Disputed 1619 project was CORRECT, Slavery WAS key to US Revolution; Gerald Horne proved in 2014
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https://www.clarionledger.com/in-de...sippi-students-learned-their-past/3623258001/
clarionledger.com
The story of a 1970s Mississippi textbook that changed how students learned about their past
Luke Ramseth
12-15 minutes
This story is part of The Confederate Reckoning, a collaborative project of USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South to critically examine the legacy of the Confederacy and its influence on systemic racism today.
The way Mississippi students learned about slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the civil rights movement in their home state began to slowly shift in 1980.
Before 1980, students were often taught a whitewashed narrative of the state’s violent past, one that diminished Black people’s suffering and fostered prejudice. After 1980 came a version of Mississippi history in textbooks that looked a little more like the history itself: complicated, uncomfortable, sometimes ugly.
What changed? Ninth graders finally began to get their hands on a textbook called “Mississippi: Conflict and Change.” The book, which ultimately won a nonfiction writing award and garnered positive reviews from major news outlets, almost wasn’t released to school districts at all. Its authors fought for years for its adoption, first against Mississippi’s textbook review committee and then in federal court.
"Mississippi Conflict and Change" was a history textbook written by two Mississippi historians. The textbook was originally rejected by the state because it did not maintain previously accepted interpretations of historic events.
Special to Clarion Ledger
The book didn’t suddenly end Mississippi’s history teaching shortcomings, and the fight to give students a more full view of the past still continues today, said Stephanie R. Rolph, a history professor at Millsaps College.
“Even some of the most recent textbooks on Mississippi history, while they're improvements on what was available in the 1970s, are still not fully diving into the history of slavery in the state, the level of violence that accompanied it, and the aftermath of it,” Rolph said.
But “Conflict and Change” served as a bellwether, she said, showing other Mississippi scholars that they, too, could challenge the status quo. The story behind the textbook’s eventual adoption was turned into its own 2017 book, “Civil Rights Culture Wars,” by Ole Miss historian Charles Eagles.
“Mississippi women, workers, and blacks and other minorities learned little about their own histories from their Mississippi history textbooks,” Eagles wrote in his first chapter, describing the era before “Conflict and Change” was released. This “state-sanctioned amnesia,” he wrote, “played a vital role in the perpetuation of white supremacy and racial discrimination.”
Confederate Reckoning: The teaching of the history of the Confederacy
As the nation faces a reckoning over social-justice issues and systemic racism, we are examining whether schools are adequately teaching the history of American slavery, the Confederacy, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era.
Just as Mississippi’s leaders refused to integrate schools for 16 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, they also refused to sign off on a textbook that offered a more comprehensive perspective of the state’s history around slavery and race.
In 1960, the Mississippi Legislature gave Gov. Ross Barnett, a segregationist, full control over picking what textbooks schools were allowed to use. Barnett chose a state history book written by John Bettersworth, an author who included “pro-white, anti-integrationist narratives” and “seemed stuck in the same Old South and Lost Cause mentality” of the state history authors that came before him, according to a 2010 report by the historian Rebecca Davis.
By 1970, a state textbook review committee appointed by top leaders had begun choosing what schools could buy with state money. But that didn’t immediately improve which types of history books were being adopted. “Mississippi textbook authors continued writing ‘whites only’ history well into the 1970s and some into the 1980s,” Davis wrote.
Students read — and were misled — about “‘corrupt Negro-controlled’ Reconstruction governments, and ‘troublemaking’ civil rights activists,” said Davis’ paper, which studied the evolution of race in Mississippi history textbooks from 1900 to 1995.
Many of those old textbooks, Rolph added, discussed slavery “in that old white paternalistic way, that it was good, and (the slaves) were happy.”
Then came “Conflict and Change.” It was written in the early 1970s by sociologist James Loewen of Tougaloo College and historian Charles Sallis of Millsaps College, along with several other contributors including their students.
Sociologist James Loewen, one of the authors of "Mississippi: Conflict and Change."
Special to Clarion Ledger
“Both of these professors knew of each other, and in both of our classes we were discussing some of the myths and lies and stereotypes about Mississippi history,” Jeanne Middleton Hairston, a former Millsaps professor who was at the time a student helping write the book, explained in a radio interview several years ago. “We just began to realize, students and faculty, that there was such an ignorance about Mississippi’s history, and particularly for the recent past, ‘54 on.”
Unlike its predecessors, Eagles noted in his account, the new textbook boldly explored lynchings, white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation.
The longest chapter in “Conflict and Change” is about the civil rights movement. A section on slavery candidly states that white Southerners “tried to free themselves from the guilt of enslaving their fellow men by telling themselves that their slaves were not really people at all.”
Jeanne Middleton Hairston was one of the student authors of "Mississippi: Conflict and Change." She now serves on the Jackson Public Schools Board of Trustees.
Special to the Clarion Ledger
“(H)istorians may not tell what actually happened,” Sallis and Loewen warned their young readers in the first chapter, an apparent jab at the Mississippi history authors that came before them. “They tell what they think happened. Since they themselves are well thought of, they may write history in such a way that their own status can be explained and defended.”
In 1974, Sallis and Loewen submitted their book to the Textbook Purchasing Board for approval. Also submitted at the last minute was the newest book by Bettersworth, called “Your Mississippi.”
The New York Times would later describe Bettersworth’s previous textbooks as portraying Black people only as “complacent darkies or as a problem to whites.” The latest iteration Bettersworth submitted, the Times reported, had updated a few of its more ridiculous descriptions of Black people’s lives. But, as Davis wrote, the book remained “woefully behind the times.”
The board could have allowed both books, letting schools pick their favorite. But the panel rejected “Conflict and Change,” 5 to 2, its two Black members voting in the minority. “It was very obviously a racist decision,” Loewen remarked at the time.
The professors sued, saying Bettersworth’s latest book was inadequate, that it continued to overlook Black people’s accomplishments and that it labeled the Ku Klux Klan as only a “secret social and fraternal” club, among other complaints. After several years of litigation their book finally won adoption by Mississippi in 1980.
Before the decision, one of the defendants, textbook committee member John Turnipseed, testified how he was concerned about a picture of a lynching that had been included in “Conflict and Change." It showed white people posing near a burned black body.
Part 2:
He worried class discussions about lynching would be uncomfortable and make teaching difficult for a white woman teacher, especially in front of a class of mostly Black students, according to a description of his statements included in Davis’ report.
“Didn’t lynchings happen in Mississippi?” U.S. District Court Judge Orma Smith asked.
“Yes, but it was all so long ago, why dwell on it now?” Turnipseed replied.
“It’s a history book isn’t it?” the judge shot back.
Medgar Evers stood for several key issues in the civil rights movement, but nothing held more importance to him than getting African Americans to exercise their rights as citizens by registering to vote.
The Clarion-Ledger
“Conflict and Change” altered how slavery was described in Mississippi textbooks. Books began to acknowledge “slaves as real people with real feelings and ideas, and not simply a means to perpetuate King Cotton,” Davis wrote.
A 1995 textbook, “Discovering Mississippi,” co-authored by the late Ole Miss historian David Sansing, included five pages on slave life alongside illustrations.
Other shifts occurred in more recent books as well, Davis wrote, with more full descriptions of free Black people and a fresh perspective on Reconstruction that didn’t lean on racial stereotypes. Newer books also updated Ku Klux Klan descriptions to better align with what the group actually was: a terrorist organization. Oddly, the lynching of Emmett Till, the report said, got scant attention in textbooks until the mid-1990s.
By 2011, Mississippi only earned a “C” grade on its civil rights teaching standards from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Five years earlier, state lawmakers had passed legislation authorizing schools to make civil rights part of the curriculum in all grades.
The SPLC labeled recent changes the state had made to its standards “a promising start,” though it noted that, as a local control state, school districts could easily disregard the guidelines. “This is disappointing in a state whose progress in education has repeatedly attracted national attention,” the report’s authors said.
Three years later, a similar SPLC report found Mississippi had slightly improved its civil rights education score — but its overall rating remained a C. Alabama earned a B, Louisiana an A.
By 2017, an investigation by The Hechinger Report and Reveal found many school districts continued to rely on old textbooks that still didn’t meet the state’s most recent civil rights teaching standards. Some of the books used questionable language or skipped over key events and groups, like the Freedom Riders, according to the report.
Previous investigation: Why students are ignorant about the civil rights movement
Before 2011, the state’s social studies standards hadn’t required students to learn about the civil rights movement. Civil rights was mentioned only three times in the 305-page document.
The state’s latest standards, published in 2018, mention civil rights 225 times and slavery 25 times, with guidelines on learning about the Freedom Riders and Ole Miss riots, exploration of Jim Crow and “the lasting impact of slavery” on discrimination and economic conditions of African Americans today.
Many teachers have moved beyond textbooks for teaching about issues like slavery and the civil rights movement, Rolph said.
Chuck Yarborough
“We want simplicity in history. We want either good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong. And while that’s very satisfactory to us individually, any project in history that is going to reflect our world, and teach kids how to operate in our world, has to explore that complexity.”
For example, Chuck Yarborough, a teacher in Columbus, has received national attention for how he teaches U.S. and African American history. It involves a project called Tales From the Crypt, where students research someone buried in one of the city’s two historic cemeteries, one of which includes Confederate soldiers, then write and perform about them.
“Human beings like there to be no shades of gray,” Yarborough said in a 2018 profile in The Atlantic. “We want simplicity in history. We want either good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong. And while that’s very satisfactory to us individually, any project in history that is going to reflect our world, and teach kids how to operate in our world, has to explore that complexity.”
