuclet and Andrew
Durnford. These were black men and women who owned slaves.
Blacks who owned slaves
sometimes purchased their own wives. After purchase, some waited to free their
wives. If a wife proved unsuitable, the free black husband might sell his
enslaved black wife to another owner. One enslaved woman married to her black
master attempted to use her husband's manumission papers in a scheme to
liberate another slave with whom she was in love. In Virginia, black slave
owners were entitled by law to the services of white indentured servants. Black
slave owners in Louisiana published their willingness to fight for the Confederacy.
"The free colored population of Louisiana … own slaves, and they are
dearly attached to their native land … and they are ready to shed their blood
for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism."
Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians
owned black slaves. There was great controversy among Cherokee about intimate
relations between black slaves and Cherokee owners. At one point marriage
between a Cherokee and a black person was punishable
with the death penalty. Some Cherokee focused on purity of blood. Fully or
partially black people identifying as Cherokee lacked such blood purity. This
heated debate broke out in the Cherokee
Freedmen Controversy.
Not just blacks who owned slaves in
America confound anti-racist dogma. Wood writes, "When Europeans
encountered native kingdoms on Africa's Atlantic coast in the fifteenth
century, they discovered slavery as a deeply embedded practice." European
travelers described sadistic human sacrifice of slaves, sacrifice involving
the spilling of much blood, in Benin in West Africa. See here
for accounts of the grisly human sacrifice of slaves, including women slaves
being gagged, staked to the ground, disemboweled, and left to die slowly in the
hot sun. Again, these practices of human sacrifice were carried out by Africans
on fellow Africans, and they existed before contact with Europeans.
Wood writes, "Slavery continued
among American tribes beyond the reach of Western law well into the nineteenth
century." Native American tribes, before any contact with Europeans,
practiced systems of enslavement that might include torture, human sacrifice,
and cannibalizing of slaves. Native American parents would sometimes sell their
children into slavery. Aztec slaves might wear cumbersome
wooden collars that made movement difficult. Cherokee also used collars for
slaves. Aztec
kings' funerals were accompanied by the sacrifice of slaves, and multiple,
prescribed ceremonies days after the king's death also involved the killing of yet
more slaves. Aztec nobles would be buried with slaves to help them in the
afterlife. Some tribes practiced genetic slavery; children of slaves would
themselves be slaves.
In the Pacific Northwest, up to a third
of the population was enslaved. If slaves were disobedient, shamans would carry
out exorcisms to tame the slave. Slaves might be killed during a potlatch, so
that the slave's owner could ostentatiously exhibit his own casual indifference
to worldly possessions. That's virtue signaling taken to the most extreme degree.
Slavery continued under Russian control
of the Pacific Northwest. When the area came under American control and slavery
was outlawed, Native Americans erected a totem pole depicting Abraham Lincoln. In
some tellings, the pole was erected by grateful, freed slaves. As others
tell it, the pole was erected by slave-owners angered at the theft of their
property. Their goal was to shame Americans into compensating them for lost
property.
Native American slave owners might mutilate
slaves' bodies. As Judge
Dawson stated in an 1886 court case, "The object of such mutilation is
to impress upon the slaves their inferiority, and render their humiliation
complete." Judge Dawson ends his opinion with a ringing condemnation of
slavery, and an insistence that the enslaved Indian who appealed for his
freedom to an American court should win the day. "Can such a system be
tolerated in a country whose people lay claims to civilization and
Christianity? Does not every precept of religion, every principle that
underlies our system of government, every axiom of our political fabric, cry
out against such monstrous inhumanity?" The enslaved Indian petitioner "has
lost one eye, his ears are badly mutilated, and he is certainly a sad spectacle
of humiliated manhood. The crack of the lash, the torture of mutilation, the
fear of death, the annoyance of the juggler [shaman], the excess of manual
labor imposed upon him, the extreme hardships of his life, with the sense of
degradation and inferiority constantly before him, have subdued his manhood,
and the pitiable spectacle of his once stately form is an evidence of the
blighting curse of slavery."