Much work needs to be done to better teach Mississippi students about the state’s history, Rolph said. Many still arrive in her college classes with an understanding of the state’s geography and economy — but woefully little knowledge of its history around slavery, the civil rights movement and similar issues.
Students should know not only the importance of icons like Martin Luther King Jr., she added, but also key Mississippi figures such as the the voting and women's rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.
He worried class discussions about lynching would be uncomfortable and make teaching difficult for a white woman teacher, especially in front of a class of mostly Black students, according to a description of his statements included in Davis’ report.
“Didn’t lynchings happen in Mississippi?” U.S. District Court Judge Orma Smith asked.
“Yes, but it was all so long ago, why dwell on it now?” Turnipseed replied.
“It’s a history book isn’t it?” the judge shot back.
Medgar Evers stood for several key issues in the civil rights movement, but nothing held more importance to him than getting African Americans to exercise their rights as citizens by registering to vote.
The Clarion-Ledger
“Conflict and Change” altered how slavery was described in Mississippi textbooks. Books began to acknowledge “slaves as real people with real feelings and ideas, and not simply a means to perpetuate King Cotton,” Davis wrote.
A 1995 textbook, “Discovering Mississippi,” co-authored by the late Ole Miss historian David Sansing, included five pages on slave life alongside illustrations.
Other shifts occurred in more recent books as well, Davis wrote, with more full descriptions of free Black people and a fresh perspective on Reconstruction that didn’t lean on racial stereotypes. Newer books also updated Ku Klux Klan descriptions to better align with what the group actually was: a terrorist organization. Oddly, the lynching of Emmett Till, the report said, got scant attention in textbooks until the mid-1990s.
By 2011, Mississippi only earned a “C” grade on its civil rights teaching standards from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Five years earlier, state lawmakers had passed legislation authorizing schools to make civil rights part of the curriculum in all grades.
The SPLC labeled recent changes the state had made to its standards “a promising start,” though it noted that, as a local control state, school districts could easily disregard the guidelines. “This is disappointing in a state whose progress in education has repeatedly attracted national attention,” the report’s authors said.
Three years later, a similar SPLC report found Mississippi had slightly improved its civil rights education score — but its overall rating remained a C. Alabama earned a B, Louisiana an A.
By 2017, an investigation by The Hechinger Report and Reveal found many school districts continued to rely on old textbooks that still didn’t meet the state’s most recent civil rights teaching standards. Some of the books used questionable language or skipped over key events and groups, like the Freedom Riders, according to the report.
Previous investigation: Why students are ignorant about the civil rights movement
Before 2011, the state’s social studies standards hadn’t required students to learn about the civil rights movement. Civil rights was mentioned only three times in the 305-page document.
The state’s latest standards, published in 2018, mention civil rights 225 times and slavery 25 times, with guidelines on learning about the Freedom Riders and Ole Miss riots, exploration of Jim Crow and “the lasting impact of slavery” on discrimination and economic conditions of African Americans today.
Many teachers have moved beyond textbooks for teaching about issues like slavery and the civil rights movement, Rolph said.
Chuck Yarborough
“We want simplicity in history. We want either good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong. And while that’s very satisfactory to us individually, any project in history that is going to reflect our world, and teach kids how to operate in our world, has to explore that complexity.”
For example, Chuck Yarborough, a teacher in Columbus, has received national attention for how he teaches U.S. and African American history. It involves a project called Tales From the Crypt, where students research someone buried in one of the city’s two historic cemeteries, one of which includes Confederate soldiers, then write and perform about them.
“Human beings like there to be no shades of gray,” Yarborough said in a 2018 profile in The Atlantic. “We want simplicity in history. We want either good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong. And while that’s very satisfactory to us individually, any project in history that is going to reflect our world, and teach kids how to operate in our world, has to explore that complexity.”
Much work needs to be done to better teach Mississippi students about the state’s history, Rolph said. Many still arrive in her college classes with an understanding of the state’s geography and economy — but woefully little knowledge of its history around slavery, the civil rights movement and similar issues.
Students should know not only the importance of icons like Martin Luther King Jr., she added, but also key Mississippi figures such as the the voting and women's rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.
Behind the attack on New York Times Project 1619
Behind the attack on New York Times Project 1619
February 14, 2020
Last August, the NY Times Sunday Magazine was entirely devoted to Project 1619, an attempt to root the racism of today in the institution of slavery that dates back to 1619, when more than 20 slaves were sold to the British colonists in Virginia. This hypothesis in itself might have not touched off the controversy surrounding the project. Instead, it was another claim that the American Revolution of 1776 was a reactionary rebellion to preserve slavery that probably set the gears in motion that led to an open letter from five prestigious historians to the NY Times that concluded:
We ask that The Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy and truth, issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in The 1619 Project. We also ask for the removal of these mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications, including books bearing the name of The New York Times. We ask finally that The Times reveal fully the process through which the historical materials were and continue to be assembled, checked and authenticated.
The letter was written by Sean Wilentz and signed by him and four others: Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood. All are white with an average age of 71.
It is highly likely that the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) that publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) helped organize this campaign since all of the historians, except Wilentz, have granted interviews to it about their objections to Project 1619. It is even more likely that SEP member Tom Mackaman led this effort since he is a professor at King’s College in Pennsylvania and might have used his academic status to persuade them to take a stand. McPherson probably didn’t need much persuasion since his contacts with WSWS go back to 1999. It is not clear how much contact WSWS had with Sean Wilentz since his liberal Democratic Party politics might have made him much less amenable to any joint project with a bunch of sectarian lunatics.
At any rate, others have connected the dotted lines, including the Wall Street Journal that summed up the conflict a week ago:
‘So wrong in so many ways” is how Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution, characterized the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” James McPherson, dean of Civil War historians and another Pulitzer winner, said the Times presented an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” Even more surprising than the criticism from these generally liberal historians was where the interviews appeared: on the World Socialist Web Site, run by the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party.
The “1619 Project” was launched in August with a 100-page spread in the Times’s Sunday magazine. It intends to “reframe the country’s history” by crossing out 1776 as America’s founding date and substituting 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Va. The project has been celebrated up and down the liberal establishment, praised by Sen. Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
A September essay for the World Socialist Web Site called the project a “racialist falsification” of history. That didn’t get much attention, but in November the interviews with the historians went viral. “I wish my books would have this kind of reaction,” Mr. Wood says in an email. “It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.” He adds that fellow historians have privately expressed their agreement. Mr. McPherson coolly describes the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”
The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it “decenters whiteness” and disdains its critics as “old, white male historians.” She tweeted of Mr. McPherson: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” Her own qualifications are an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master’s in journalism. She says the project goes beyond Mr. McPherson’s expertise, the Civil War. “For the most part,” she writes in its lead essay, “black Americans fought back alone” against racism. No wonder she’d rather not talk about the Civil War.
To the Trotskyists, Ms. Hannah-Jones writes: “You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.” She calls them “white men claiming to be socialists.” Perhaps they’re guilty of being white men, but they’re definitely socialists. Their faction, called the Workers League until 1995, was “one of the most strident and rigid Marxist groups in America” during the Cold War, says Harvey Klehr, a leading historian of American communism.
“Ours is not a patriotic, flag-waving kind of perspective,” says Thomas Mackaman, the World Socialist Web Site’s interviewer and a history professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He simply recognizes that the arrival of 20 slaves in 1619 wasn’t a “world-altering event.” Slavery had existed across the world for millennia, and there were already slaves elsewhere in what would become the U.S. before 1619.
So, Mackaman says that the arrival of 20 slaves in 1619 was no big deal since “Slavery had existed across the world for millennia, and there were already slaves elsewhere in what would become the U.S. before 1619.” Odd that Mackaman, the big-time Marxist scholar, can’t distinguish between pre-capitalist and capitalist slavery. Yes, there were slaves in 1619 but being one in the Ottoman Empire was not the same thing as picking cotton. The Janissaries, who were slaves, were also the Sultan’s elite troops, paid regular salaries, and eventually became part of the ruling class.
If the WSWS was defending Marxism by going on the attack against Project 1619, that didn’t seem to bother the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone who was pleased to hear James McPherson deny that racism was a permanent condition. This is the same Barone who wrote “How Genetic Science Is Undercutting the Case for Racial Quotas” for the Washington Examiner on April 4, 2018. Somehow, the belief in genetic inferiority does not seem consistent with racism not being a permanent condition but I’ll let the dialectical geniuses at WSWS sort that out.
In addition to the Trump-supporting Washington Examiner, Wilentz and company got thumbs up from the City-Journal, the voice of the neoconservative Manhattan Institute, the National Review, and New Criterion, a high-falutin’ journal that once awarded a prize to Charles Murray, best-known for his Bell-Curve theory that finds Blacks genetically inferior.
Most of the fury from the WSWS and its academic allies is directed at an introductory article written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, an African-American staff writer for the NYT Sunday Magazine and the recipient of a Polk Award for her reports on NPR Radio. This paragraph must have made Sean Wilentz’s hair catch fire:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if 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. 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.
From all the sparks this debate has generated, it is important to recognize that it did not start with her article. To some extent, it reflects both a generational and racial divide with both younger and Black scholars less willing to believe in the purity of our Founding Fathers. The overwhelming majority of the Project 1619 authors were African-American. All the white ones were young.