The Muslim Slave Trade lasted far longer
than the Atlantic Slave Trade, enslaved more people, including millions of
white Europeans as well as white Americans, and continued into the twenty-first
century. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania did not make slavery a crime till
2007. Ghanaian researcher John
Azumah estimates that a minimum of 28
million Africans were trafficked in the Muslim Slave Trade. Thousands
of Slavic slaves per year fed Muslim slave caravans in the Middle Ages. One
caravan included five thousand Slavic slaves. Female Slavic sex slaves in
Al-Andalus, that is, Muslim Spain, were subjected to
female genital mutilation. Between 1500-1700, Muslims enslaved c. two
million people from Eastern Europe, including Poland. Islam advanced with
armies of slave
soldiers. The Muslim Slave Trade habitually castrated males; estimates are
that six
of ten victims died from this procedure. The
Muslim Slave Trade is supported by canonical Muslim scripture and the
example of Mohammed, Islam's "perfect example." Mohammed was a slave
owner and slave trader, and he enslaved people he conquered in battle. He
encouraged his followers to have sex with their slave captives, including in
front of their husbands.
For eleven years, Professor
Duke Pesta gave his American university students quizzes to determine what
they knew about slavery. Pesta administered these quizzes "at seven
different universities, ranging from large research institutions to small
liberal arts colleges to branch campuses." He discovered "students'
overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost
exclusively an American phenomenon … more students connected Thomas Jefferson
to slavery than could identify him as president … students were given an
overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by
scholars such as Howard Zinn in 'A People's History of the United States.'"
Students were coming to college "pre-programmed." Knowing nothing
about socialism, they defined it as "fairness." "They cannot
tell you many historical facts … but they are, however, stridently vocal about
the corrupt nature of the Republic and the wickedness of the founding fathers."
Students exhibited "moral superiority" about America's "racist
and sexist" nature.
My own university students had never
heard of the Barbary Wars, the first war America fought against a country other
than England, and the first war America fought on foreign soil. The students
didn't know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson asked why African Muslims
enslaved Americans. They didn't know that Adams and Jefferson learned that "It
was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the
Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder
and enslave."
Wood does not linger on African or
Native American slavery, or leftists' indoctrination of American students. This
review does. None of these facts are adduced to argue that American slavery was
anything but what most people think it was: a crime committed by whites against
blacks. For the most part, that is true. Black and Cherokee slave-owners were a
negligible minority. The existence of the Muslim Slave Trade does not absolve
America of its guilt and duty of repair. Why, then, mention any of this in a
review of Wood's excellent book?
The 1619 Project, and the wider "anti-racism"
movement, including Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter, are de facto
religions. Americans are retreating rapidly from engagement with her
Judeo-Christian roots. Americans are not abandoning all the trappings of
religion; rather they are seeking new religious dogma and expression.
Anti-racism provides that.
Post-Christian New Agers like to use the
word "karma" to mean "justice." Karma doesn't mean justice
at all. Past life actions may doom or elevate a Hindu. Bad person in a past
life? Be an Untouchable in this life. Good people may be reborn as high-caste
Brahmins. America's new race-based religion is, in one respect, similar to the
Hindu caste system. One's "racial ancestors'" actions determine
punishment or reward in this life. Unlike Christianity, there is no hope of
redemption. An Untouchable is an Untouchable is an Untouchable. White people
can never overcome whiteness.
The new race-based religion rejects transcendent
messages from both the Old Testament and the New. Both the Old Testament and
the New insist that descendants cannot be punished for their ancestor's crimes
(See Ezekiel
18 and John 9:1-3.) In the Good Samaritan parable, Jesus introduces a
morality that insists that all people, regardless of ethnic identity, are to be
accorded the same ethical treatment. It is exactly such Christian concepts that
allowed an abolition movement to arise. Stripping away identity as the most
important criterion, Christians could see themselves in slaves, even if those
slaves were ethnically different. The new anti-racist ideology removes
Christian spectacles, and encourages us to revert to blind tribalism. Under
tribalism, we can't feel each others' pain, and we apply differing ethical
standards to persons in tribes other than our own. "White fragility"
and "white discomfort" deserve no compassion, we are taught, with
adamant insistence. Rather, white people's exhibitions of pain are power plays
that essentially evil whites resort to in order to establish their constant
goal: white supremacy. If a white person is hurting, the response must not be
to feel human compassion and reach out to comfort. The response must be to mock
and defeat him or her.
The Good Samaritan ethic is profoundly
different from tribal ethical systems that differentiate between in and out
group members and have differing ethical standards for each. In Pagan Rome,
Roman citizens were largely exempt from crucifixion, but Jews could be
crucified, and thousands of Jews were. Islamic legal systems are inspired by qisas.
In law codes inspired by this Islamic precept, the punishment for killing a
Hindu woman is much less than for killing a Muslim man. Race-based ethics are a
step backward. Not just ethics, but, in the new race-based religion, truth
itself varies by skin color, as we shall see, below, in Nikole Hannah-Jones'
response to her critics.
The race-based, generational vendetta-based
ethic is expressed exactly, if semi-incoherently, in an
internet post saluting the 1619 Project:
"As of today we black and Latinos
are still under the Jim Crow Law we the people who our ancestors came over on
the mother ship's in chain's and sold to work there crops are still Slaves
under the Jim Crow Law as of today in time and in history. In time God is going
to pay back to all who done wrong to our ancestors and all that's going on in
darkness again with the Jim Crow Law of today 's world."
Of course those who "done wrong"
to "ancestors" are no longer alive, but there are white people in the
world, and those white people, because they share the same skin color as a
select group of perpetrators, perpetrators arbitrarily singled out from a
vastly larger group of perpetrators of various shades, including "black
and brown," must be punished and must be fleeced.
America's new race-centered religion argues
that all whites are guilty of the crimes of slavery and white supremacy, and
that that guilt adheres to white identity. White people exploit; white people
establish hierarchies; white people are obsessed with concepts of tribal purity.
"Black and brown" people are communal, peace-loving, and completely
innocent of any historical crime. Whites must be punished for their guilt. Ibram
X. Kendi spells out tribal ethics exactly as does the above-quoted internet
poster. Kendi is simply more sophisticated and more amply remunerated for advancing
tribal ethics. "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist
discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present
discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future
discrimination … to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.
There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must
treat them differently."
This rigid division of humanity into
good, innocent, worthy-of-financial-compensation "black and brown"
people and bad, guilty, must-be-made-to-pay-up white people is evident in my
city today. Paterson, NJ's BLM chapter has announced
its "solidarity" with "people of color" Muslim Arabs in
opposition to "white" Jews. In fact, of course, Jews
and Arabs are quite similarly pigmented. Similarly, when NATO began to bomb
Serbia in 1999, I tried to organize my fellow peace-loving leftists against the
bombing campaign. One prominent black preacher refused to participate. He
supported the "people of color" Albanians against the "white"
Serbs. No such color distinction exists between these two groups, in fact.
As mentioned, the vast majority of the
Atlantic Slave Trade's cargo went to the Caribbean and Central and South
America. So much for the "black and brown" formulation. "Brown"
"Latinx" people were the most numerous slavers in the Americas, and
today's race-based religion not only exonerates "brown" people, it
embraces them and conflates them with black people. This ahistorical formulation
violates truth and exposes the new religion's goal: the demonization of whites.
"We are demonizing kids. We're demonizing white people for being born. We
are using language that makes them feel less than for nothing that they are
personally responsible for," as one practitioner put it, in
a leaked audio.
The ruthless but remunerative career of
slave catcher Nathaniel Butler, himself a black man; Cherokee racists intent on
preserving the purity of the blood of their tribe; the grand guignol of
slave-era Benin; and Haida mutilations of their slaves: all these nightmares
inform us that the ugliness of slavery in America was an expression of flawed
human nature, not white nature. Coming to terms with the nightmare of slavery
does not involve locating evil in white skin. Rather, any real coming to terms
with the exploitation of one human being by another demands that we consider a
husband, ostensibly in love with his wife, who is willing to sell her to
another man because she didn't meet his needs.
The universal, Christian ethic demands
that I see myself in the slave-owning husband, regardless of his color, and the
enslaved wife, regardless of her color. I must guard against the sins he
commits hiding in my own heart, just waiting for me to give in to my worst
impulses. I must feel compassion for the victim I have never been. Tribalism
short circuits that race-blind exercise. A spiritual exercise that builds both
responsibility and compassion is eliminated in tribal ethics. All that is left
is hatred of the other tribe, and the thirst for revenge from people
irrationally imagined to be descendants of wrongdoers.
Both the
Old and New Testaments insist that "no one is righteous; no, not one."
We are all equal because we are all sinners. Someone directed by the
Judeo-Christian ethic would read about the horrors of slavery and recognize: "People
like me did this. This is part of human nature. I am human. I must guard
against such evil in myself, and I must work toward making the world a more
ethical place where such horrors do not occur, including in contemporary
slavery."
Someone informed by the current
race-based ethical system locates all evil in white skin. The religious ritual
in response to white evil is, as the above-quoted practitioner acknowledges, to
"demonize" whites, beginning with white schoolchildren. That approach
will never lead to a better world, and it would never have informed anything
like America's abolitionist movement. It is a nihilist approach that leads only
to destruction. The 1619 Project is part of a larger effort to distort atrocity
as part of a marketing of a perverse and destructive race-based ethical system
and economic shakedown.
On June 30, 2020, the New York Times
ran a Hannah-Jones piece entitled "What
is Owed: If True Justice And Equality Are Ever to Be Achieved in the United
States, the Country Must Finally Take Seriously What It Owes Black Americans."