Behind the attack on New York Times Project 1619
February 14, 2020
Last August, the NY Times Sunday Magazine was entirely devoted to Project 1619, an attempt to root the racism of today in the institution of slavery that dates back to 1619, when more than 20 slaves were sold to the British colonists in Virginia. This hypothesis in itself might have not touched off the controversy surrounding the project. Instead, it was another claim that the American Revolution of 1776 was a reactionary rebellion to preserve slavery that probably set the gears in motion that led to an open letter from five prestigious historians to the NY Times that concluded:
We ask that The Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy and truth, issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in The 1619 Project. We also ask for the removal of these mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications, including books bearing the name of The New York Times. We ask finally that The Times reveal fully the process through which the historical materials were and continue to be assembled, checked and authenticated.
The letter was written by Sean Wilentz and signed by him and four others: Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood. All are white with an average age of 71.
It is highly likely that the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) that publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) helped organize this campaign since all of the historians, except Wilentz, have granted interviews to it about their objections to Project 1619. It is even more likely that SEP member Tom Mackaman led this effort since he is a professor at King’s College in Pennsylvania and might have used his academic status to persuade them to take a stand. McPherson probably didn’t need much persuasion since his contacts with WSWS go back to 1999. It is not clear how much contact WSWS had with Sean Wilentz since his liberal Democratic Party politics might have made him much less amenable to any joint project with a bunch of sectarian lunatics.
At any rate, others have connected the dotted lines, including the Wall Street Journal that summed up the conflict a week ago:
‘So wrong in so many ways” is how Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution, characterized the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” James McPherson, dean of Civil War historians and another Pulitzer winner, said the Times presented an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” Even more surprising than the criticism from these generally liberal historians was where the interviews appeared: on the World Socialist Web Site, run by the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party.
The “1619 Project” was launched in August with a 100-page spread in the Times’s Sunday magazine. It intends to “reframe the country’s history” by crossing out 1776 as America’s founding date and substituting 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Va. The project has been celebrated up and down the liberal establishment, praised by Sen. Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
A September essay for the World Socialist Web Site called the project a “racialist falsification” of history. That didn’t get much attention, but in November the interviews with the historians went viral. “I wish my books would have this kind of reaction,” Mr. Wood says in an email. “It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.” He adds that fellow historians have privately expressed their agreement. Mr. McPherson coolly describes the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”
The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it “decenters whiteness” and disdains its critics as “old, white male historians.” She tweeted of Mr. McPherson: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” Her own qualifications are an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master’s in journalism. She says the project goes beyond Mr. McPherson’s expertise, the Civil War. “For the most part,” she writes in its lead essay, “black Americans fought back alone” against racism. No wonder she’d rather not talk about the Civil War.
To the Trotskyists, Ms. Hannah-Jones writes: “You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.” She calls them “white men claiming to be socialists.” Perhaps they’re guilty of being white men, but they’re definitely socialists. Their faction, called the Workers League until 1995, was “one of the most strident and rigid Marxist groups in America” during the Cold War, says Harvey Klehr, a leading historian of American communism.
“Ours is not a patriotic, flag-waving kind of perspective,” says Thomas Mackaman, the World Socialist Web Site’s interviewer and a history professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He simply recognizes that the arrival of 20 slaves in 1619 wasn’t a “world-altering event.” Slavery had existed across the world for millennia, and there were already slaves elsewhere in what would become the U.S. before 1619.
So, Mackaman says that the arrival of 20 slaves in 1619 was no big deal since “Slavery had existed across the world for millennia, and there were already slaves elsewhere in what would become the U.S. before 1619.” Odd that Mackaman, the big-time Marxist scholar, can’t distinguish between pre-capitalist and capitalist slavery. Yes, there were slaves in 1619 but being one in the Ottoman Empire was not the same thing as picking cotton. The Janissaries, who were slaves, were also the Sultan’s elite troops, paid regular salaries, and eventually became part of the ruling class.
If the WSWS was defending Marxism by going on the attack against Project 1619, that didn’t seem to bother the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone who was pleased to hear James McPherson deny that racism was a permanent condition. This is the same Barone who wrote “How Genetic Science Is Undercutting the Case for Racial Quotas” for the Washington Examiner on April 4, 2018. Somehow, the belief in genetic inferiority does not seem consistent with racism not being a permanent condition but I’ll let the dialectical geniuses at WSWS sort that out.
In addition to the Trump-supporting Washington Examiner, Wilentz and company got thumbs up from the City-Journal, the voice of the neoconservative Manhattan Institute, the National Review, and New Criterion, a high-falutin’ journal that once awarded a prize to Charles Murray, best-known for his Bell-Curve theory that finds Blacks genetically inferior.
Most of the fury from the WSWS and its academic allies is directed at an introductory article written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, an African-American staff writer for the NYT Sunday Magazine and the recipient of a Polk Award for her reports on NPR Radio. This paragraph must have made Sean Wilentz’s hair catch fire:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if 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. 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.
From all the sparks this debate has generated, it is important to recognize that it did not start with her article. To some extent, it reflects both a generational and racial divide with both younger and Black scholars less willing to believe in the purity of our Founding Fathers. The overwhelming majority of the Project 1619 authors were African-American. All the white ones were young.
PART 2:
You can see the generational conflict at work in the June 6th NY Review of Books take-down of Sean Wilentz’s latest book titled “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding” (unfortunately behind a paywall; contact me for a copy). Written by Nicholas Guyatt, it reflects the skepticism of younger scholars about the democratic pretensions of Jefferson, et al. It also puts Wilentz’s reverence for the US Constitution into a political context:
So why is Wilentz so interested in a form of antislavery originalism? The answer, I think, lies in politics rather than history. No Property in Man began as a series of lectures at Harvard in 2015. That year, Wilentz got into a spat with Bernie Sanders after the presidential candidate told an audience in Virginia that the United States “in many ways was created…on racist principles.” Wilentz, in a New York Times Op-Ed, dismissed “the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery” and accused Sanders of “poison[ing] the current presidential campaign.” To describe the Founding as racist was, Wilentz wrote, to perpetuate “one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.”
Wilentz has long been a liberal activist. For more than a quarter-century, he faithfully supported Bill and Hillary Clinton. During the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, he warned Congress that “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness” if Bill Clinton was impeached. In a 2008 editorial in The New Republic, he accused Barack Obama and his campaign team of keeping “the race and race-baiter cards near the top of their campaign deck” during their battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He has been a particularly sharp critic of those who’ve rallied behind candidates to the left of the Clintons. In a recent article lamenting the Sanders phenomenon, Wilentz accused the left of being irresponsible in its economic promises, solipsistic in its embrace of identity politics, and disrespectful toward the achievements of the liberal tradition. Trashing the Founders is, for Wilentz, another sign of progressive immaturity.
Nicholas Guyatt is a 46-year old (that’s young to me!) British professor at the University of Cambridge who has a better grasp of American politics than you might expect. His latest book is titled “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation”, which addresses the question why the Founding Fathers failed to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that “all men are created equal”? The usual answer is racism, but the reality, according to the Amazon.com blurb, is more complex and unsettling. Namely, “Unable to convince others-and themselves-that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of color could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia.” Some of you might recall that, as Hannah-Jones pointed out, Lincoln’s solution to the North-South conflict was sending slaves to Liberia.
This obviously is not the kind of analysis that sits well with Marxists and leftists who view 1776 as a paradigmatic bourgeois-democratic revolution. As Neil Davidson has pointed out, it is best to think of these revolutions only as bourgeois rather than bourgeois-democratic since in most instances the result was all about class domination rather than Enlightenment values.
Hannah-Jones’s article was not the only one that pissed off the WSWS and their historian allies. There’s also one by Matthew Desmond simply titled “Capitalism” that is based on the groundbreaking scholarship of Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist and Walter Johnson. They make the case that chattel slavery was a form of capitalist exploitation even though there’s very little in Marx’s Capital to buttress that analysis. It was only with the publication of Eric Williams’s “Capitalism and Slavery” that scholars began to reconsider these questions. While he has not lined up with WSWS on whether the Constitution sanctioned slavery, John Clegg informed Jacobin readers that Desmond was all wet in claiming that slavery “helped turn a poor fledgling nation into a financial colossus.” I will be working on a lengthy reply to Clegg but it is important to note that two of the historians who signed the open letter agree with him.
One of them was John Oakes, who in referring to this new scholarship, takes the accusatory tone so characteristic of WSWS: “What you really have with this literature is a marriage of neo-liberalism and liberal guilt. When you marry those two things, neo-liberal politics and liberal guilt, this is what you get. You get the New York Times, you get the literature on slavery and capitalism.” I’m almost surprised that he didn’t use the term “pseudo-socialist” that is ubiquitous to this sectarian website. For Oakes, Desmond’s fatal flaw is moralism:
Desmond, following the lead of the scholars he’s citing, basically relies on the same analogy. They’re saying, “look at the ways capitalism is just like slavery, and that’s because capitalism came from slavery.” But there’s no actual critique of capitalism in any of it. They’re saying, “Oh my God! Slavery looks just like capitalism. They had highly developed management techniques just like we do!” Slaveholders were greedy, just like capitalists. Slavery was violent, just like our society is. So there’s a critique of violence and a critique of greed. But greed and violence are everywhere in human history, not just in capitalist societies. So there’s no actual critique of capitalism as such, at least as I read it.
This could not be further from the sort of detailed economic analysis Desmond puts forward in his article, such as this:
As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.”
The WSWS interviewer confessed to James McPherson, the other critic of the new scholarship on slavery and capitalism, that he finds it “problematic”. Certainly, McPherson must be as bothered as he was by their drawing “an equal sign between what they perceive to be a fully developed capitalist South, and the North.” That is a crude reduction of what Beckert, et al, have written, but just what you might expect from WSWS. McPherson’s response is rather feeble:
Yes, that’s right. That part of it—that the South is as capitalist as the North, or Great Britain—is unpersuasive to me. Certainly, they were part of a capitalist world order. There’s no question about that. Cotton and sugar were central. But the idea that the ideology of the planter class in the South was a capitalist ideology, there I’ve always been a little bit more on the side of Eugene Genovese, who sees the southern ideology as seigneurial.
I have no idea whether McPherson read Desmond’s article carefully but there is nothing about “ideology”, nor is there much to speak of about it in the scholarship of Beckert, et al. Instead, their books focus on commodity production for the marketplace that is central to Marxist theory, even if it is not premised on free wage labor.
Finally, there is the question of why people like Bynum, McPherson, Oakes and Wood would ever sit down with the likes of the SEP/WSWS. You can only conclude that they, like most academics, have a narrow focus on their own work and could not be more indifferent to the hundreds of articles on the WSWS website that have defended Assad from charges of war crimes and other such crypto-Stalinist rubbish. They also probably liked the attention they were getting from this sect that does have a talent for buttering up academics, at least those who are such babes in the wood.
One of the most reactionary elements of the SEP’s program is its characterization of the trade union movement in the USA as an obstacle to progress as if Scott Walker’s crushing of the public service unions in Wisconsin was no big deal. To get an idea of how demented these people are, they published an article this year calling attention to how the Christchurch, New Zealand white supremacist and mass murderer Brenton Tarrant praised trade unions in his 50-page manifesto as if this would warn off someone working in an Amazon warehouse from starting a union.
Unlike other groups on the left, the SEP does not participate in the living mass movement. Except for its website and the election campaigns they run from time to time, you will never run into them at planning meetings for a protest against fracking or police brutality. Its primary goal is to gin up traffic to its website as if reaching some target number of visits will hasten in the socialist revolution.
The main complaint that it has about Project 1619 is a familiar one, namely that it is based on identity politics rather than class. Although he did not sign the open letter, Adolph Reed was happy to sit down with these idiots, another sign of his political myopia. When WSWS asked him to comment on supposedly a dominant tendency in academia is to attribute all social problems to race, or to other forms of identity, he replied:
As Walter Benn Michaels said, and as I have said time and time again, if anti-disparitarianism is your ideology, then for you a society qualifies as being just if 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth, so long as that within that 1 percent 12 percent or so are black, etc., reflecting their share of the national population. This is the ideal of social justice for neoliberalism. There’s no question of actual redistribution.
Like all the other people so ready to dismiss the contributors to this project as “neoliberal” or worse, Reed appears to have either only skimmed through the articles or not having read them at all. If he had read Trymaine Lee’s “The Wealth Gap”, he would have seen something complete different from blacks trying to use affirmative action to get a seat at the ruling class table. Showing little reverence toward the New Deal that has become fashionable during the growing popularity of Bernie Sanders, Lee writes:
The G.I. Bill is often hailed as one of Roosevelt’s most enduring legacies. It helped usher millions of working-class veterans through college and into new homes and the middle class. But it discriminatorily benefited white people. While the bill didn’t explicitly exclude black veterans, the way it was administered often did. The bill gave veterans access to mortgages with no down payments, but the Veterans Administration adopted the same racially restrictive policies as the Federal Housing Administration, which guaranteed bank loans only to developers who wouldn’t sell to black people. “The major way in which people have an opportunity to accumulate wealth is contingent on the wealth positions of their parents and their grandparents,” Darity says. “To the extent that blacks have the capacity to accumulate wealth, we have not had the ability to transfer the same kinds of resources across generations.”
Writing for The New Republic, where he has a monthly column, Reed assured his readers that “The New Deal Wasn’t Intrinsically Racist”. That’s some consolation to the children of those men and women who got screwed “accidentally”. Like most of the garbage Reed writes nowadays, it is an attempt to debunk the idea that American society is racist to the core. At the heart of all these historians’ special pleading for the Great American model is a refusal to come to terms with the reality, namely that it was a racist and imperialist genocidal monster that grows more rapacious with each passing year. It is not surprising that the Washington Examiner, The National Review, The City Journal and the New Criterion find the WSWS campaign amenable to their reactionary interests. Whenever I run across this special pleading for an idealized republic in which racial and other “identity” based demands are an obstacle to future progress, I am always reminded of what Leon Trotsky, the greatest Marxist thinker of the 20thcentury, told his comrades in 1933, when he was an exile living in Turkey:
But today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them. When the Negro workers today unite with their own petty bourgeois that is because they are not yet sufficiently developed to defend their elementary rights. To the workers in the Southern states the liberal demand for ‘social, political and economic equality’ would undoubtedly mean progress, but the demand for ‘self-determination’ a greater progress. However, with the slogan ‘social, political and economic equality’ they can much easier be misled (‘according to the law you have this equality’.
This is the attitude that revolutionaries should adopt when it comes to Project 1619. It is also the attitude that my friend Noah Ignatiev defended as a “race traitor”. For those who reject the “racial identity” politics of the NY Times-backed project simply because a bourgeois newspaper is behind it, I invite you to contact me for copies of the key articles. They are the real deal as opposed to the junk the WSWS is peddling.
You can see the generational conflict at work in the June 6th NY Review of Books take-down of Sean Wilentz’s latest book titled “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding” (unfortunately behind a paywall; contact me for a copy). Written by Nicholas Guyatt, it reflects the skepticism of younger scholars about the democratic pretensions of Jefferson, et al. It also puts Wilentz’s reverence for the US Constitution into a political context:
So why is Wilentz so interested in a form of antislavery originalism? The answer, I think, lies in politics rather than history. No Property in Man began as a series of lectures at Harvard in 2015. That year, Wilentz got into a spat with Bernie Sanders after the presidential candidate told an audience in Virginia that the United States “in many ways was created…on racist principles.” Wilentz, in a New York Times Op-Ed, dismissed “the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery” and accused Sanders of “poison[ing] the current presidential campaign.” To describe the Founding as racist was, Wilentz wrote, to perpetuate “one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.”
Wilentz has long been a liberal activist. For more than a quarter-century, he faithfully supported Bill and Hillary Clinton. During the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, he warned Congress that “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness” if Bill Clinton was impeached. In a 2008 editorial in The New Republic, he accused Barack Obama and his campaign team of keeping “the race and race-baiter cards near the top of their campaign deck” during their battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He has been a particularly sharp critic of those who’ve rallied behind candidates to the left of the Clintons. In a recent article lamenting the Sanders phenomenon, Wilentz accused the left of being irresponsible in its economic promises, solipsistic in its embrace of identity politics, and disrespectful toward the achievements of the liberal tradition. Trashing the Founders is, for Wilentz, another sign of progressive immaturity.
Nicholas Guyatt is a 46-year old (that’s young to me!) British professor at the University of Cambridge who has a better grasp of American politics than you might expect. His latest book is titled “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation”, which addresses the question why the Founding Fathers failed to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that “all men are created equal”? The usual answer is racism, but the reality, according to the Amazon.com blurb, is more complex and unsettling. Namely, “Unable to convince others-and themselves-that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of color could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia.” Some of you might recall that, as Hannah-Jones pointed out, Lincoln’s solution to the North-South conflict was sending slaves to Liberia.
This obviously is not the kind of analysis that sits well with Marxists and leftists who view 1776 as a paradigmatic bourgeois-democratic revolution. As Neil Davidson has pointed out, it is best to think of these revolutions only as bourgeois rather than bourgeois-democratic since in most instances the result was all about class domination rather than Enlightenment values.
Hannah-Jones’s article was not the only one that pissed off the WSWS and their historian allies. There’s also one by Matthew Desmond simply titled “Capitalism” that is based on the groundbreaking scholarship of Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist and Walter Johnson. They make the case that chattel slavery was a form of capitalist exploitation even though there’s very little in Marx’s Capital to buttress that analysis. It was only with the publication of Eric Williams’s “Capitalism and Slavery” that scholars began to reconsider these questions. While he has not lined up with WSWS on whether the Constitution sanctioned slavery, John Clegg informed Jacobin readers that Desmond was all wet in claiming that slavery “helped turn a poor fledgling nation into a financial colossus.” I will be working on a lengthy reply to Clegg but it is important to note that two of the historians who signed the open letter agree with him.
One of them was John Oakes, who in referring to this new scholarship, takes the accusatory tone so characteristic of WSWS: “What you really have with this literature is a marriage of neo-liberalism and liberal guilt. When you marry those two things, neo-liberal politics and liberal guilt, this is what you get. You get the New York Times, you get the literature on slavery and capitalism.” I’m almost surprised that he didn’t use the term “pseudo-socialist” that is ubiquitous to this sectarian website. For Oakes, Desmond’s fatal flaw is moralism:
Desmond, following the lead of the scholars he’s citing, basically relies on the same analogy. They’re saying, “look at the ways capitalism is just like slavery, and that’s because capitalism came from slavery.” But there’s no actual critique of capitalism in any of it. They’re saying, “Oh my God! Slavery looks just like capitalism. They had highly developed management techniques just like we do!” Slaveholders were greedy, just like capitalists. Slavery was violent, just like our society is. So there’s a critique of violence and a critique of greed. But greed and violence are everywhere in human history, not just in capitalist societies. So there’s no actual critique of capitalism as such, at least as I read it.
This could not be further from the sort of detailed economic analysis Desmond puts forward in his article, such as this:
As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.”