The article fairly screams at the reader: against a black background, the
headline font is all caps, supersized, bright yellow, and ragged-edged. Amidst
the lettering are black-and-white photos of angry black people raising fists. "It
does not matter if your ancestors engaged in slavery or if you just immigrated
here two weeks ago," Hannah-Jones writes. If you are white, you owe black
people money. "It is time for reparations." "My ultimate goal is
that there will be a reparations bill passed."
Reparations will be convenient for
Hannah-Jones. Her Czech half can pay reparations to her black half. A quick
trip to the drive-up ATM and she won't even have to leave her car, and
balancing her checkbook will be a breeze. Of course it is likely that
Hannah-Jones' Czech ancestors were serfs; serfdom was not eliminated in Czech
lands till 1848. No matter. White serfs' suffering under their lash was just
another expression of "white fragility" the Woke must mock.
When American slavery is placed in the
context of world and historical slavery, it is clear that what makes America
exceptional is America's rejection of slavery. Wood writes, "America,
contrary to Hannah Jones, was born not in the midst of indifference to slavery
but in the gathering storm of principled opposition to slavery."
Before America was born, Quakers
established the "Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the
Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage." Ben Franklin was the group's
president. 646,392
Union soldiers were killed or injured ending slavery. If a proportional
loss occurred given America's population today, that would amount to eleven and
a half million casualties. Their sacrifice is what makes America exceptional.
Their descendants don't owe reparations to anyone. Instead of respecting their sacrifice,
as Wood writes, the goal of the 1619 Project is to promote a "new form of
American exceptionalism in which the United States is uniquely awful."
One must find fault not just with the
1619 Project's assertions, one must also fault its method. History is
traditionally hammered out in a scholarly process that involves credentialed
historians who have devoted their lives to their craft. As previously
mentioned, Hannah-Jones was a mid-level journalist who focused mostly on
segregation while working for local newspapers. Her CV does not qualify her to
rewrite American history. Any historian hoping to do so would have to contend
with peers, that is other men and women who have also devoted their lives to
scholarship, checking over facts and methodology. There was no such peer review
of the 1619 Project.
Scholarship uses tools like footnotes.
Footnotes were not invented in order to give headaches to undergraduate
students typing up their work and struggling to adhere to formatting
guidelines. Footnotes allow scholars to see exactly where a given assertion
finds support. If an author says something like "Abraham Lincoln was a
white supremacist," a footnote allows readers to discover what material
lead the author to that startling conclusion. "Nikole Hannah Jones"
Wood reports, "cites no sources at all: the project as presented in the
magazine contains no footnotes, bibliography, or other scholarly footholds."
Of the fourteen main contributors, only five are historians . Seven are
journalists; six work for the New York Times.
As a "riposte" to the 1619
Project, Wood proposes the November, 1620 arrival of Puritans in Massachusetts.
Their Mayflower compact "pointed the way toward America's self-government."
"The document sketched, for the first time in European settlement of the
New World, an ideal of self-government based on justice … The leaders invited
servants and underage men to sign it as well. The Mayflower compact was
egalitarian in that sense. It ignored class, wealth, and other marks of status
– though it did not include women." The Mayflower Compact's concept of
authority was a Christian one; the true leader was a servant to the people. The
men who exercised authority "earned what authority they had by tireless
service fetching wood and making fires, preparing food for the sick, washing
infected clothes, and doing so 'willingly and cheerfully.'"
The Mayflower Compact is not limited to
its place and time. Rather, it is "profoundly connected" to the
Declaration of Independence. Wood quotes Rebeca
Fraser "The Mayflower Compact has a whisper of the contractual
government enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that governments
derive their just powers 'from the consent of the governed'" The Mayflower
Compact is a better choice for America's founding than the arrival of Africans
in Virginia in 1619. Forced labor was all but universal in 1619. What makes
America different from every other location where forced labor was practiced is
the kind of ideals expressed in the Mayflower Compact, elaborated in the
Declaration of Independence, and enforced with the willing sacrifice of human
blood in the Civil War.
In December, 2019, five major historians
-- Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon S.
Wood – published a
letter protesting the 1619 Project. Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus
Professor of the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton. Wood quotes Wilentz's
New
York Review of Books argument that the West
is unique in recognizing slavery as "A barbaric offense to God, reason,
and natural rights." Wood and Wilentz cite abolitionists like John
Woolman, an American merchant from Pennsylvania, who detailed arguments against
slavery in his publications and speeches. "By the mid-1770s, in the
American colonies as well as in Britain and France, a significant number of
reformers and intellectuals had come to regard American slavery as pure evil.