The WSWS interviewer confessed to James McPherson, the other critic of the new scholarship on slavery and capitalism, that he finds it “problematic”. Certainly, McPherson must be as bothered as he was by their drawing “an equal sign between what they perceive to be a fully developed capitalist South, and the North.” That is a crude reduction of what Beckert, et al, have written, but just what you might expect from WSWS. McPherson’s response is rather feeble:
Yes, that’s right. That part of it—that the South is as capitalist as the North, or Great Britain—is unpersuasive to me. Certainly, they were part of a capitalist world order. There’s no question about that. Cotton and sugar were central. But the idea that the ideology of the planter class in the South was a capitalist ideology, there I’ve always been a little bit more on the side of Eugene Genovese, who sees the southern ideology as seigneurial.
I have no idea whether McPherson read Desmond’s article carefully but there is nothing about “ideology”, nor is there much to speak of about it in the scholarship of Beckert, et al. Instead, their books focus on commodity production for the marketplace that is central to Marxist theory, even if it is not premised on free wage labor.
Finally, there is the question of why people like Bynum, McPherson, Oakes and Wood would ever sit down with the likes of the SEP/WSWS. You can only conclude that they, like most academics, have a narrow focus on their own work and could not be more indifferent to the hundreds of articles on the WSWS website that have defended Assad from charges of war crimes and other such crypto-Stalinist rubbish. They also probably liked the attention they were getting from this sect that does have a talent for buttering up academics, at least those who are such babes in the wood.
One of the most reactionary elements of the SEP’s program is its characterization of the trade union movement in the USA as an obstacle to progress as if Scott Walker’s crushing of the public service unions in Wisconsin was no big deal. To get an idea of how demented these people are, they published an article this year calling attention to how the Christchurch, New Zealand white supremacist and mass murderer Brenton Tarrant praised trade unions in his 50-page manifesto as if this would warn off someone working in an Amazon warehouse from starting a union.
Unlike other groups on the left, the SEP does not participate in the living mass movement. Except for its website and the election campaigns they run from time to time, you will never run into them at planning meetings for a protest against fracking or police brutality. Its primary goal is to gin up traffic to its website as if reaching some target number of visits will hasten in the socialist revolution.
The main complaint that it has about Project 1619 is a familiar one, namely that it is based on identity politics rather than class. Although he did not sign the open letter, Adolph Reed was happy to sit down with these idiots, another sign of his political myopia. When WSWS asked him to comment on supposedly a dominant tendency in academia is to attribute all social problems to race, or to other forms of identity, he replied:
As Walter Benn Michaels said, and as I have said time and time again, if anti-disparitarianism is your ideology, then for you a society qualifies as being just if 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth, so long as that within that 1 percent 12 percent or so are black, etc., reflecting their share of the national population. This is the ideal of social justice for neoliberalism. There’s no question of actual redistribution.
Like all the other people so ready to dismiss the contributors to this project as “neoliberal” or worse, Reed appears to have either only skimmed through the articles or not having read them at all. If he had read Trymaine Lee’s “The Wealth Gap”, he would have seen something complete different from blacks trying to use affirmative action to get a seat at the ruling class table. Showing little reverence toward the New Deal that has become fashionable during the growing popularity of Bernie Sanders, Lee writes:
The G.I. Bill is often hailed as one of Roosevelt’s most enduring legacies. It helped usher millions of working-class veterans through college and into new homes and the middle class. But it discriminatorily benefited white people. While the bill didn’t explicitly exclude black veterans, the way it was administered often did. The bill gave veterans access to mortgages with no down payments, but the Veterans Administration adopted the same racially restrictive policies as the Federal Housing Administration, which guaranteed bank loans only to developers who wouldn’t sell to black people. “The major way in which people have an opportunity to accumulate wealth is contingent on the wealth positions of their parents and their grandparents,” Darity says. “To the extent that blacks have the capacity to accumulate wealth, we have not had the ability to transfer the same kinds of resources across generations.”
Writing for The New Republic, where he has a monthly column, Reed assured his readers that “The New Deal Wasn’t Intrinsically Racist”. That’s some consolation to the children of those men and women who got screwed “accidentally”. Like most of the garbage Reed writes nowadays, it is an attempt to debunk the idea that American society is racist to the core. At the heart of all these historians’ special pleading for the Great American model is a refusal to come to terms with the reality, namely that it was a racist and imperialist genocidal monster that grows more rapacious with each passing year. It is not surprising that the Washington Examiner, The National Review, The City Journal and the New Criterion find the WSWS campaign amenable to their reactionary interests. Whenever I run across this special pleading for an idealized republic in which racial and other “identity” based demands are an obstacle to future progress, I am always reminded of what Leon Trotsky, the greatest Marxist thinker of the 20thcentury, told his comrades in 1933, when he was an exile living in Turkey:
But today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them. When the Negro workers today unite with their own petty bourgeois that is because they are not yet sufficiently developed to defend their elementary rights. To the workers in the Southern states the liberal demand for ‘social, political and economic equality’ would undoubtedly mean progress, but the demand for ‘self-determination’ a greater progress. However, with the slogan ‘social, political and economic equality’ they can much easier be misled (‘according to the law you have this equality’.
This is the attitude that revolutionaries should adopt when it comes to Project 1619. It is also the attitude that my friend Noah Ignatiev defended as a “race traitor”. For those who reject the “racial identity” politics of the NY Times-backed project simply because a bourgeois newspaper is behind it, I invite you to contact me for copies of the key articles. They are the real deal as opposed to the junk the WSWS is peddling.
Project 1619 and Its Detractors - CounterPunch.org
Project 1619 and Its Detractors
Photograph Source: The 1619 Project logo
The New York Times – Public Domain
Last August, the New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted an entire issue to Project 1619, an attempt to root today’s racism in the institution of slavery dating back to the seventeenth century. In 1619, British colonists in Point Comfort, Virginia bought twenty African slaves from Portuguese traders who had landed there, fresh from a body-snatching expedition. Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the introduction to ten articles in the magazine that focused on different aspects of Black oppression, such as Traymaine Lee’s on the wealth gap between black and white Americans.
Four months later, five prominent historians of the Civil War signed a letterdemanding that the newspaper correct “errors” and “distortions” in Project 1619. Rumor has it that Princeton professor Sean Wilentz wrote the letter and lined up four others to co-sign: Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood. I would only add that Bynum wrote a book that chronicled the armed resistance to wealthy slave-owners by poor white southerners and served as a consultant for the inspiring movie “The Free State of Jones”.
As an example of what irked the five historians, the letter complains about the project asserting that colonists declared independence from Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” Given the world-class reputation of the five historians, I was surprised to see that no such quote appears in a Lexis-Nexis or New York Times archives search. Yet, it was clear that they were singling out Ms. Hannah-Jones who did write:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
They were also stung by her pointing out that when five, free black men visited the White House in 1862, Abraham Lincoln told them that emancipation would create a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. Once again, without mentioning her by name, they sought to refute her by calling attention to Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words, “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” One impudent tweet said that was equivalent to saying that some of Lincoln’s best friends were Negro.
Besides these grievances, the historians suspected that they were the victims of racism-in-reverse, as some overly sensitive liberals used to put it in the 1960s. They took offense at Nikole Hannah-Jones labeling them “white historians,” even though this was mild in comparison to an H. Rap Brown sound-bite. Now, it is true that the five historians are white and that Nikole Hannah-Jones and most of the contributors to Project 1619 were African-American. However, there is another dimension to this controversy that we have to take into account. There is a distinct generation gap between the five letter signers and younger historians, black or white, whose heart does not beat quicker when gazing upon portraits of James Madison or Abraham Lincoln.
One of the revisionists is Gerald Horne, whose title for his newly-published “The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America” speaks for itself. It also includes younger white historians like Nicholas Guyatt, who eviscerated Sean Wilentz’s new book “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding” in the June 6, 2019 New York Review of Books. Wilentz’s book had the same perspective as the letter to the New York Times. Not believing the hype, Guyott found Wilentz’s portrait of James Madison as an abolitionist far too worshipful. Yes, he was on record as opposing “property in men,” just like the slave-owner Thomas Jefferson.
Like Ishmael Reed’s debunking of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical that lionized Hamilton, Guyott reminded New York Review of Books readers that “Madison failed to free any of his slaves during his lifetime, supported the extension of slavery into the West during the Missouri crisis of 1819–1821, and ended his life as president of the American Colonization Society, an institution dedicated to the permanent relocation of African-Americans to another continent.”
There has been an overlapping two-pronged attack on Project 1619, one from the five historians and the other from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org). Alongside Wilentz, et al, the sectarians earned a spotlight in the bourgeois press for their campaign against Project 1619. On December 17th, the Wall Street Journal celebrated the WSWS’s denunciation of Project 1619 as a “racialist falsification” of history. It was good to see the WSJ standing up against racialism in keeping with publisher Rupert Murdoch’s well-known progressive editorial outlook.
WSWS interviewed every one of the historians except for Sean Wilentz, who got a clean bill of health from a website bent on exposing “pseudo-leftists,” including me on numerous occasions. Despite their failure to interview Wilentz, they see eye to eye on the “racialist” charge:
In 2015, the Times published an article written by Sean Wilentz, in its opinion section, in which the historian opposed “the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery.” Wilentz described this myth as “one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.” The Times did not challenge Wilentz’ views at the time. But it failed to consult Wilentz in the preparation of the 1619 Project essays. This was not an accidental mistake, but a conscious decision to exclude from the Project all countervailing arguments.
They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows. As such, this united front between a spittle-flecked, ultraleft website like WSWS and Bill and Hillary Clinton’s pal Sean Wilentz deserves an entry in the 2020 edition of Ripley’s “Believe it or Not.” In Guyott’s review, he tries to put Wilentz’s spin-doctoring for Madison and company into perspective:
Wilentz has long been a liberal activist. For more than a quarter-century, he faithfully supported Bill and Hillary Clinton. During the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, he warned Congress that “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness” if Bill Clinton was impeached. In a 2008 editorial in The New Republic, he accused Barack Obama and his campaign team of keeping “the race and race-baiter cards near the top of their campaign deck” during their battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He has been a particularly sharp critic of those who’ve rallied behind candidates to the left of the Clintons. In a recent article lamenting the Sanders phenomenon, Wilentz accused the left of being irresponsible in its economic promises, solipsistic in its embrace of identity politics, and disrespectful toward the achievements of the liberal tradition. Trashing the Founders is, for Wilentz, another sign of progressive immaturity. [Emphasis added]
The Wall Street Journal accepts WSWS “Trotskyist” credentials at face value. So does Atlantic Monthly’s Conor Friedersdorf, whose long and generally insightful article chastised Hannah-Jones’s reference to them “claiming to be socialists.” Friedersdorf found this “needlessly personal and uncharitable” since it doubted “the Marxist ideological commitments of people who have been publishing Trotskyist polemics for years.”
Indeed, nobody has published more “Trotskyist polemics” than them, as long as you are using the term Trotskyist without regard for what Trotsky stood for. An examination of the record will place Trotsky firmly in the Project 1619 camp. When Trotsky was living in Prinkipo, an island near Istanbul, in 1933, he met with Arne Swabeck (who coincidentally was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty’s “Reds”). Swabeck asked, “How must we view the position of the American Negro: As a national minority or as a racial minority?” Trotsky’s reply probably would have made both Wilentz and his friends at WSWS beet-red with fury. He urged his comrades to support self-determination for Blacks even if it antagonized white workers, who were far more radical in 1933 than they are today:
But today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them. When the Negro workers today unite with their own petty bourgeois that is because they are not yet sufficiently developed to defend their elementary rights. To the workers in the Southern states the liberal demand for “social, political and economic equality” would undoubtedly mean progress, but the demand for “self-determination” a greater progress. However, with the slogan “social, political and economic equality” they can much easier be misled (“according to the law you have this equality”).
Project 1619 and Its Detractors
Photograph Source: The 1619 Project logo
The New York Times – Public Domain
Last August, the New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted an entire issue to Project 1619, an attempt to root today’s racism in the institution of slavery dating back to the seventeenth century. In 1619, British colonists in Point Comfort, Virginia bought twenty African slaves from Portuguese traders who had landed there, fresh from a body-snatching expedition. Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the introduction to ten articles in the magazine that focused on different aspects of Black oppression, such as Traymaine Lee’s on the wealth gap between black and white Americans.
Four months later, five prominent historians of the Civil War signed a letterdemanding that the newspaper correct “errors” and “distortions” in Project 1619. Rumor has it that Princeton professor Sean Wilentz wrote the letter and lined up four others to co-sign: Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood. I would only add that Bynum wrote a book that chronicled the armed resistance to wealthy slave-owners by poor white southerners and served as a consultant for the inspiring movie “The Free State of Jones”.
As an example of what irked the five historians, the letter complains about the project asserting that colonists declared independence from Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” Given the world-class reputation of the five historians, I was surprised to see that no such quote appears in a Lexis-Nexis or New York Times archives search. Yet, it was clear that they were singling out Ms. Hannah-Jones who did write:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
They were also stung by her pointing out that when five, free black men visited the White House in 1862, Abraham Lincoln told them that emancipation would create a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. Once again, without mentioning her by name, they sought to refute her by calling attention to Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words, “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” One impudent tweet said that was equivalent to saying that some of Lincoln’s best friends were Negro.
Besides these grievances, the historians suspected that they were the victims of racism-in-reverse, as some overly sensitive liberals used to put it in the 1960s. They took offense at Nikole Hannah-Jones labeling them “white historians,” even though this was mild in comparison to an H. Rap Brown sound-bite. Now, it is true that the five historians are white and that Nikole Hannah-Jones and most of the contributors to Project 1619 were African-American. However, there is another dimension to this controversy that we have to take into account. There is a distinct generation gap between the five letter signers and younger historians, black or white, whose heart does not beat quicker when gazing upon portraits of James Madison or Abraham Lincoln.
One of the revisionists is Gerald Horne, whose title for his newly-published “The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America” speaks for itself. It also includes younger white historians like Nicholas Guyatt, who eviscerated Sean Wilentz’s new book “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding” in the June 6, 2019 New York Review of Books. Wilentz’s book had the same perspective as the letter to the New York Times. Not believing the hype, Guyott found Wilentz’s portrait of James Madison as an abolitionist far too worshipful. Yes, he was on record as opposing “property in men,” just like the slave-owner Thomas Jefferson.
Like Ishmael Reed’s debunking of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical that lionized Hamilton, Guyott reminded New York Review of Books readers that “Madison failed to free any of his slaves during his lifetime, supported the extension of slavery into the West during the Missouri crisis of 1819–1821, and ended his life as president of the American Colonization Society, an institution dedicated to the permanent relocation of African-Americans to another continent.”
There has been an overlapping two-pronged attack on Project 1619, one from the five historians and the other from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org). Alongside Wilentz, et al, the sectarians earned a spotlight in the bourgeois press for their campaign against Project 1619. On December 17th, the Wall Street Journal celebrated the WSWS’s denunciation of Project 1619 as a “racialist falsification” of history. It was good to see the WSJ standing up against racialism in keeping with publisher Rupert Murdoch’s well-known progressive editorial outlook.
WSWS interviewed every one of the historians except for Sean Wilentz, who got a clean bill of health from a website bent on exposing “pseudo-leftists,” including me on numerous occasions. Despite their failure to interview Wilentz, they see eye to eye on the “racialist” charge:
In 2015, the Times published an article written by Sean Wilentz, in its opinion section, in which the historian opposed “the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery.” Wilentz described this myth as “one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.” The Times did not challenge Wilentz’ views at the time. But it failed to consult Wilentz in the preparation of the 1619 Project essays. This was not an accidental mistake, but a conscious decision to exclude from the Project all countervailing arguments.
They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows. As such, this united front between a spittle-flecked, ultraleft website like WSWS and Bill and Hillary Clinton’s pal Sean Wilentz deserves an entry in the 2020 edition of Ripley’s “Believe it or Not.” In Guyott’s review, he tries to put Wilentz’s spin-doctoring for Madison and company into perspective:
Wilentz has long been a liberal activist. For more than a quarter-century, he faithfully supported Bill and Hillary Clinton. During the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, he warned Congress that “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness” if Bill Clinton was impeached. In a 2008 editorial in The New Republic, he accused Barack Obama and his campaign team of keeping “the race and race-baiter cards near the top of their campaign deck” during their battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He has been a particularly sharp critic of those who’ve rallied behind candidates to the left of the Clintons. In a recent article lamenting the Sanders phenomenon, Wilentz accused the left of being irresponsible in its economic promises, solipsistic in its embrace of identity politics, and disrespectful toward the achievements of the liberal tradition. Trashing the Founders is, for Wilentz, another sign of progressive immaturity. [Emphasis added]
The Wall Street Journal accepts WSWS “Trotskyist” credentials at face value. So does Atlantic Monthly’s Conor Friedersdorf, whose long and generally insightful article chastised Hannah-Jones’s reference to them “claiming to be socialists.” Friedersdorf found this “needlessly personal and uncharitable” since it doubted “the Marxist ideological commitments of people who have been publishing Trotskyist polemics for years.”
Indeed, nobody has published more “Trotskyist polemics” than them, as long as you are using the term Trotskyist without regard for what Trotsky stood for. An examination of the record will place Trotsky firmly in the Project 1619 camp. When Trotsky was living in Prinkipo, an island near Istanbul, in 1933, he met with Arne Swabeck (who coincidentally was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty’s “Reds”). Swabeck asked, “How must we view the position of the American Negro: As a national minority or as a racial minority?” Trotsky’s reply probably would have made both Wilentz and his friends at WSWS beet-red with fury. He urged his comrades to support self-determination for Blacks even if it antagonized white workers, who were far more radical in 1933 than they are today:
But today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them. When the Negro workers today unite with their own petty bourgeois that is because they are not yet sufficiently developed to defend their elementary rights. To the workers in the Southern states the liberal demand for “social, political and economic equality” would undoubtedly mean progress, but the demand for “self-determination” a greater progress. However, with the slogan “social, political and economic equality” they can much easier be misled (“according to the law you have this equality”).
PART 2:
After he relocated to Coyoacán, Trotsky met with his comrades once again in 1939 to discuss the Black struggle. As part of the delegation, C.L.R. James (known outside the party as J.R. Johnson) confessed his misgivings about self-determination:
Then in 1936 came the organization of the CIO. John L. Lewis appointed a special Negro department. The New Deal made gestures to the Negroes. Blacks and whites fought together in various struggles. These nationalist movements have tended to disappear as the Negro saw the opportunity to fight with the organised workers and to gain something. The danger of our advocating and injecting a policy of self-determination is that it is the surest way to divide and confuse the worker’s in the South.