Over the next fifteen years, they set in motion political movements dedicated
to eradicating the degradation of persons into property … Revolutionary
America, far from a pro-slavery bulwark against the supposedly enlightened
British Empire, was a hotbed of antislavery politics, arguably the hottest and
most successful of its kind in the Atlantic world prior to 1783."
Gordon S. Wood is a senior scholar of
the American Revolution and recipient of a number of awards for his dozens of
books and articles on the topic. In November, 2019, the World
Socialist Website published an interview with Wood. Peter W. Wood quotes
from this interview.
Gordon Wood expressed concern that the
1619 Project will become "the basis for high school education and it has
the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in
so many ways … None of the leading scholars of the whole period from the
Revolution to the Civil War, as far I know, have been consulted."
Wood said that in the new American
nation "nearly everybody knew" that slavery was "a barbaric
thing" and wrongly assumed it was "on the road to extinction." "It's
the American Revolution that makes [slavery] a problem for the world. And the
first real anti-slave movement takes place in North America." Virginia
planters, Wood
explained, that is men profiting from slavery, "in the years following
independence, took the lead in moving to abolish the despicable international
slave trade."
Peter W. Wood quotes historian Christopher
Leslie Brown. Contrary to the 1619 Project's main assertion, that is, that
American colonists fought the Revolution to protect American slavery from the
allegedly imminent British abolition of slavery, "The British antislavery
movement that began in the late 1780s was a late-born sibling in the family of
Anglo-American antislavery campaigns. It took shape after the individual
initiatives that first arose during the 1760s and 1770s in New England, the
Delaware Valley and … the Chesapeake Bay."
Wood's chapter addressing the 1619
Project's take on slavery and capitalism cites several critical historians and
economists. Wood argues that the 1619 Project and its attendant supporters
produced a series of bogus claims that are easily proven false. Slavery did not
account for the percentage of the US economy that Team 1619 said it did.
Slave-holders did not invent double entry bookkeeping; in fact, such
bookkeeping had been in use for centuries. There was no "pushing system"
of increased torture of slaves that somehow, counterintuitively, resulted in
increased slave efficiency. In fact it was re-organized work teams and improved
crops that produced better yields.
The idea that cotton production in the
South was the basis of American capitalism was given the lie during the Civil
War. The agricultural South lost the war and the industrial North, relying on
the labor of non-slaves, won. "The North produced cities, factories, infrastructure,
and a tide of industrial invention." Wood argues that slavery retarded the
economy, and degraded the concept of work. As long as work was associated with
forced labor that resulted in no profit to the worker, work was held in contempt.
In the capitalist North, with fewer slaves, work was associated with personal
profit and advancement. That attitude enriched the North.
Matthew Desmond, a Princeton
sociologist, penned a central 1619 piece on slavery and capitalism. Wood cites Phillip
W. Magness, an author on economic history, the history of slavery, and related
subjects. Magness wrote in
a February 2020 article that Desmond's piece is so thoroughly bad that the Times
should retract it.
Predictably, when confronted with
criticisms of the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones responded harshly. "Their
criticism is not legitimate," she said, at one event. Hannah-Jones said historians
criticized the project because she is "a black woman who presents the way
I do." In response to one critic, Hannah-Jones said, "LOL. Right,
because white historians have produced truly objective history."
Otherwise, "She offered no substantive response" writes Christine
Rosen in Commentary.
Though Hannah-Jones focused on race, as previously mentioned, the 1619
Project's critics include numerous African American scholars. They formed a
counter project, 1776 Unites.
Leslie M. Harris, a scholar and a black
woman, responded to identity-based defenses of the 1619 Project. "Some
observers, including at times Hannah-Jones herself, have framed the argument as
evidence of a chasm between black and white scholars…the argument among
historians … is hardly black and white. Over the past half-century, important
foundational work on the history and legacy of slavery has been done by a
multiracial group of scholars."
The 1619 Project provokes strong
emotions. There is a large amount of material out there addressing the Project,
material most of us can't devote time to reading. We recognize that slavery was
horrible, and we may not understand why anyone would react negatively to a
project purporting to advance knowledge about it. Peter W. Wood's book is a
gift to the reader. Wood presents the reader with an easy-to-read, wide-ranging
guide to a very hot topic. He does so with grace and class. Work like Wood's
and the scholars he cites give the reader hope in scholarship and the continued
viability of the American experiment in democracy.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
This essay appears at Front Page Magazine here
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