J.R. Johnson was impressed with the economic gains Blacks made in the New Deal at the time. He overlooked how the FHA promoted segregation by discouraging home loans in areas “infiltrated” by “inharmonious racial or nationality groups,” according to Richard Rothstein, the author of “The Color of Law.”
Even today, there are some historians on the left that minimize New Deal racism. One of them is Adolph Reed, an African-American professor at the University of Pennsylvania who identifies with Sean Wilentz, WSWS, and company. He wrote an article for The New Republic denying that the New Deal was intrinsically racist and followed that up with a congenial WSWS interview bashing Project 1619.
Trotsky stuck by his guns in his meeting with C.L.R. James/J.R. Johnson. He assured him that Black people had the right to self-determination like any other oppressed nationality. He even saw Marcus Garvey’s movement as having a progressive dynamic:
The American Negroes gathered under the banner of the ‘Back to Africa’ movement because it seemed a possible fulfillment of their wish for their own home. They did not want actually to go to Africa. It was the expression of a mystic desire for a home in which they would be free of the domination of the whites, in which they themselves could control their own fate. That also was a wish for self-determination. It was once expressed by some in a religious form and now it takes the form of a dream of an independent state. Here in the United States the whites are so powerful, so cruel and rich that the poor Negro sharecropper does not dare to say, even to himself, that he will take a part of his country for himself. Garvey spoke in glowing terms, that it was beautiful and that here all would be wonderful. Any psychoanalyst will say that the real content of this dream was to have their own home. It is not an argument in favor of injecting the idea. It is only an argument by which we can foresee the possibility of their giving their dream a more realistic form.
Trotsky’s writings on Black nationalism remained in obscurity until the 1960s when Malcolm X became a prominent spokesman for the Nation of Islam and eventually a revolutionary nationalist. Basing itself on Trotsky’s recommendations to Swabeck and J.R. Johnson, the Socialist Workers Party supported Malcolm X and did everything in its power to work with younger Black nationalists following in his footsteps as well. Not everybody was happy with this. James Robertson, who went on to form the Spartacist League, and Tim Wolforth, who launched the Workers League, a forerunner of WSWS, led a faction in the SWP that viewed Fidel Castro and Malcolm X as “petty-bourgeois”, a favorite epithet in the sectarian world.
In his history of American Trotskyism , Wolforth wrote off what most people on the left regarded as a promising development:
The movement in the ghettoes was a class movement directed against unemployment, poor housing, decaying schools and the racism which forces such conditions upon the Blacks. But the struggle took the form primarily of the movement of Blacks as Blacks and in the neighbourhoods rather than in the shops and through the unions. This is turn encouraged an even more distorted political expression of this movement in Black nationalism – first of Malcolm X and then of the Black Panthers. [Emphasis added]
By 1980, Black nationalism had run its course. A combination of police repression and ultraleft mistakes, so prevalent at the time, left the Panthers and other nationalist groups fighting to stay alive. Today, Black nationalism might seem even more outdated, given the powerful magnetic grip that electoral politics has on both white and black young leftists.
Yet, Black nationalism persists to a small degree as the second cousin of “identity politics” or “intersectionality.” These terms are scare-words both socialists and liberals use when making amalgams of groups like Black Lives Matter and the doomed Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
In an article titled “The 1619 Project and the falsification of history: An analysis of the New York Times’ reply to five historians”, WSWS regulars David North and Eric London make the case against “identity politics.” It does not differ from what Tim Wolforth and Jim Robertson argued sixty years ago:
During the past several months, since its publication in September 2019 of its initial critique of the 1619 Project, the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site have been asked by journalists representing bourgeois publications to explain why we oppose the New York Times’ initiative. These questions, which generally arise from genuine curiosity rather than political malice, reflect the extent to which the “left” is identified with “identity politics.” In response, we explain that the exaltation of such politics has nothing in common with the theory, principles, and political program of the socialist movement. The historical slogan of the socialist movement is “Workers of the World, Unite!” not “Races of the World, Divide!”
It reminds me of what Malcolm X once said after being asked for his opinion on Black-white unity. His response: there has to be Black unity beforehand. Whites are united, but Blacks are not. His goal was to unite Black people even if it upset the likes of Tim Wolforth or David North.
Even if Black Lives Matter had very little in common with the nationalism of the 1960s, its focus on Black issues made it vulnerable to criticisms from WSWS and Adolph Reed. WSWS blasted Black Lives Matter as a “pseudo-left” organization hiding behind a racial narrative to account for the crisis of police violence. For his part, Reed wrote a Progressive Magazine article stating that “as a political strategy exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time.”
You get the same class-reductionist analysis from Sean Wilentz. In a May 20, 2019 article for The Nation, Timothy Shenk describes the political odyssey of the Princeton professor. During a youthful fling with Jacobin-style class-exclusive “democratic socialism,” he eulogized Eugene V. Debs: “Amid the cacophonies of today’s interest and identity politics, it is hard to imagine a reinvented sense of comradeship upon which some future Debs might build.”
Later on, Bill Clinton replaced Eugene V. Debs as a model of practical politics. Shenk writes:
The balance that Wilentz had tried to maintain between socialist ideals and liberal politics collapsed. A romantic streak had always run just beneath his superficial cynicism, and he still had the idealist’s hunger for a glorious crusade. Now, he channeled that energy into a new cause. Liberalism became an end in itself, while faith in democracy’s radical potential turned into hostility toward critics of Clinton, who, Wilentz suggested, were motivated by “a deep-seated contempt for American politics.”
I have no idea what kind of conversations went on between Wilentz and his partners at WSWS. Still, one imagines that the sectarians never broached the subject of his miserable service on behalf of Democratic Party neoliberalism and war. Collaboration with the academic celebrity justified discretion, the better part of opportunism.
Wilentz even raked Bernie Sanders over the coals—a reform Democrat by all conventional norms. In 2015, Wilentz became as furious at Sanders as he is now at Nikole Hannah-Jones. It seems that Sanders told an audience that the United States “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles. That’s a fact.” In other words, he lined up with Project 1619. Using the same language as in the letter to the New York Times, Wilentz wrote an op-ed piece for the newspaper stating that “as far as the nation’s founding is concerned, it is not a fact.” He accused Sanders of spreading a dangerous “myth” that could “poison the current presidential campaign.”
The only poison I see is in Wilentz’s letter to the Times and the crude class-reductionism that masquerades as Marxism in the WSWS. While recognizing the New York Times’s apparent, market-driven bid for respectability among Black Americans by publishing Project 1619, it has done more to advance a class-based analysis of this racist system than its detractors.
After he relocated to Coyoacán, Trotsky met with his comrades once again in 1939 to discuss the Black struggle. As part of the delegation, C.L.R. James (known outside the party as J.R. Johnson) confessed his misgivings about self-determination:
Then in 1936 came the organization of the CIO. John L. Lewis appointed a special Negro department. The New Deal made gestures to the Negroes. Blacks and whites fought together in various struggles. These nationalist movements have tended to disappear as the Negro saw the opportunity to fight with the organised workers and to gain something. The danger of our advocating and injecting a policy of self-determination is that it is the surest way to divide and confuse the worker’s in the South.
J.R. Johnson was impressed with the economic gains Blacks made in the New Deal at the time. He overlooked how the FHA promoted segregation by discouraging home loans in areas “infiltrated” by “inharmonious racial or nationality groups,” according to Richard Rothstein, the author of “The Color of Law.”
Even today, there are some historians on the left that minimize New Deal racism. One of them is Adolph Reed, an African-American professor at the University of Pennsylvania who identifies with Sean Wilentz, WSWS, and company. He wrote an article for The New Republic denying that the New Deal was intrinsically racist and followed that up with a congenial WSWS interview bashing Project 1619.
Trotsky stuck by his guns in his meeting with C.L.R. James/J.R. Johnson. He assured him that Black people had the right to self-determination like any other oppressed nationality. He even saw Marcus Garvey’s movement as having a progressive dynamic:
The American Negroes gathered under the banner of the ‘Back to Africa’ movement because it seemed a possible fulfillment of their wish for their own home. They did not want actually to go to Africa. It was the expression of a mystic desire for a home in which they would be free of the domination of the whites, in which they themselves could control their own fate. That also was a wish for self-determination. It was once expressed by some in a religious form and now it takes the form of a dream of an independent state. Here in the United States the whites are so powerful, so cruel and rich that the poor Negro sharecropper does not dare to say, even to himself, that he will take a part of his country for himself. Garvey spoke in glowing terms, that it was beautiful and that here all would be wonderful. Any psychoanalyst will say that the real content of this dream was to have their own home. It is not an argument in favor of injecting the idea. It is only an argument by which we can foresee the possibility of their giving their dream a more realistic form.
Trotsky’s writings on Black nationalism remained in obscurity until the 1960s when Malcolm X became a prominent spokesman for the Nation of Islam and eventually a revolutionary nationalist. Basing itself on Trotsky’s recommendations to Swabeck and J.R. Johnson, the Socialist Workers Party supported Malcolm X and did everything in its power to work with younger Black nationalists following in his footsteps as well. Not everybody was happy with this. James Robertson, who went on to form the Spartacist League, and Tim Wolforth, who launched the Workers League, a forerunner of WSWS, led a faction in the SWP that viewed Fidel Castro and Malcolm X as “petty-bourgeois”, a favorite epithet in the sectarian world.
In his history of American Trotskyism , Wolforth wrote off what most people on the left regarded as a promising development:
The movement in the ghettoes was a class movement directed against unemployment, poor housing, decaying schools and the racism which forces such conditions upon the Blacks. But the struggle took the form primarily of the movement of Blacks as Blacks and in the neighbourhoods rather than in the shops and through the unions. This is turn encouraged an even more distorted political expression of this movement in Black nationalism – first of Malcolm X and then of the Black Panthers. [Emphasis added]
By 1980, Black nationalism had run its course. A combination of police repression and ultraleft mistakes, so prevalent at the time, left the Panthers and other nationalist groups fighting to stay alive. Today, Black nationalism might seem even more outdated, given the powerful magnetic grip that electoral politics has on both white and black young leftists.
Yet, Black nationalism persists to a small degree as the second cousin of “identity politics” or “intersectionality.” These terms are scare-words both socialists and liberals use when making amalgams of groups like Black Lives Matter and the doomed Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
In an article titled “The 1619 Project and the falsification of history: An analysis of the New York Times’ reply to five historians”, WSWS regulars David North and Eric London make the case against “identity politics.” It does not differ from what Tim Wolforth and Jim Robertson argued sixty years ago:
During the past several months, since its publication in September 2019 of its initial critique of the 1619 Project, the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site have been asked by journalists representing bourgeois publications to explain why we oppose the New York Times’ initiative. These questions, which generally arise from genuine curiosity rather than political malice, reflect the extent to which the “left” is identified with “identity politics.” In response, we explain that the exaltation of such politics has nothing in common with the theory, principles, and political program of the socialist movement. The historical slogan of the socialist movement is “Workers of the World, Unite!” not “Races of the World, Divide!”
It reminds me of what Malcolm X once said after being asked for his opinion on Black-white unity. His response: there has to be Black unity beforehand. Whites are united, but Blacks are not. His goal was to unite Black people even if it upset the likes of Tim Wolforth or David North.
Even if Black Lives Matter had very little in common with the nationalism of the 1960s, its focus on Black issues made it vulnerable to criticisms from WSWS and Adolph Reed. WSWS blasted Black Lives Matter as a “pseudo-left” organization hiding behind a racial narrative to account for the crisis of police violence. For his part, Reed wrote a Progressive Magazine article stating that “as a political strategy exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time.”
You get the same class-reductionist analysis from Sean Wilentz. In a May 20, 2019 article for The Nation, Timothy Shenk describes the political odyssey of the Princeton professor. During a youthful fling with Jacobin-style class-exclusive “democratic socialism,” he eulogized Eugene V. Debs: “Amid the cacophonies of today’s interest and identity politics, it is hard to imagine a reinvented sense of comradeship upon which some future Debs might build.”
Later on, Bill Clinton replaced Eugene V. Debs as a model of practical politics. Shenk writes:
The balance that Wilentz had tried to maintain between socialist ideals and liberal politics collapsed. A romantic streak had always run just beneath his superficial cynicism, and he still had the idealist’s hunger for a glorious crusade. Now, he channeled that energy into a new cause. Liberalism became an end in itself, while faith in democracy’s radical potential turned into hostility toward critics of Clinton, who, Wilentz suggested, were motivated by “a deep-seated contempt for American politics.”
I have no idea what kind of conversations went on between Wilentz and his partners at WSWS. Still, one imagines that the sectarians never broached the subject of his miserable service on behalf of Democratic Party neoliberalism and war. Collaboration with the academic celebrity justified discretion, the better part of opportunism.
Wilentz even raked Bernie Sanders over the coals—a reform Democrat by all conventional norms. In 2015, Wilentz became as furious at Sanders as he is now at Nikole Hannah-Jones. It seems that Sanders told an audience that the United States “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles. That’s a fact.” In other words, he lined up with Project 1619. Using the same language as in the letter to the New York Times, Wilentz wrote an op-ed piece for the newspaper stating that “as far as the nation’s founding is concerned, it is not a fact.” He accused Sanders of spreading a dangerous “myth” that could “poison the current presidential campaign.”
The only poison I see is in Wilentz’s letter to the Times and the crude class-reductionism that masquerades as Marxism in the WSWS. While recognizing the New York Times’s apparent, market-driven bid for respectability among Black Americans by publishing Project 1619, it has done more to advance a class-based analysis of this racist system than its detractors.
Yall think this is a game, huh?
huffpost.com
Texas Senate Bill Drops Teaching Requirement That Ku Klux Klan Is 'Morally Wrong'
Mary Papenfuss
3-4 minutes
In a new political low in Texas, the Republican-dominated state Senate has passed a bill to eliminate a requirement that public schools teach that the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist campaign of terror are “morally wrong.”
The cut is among some two dozen curriculum requirements dropped from the new measure, along with studying Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the works of United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony’s writings about the women’s suffragist movement, and Native American history.
Critics say the state is promoting an “anti-civics” education.
Senate Bill 3 — passed last Friday 18-4 — drops most mentions of people of color and women from the state’s required curriculum.
That includes eliminating a requirement that students be taught the “history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.”
The measure slices out more curriculum requirements from an already restrictive Texas education law (H.B. 3979) passed last month as part of conservatives’ fear-mongering about critical race theory, a framework for studying institutional racism that is rarely taught in K-12 schools. The term “critical race theory” is not explicitly mentioned in either the law that passed or this current Senate bill.
The new bill echoes language from last month’s law that bars teachers from requiring students to develop “an understanding” of The 1619 Project, which calls for a far more profound examination of the significance of slavery in American history.
It also retains the language that teachers may not “be compelled” to discuss current events or “controversial issue of public policy or social affairs” and that if they do, they can’t give “deference to any one perspective.”
Democratic state Sen. Judith Zaffirini attacked the Senate bill — and that clause in particular — as an attempt to “tie the hands of our teachers,” The Dallas Morning News reported.
“How could a teacher possibly discuss slavery, the Holocaust, or the mass shootings at the Walmart in El Paso or at the Sutherland Springs church in my district without giving deference to any one perspective?” she asked.
Though the new bill essentially erases the cautionary lessons to be learned from the Ku Klux Klan, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick praised the legislation for rejecting “philosophies that espouse that one race or sex is better than another.”
Parents “want their students to learn how to think critically, not be indoctrinated by the ridiculous leftist narrative that America and our Constitution are rooted in racism,” Patrick, who presides over the Senate, added in a statement.
The legislation must next be considered in the House, which is also led by Republicans. The House, however, currently lacks the quorum required for any vote. Democrats fled the state earlier this month to block a new restrictive voting bill.
huffpost.com
Texas Senate Bill Drops Teaching Requirement That Ku Klux Klan Is 'Morally Wrong'
Mary Papenfuss
3-4 minutes
In a new political low in Texas, the Republican-dominated state Senate has passed a bill to eliminate a requirement that public schools teach that the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist campaign of terror are “morally wrong.”
The cut is among some two dozen curriculum requirements dropped from the new measure, along with studying Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the works of United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony’s writings about the women’s suffragist movement, and Native American history.
Critics say the state is promoting an “anti-civics” education.
Senate Bill 3 — passed last Friday 18-4 — drops most mentions of people of color and women from the state’s required curriculum.
That includes eliminating a requirement that students be taught the “history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.”
The measure slices out more curriculum requirements from an already restrictive Texas education law (H.B. 3979) passed last month as part of conservatives’ fear-mongering about critical race theory, a framework for studying institutional racism that is rarely taught in K-12 schools. The term “critical race theory” is not explicitly mentioned in either the law that passed or this current Senate bill.
The new bill echoes language from last month’s law that bars teachers from requiring students to develop “an understanding” of The 1619 Project, which calls for a far more profound examination of the significance of slavery in American history.
It also retains the language that teachers may not “be compelled” to discuss current events or “controversial issue of public policy or social affairs” and that if they do, they can’t give “deference to any one perspective.”
Democratic state Sen. Judith Zaffirini attacked the Senate bill — and that clause in particular — as an attempt to “tie the hands of our teachers,” The Dallas Morning News reported.
“How could a teacher possibly discuss slavery, the Holocaust, or the mass shootings at the Walmart in El Paso or at the Sutherland Springs church in my district without giving deference to any one perspective?” she asked.
Though the new bill essentially erases the cautionary lessons to be learned from the Ku Klux Klan, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick praised the legislation for rejecting “philosophies that espouse that one race or sex is better than another.”
Parents “want their students to learn how to think critically, not be indoctrinated by the ridiculous leftist narrative that America and our Constitution are rooted in racism,” Patrick, who presides over the Senate, added in a statement.
The legislation must next be considered in the House, which is also led by Republicans. The House, however, currently lacks the quorum required for any vote. Democrats fled the state earlier this month to block a new restrictive voting bill.
time.com
You Can't Tell the Story of 1776 Without Talking About Race and Slavery
Robert G. Parkinson
7-9 minutes
Slavery and arguments about race were not only at the heart of the American founding; it was what united the states in the first place. We have been reluctant to admit just how thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought about, talked about, and wrote about race at the moment of American independence.
Part of the reason why we haven’t fully realized this is because of John Adams. More than forty years after 1776, an 83-year-old John Adams wanted Americans to know just how astounding it was that America declared independence. Getting all thirteen colonies to reach this same, momentous decision, Adams remembered, was “certainly a very difficult enterprise” and “perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.” Colonists really didn’t know or particularly like one another. They fought with each other all the time. But something phenomenal happened in 1776. “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together—a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected.” Adams was, of course, bragging, subtly suggesting that the work he, Jefferson, Franklin, and the Continental Congress did was pretty much a miracle. This magical way of thinking is compelling. It created an attractive, exceptional origin story for the United States. But it covered up the work that Adams and his colleagues undertook at the time. That work was about publicizing stories to make Americans afraid of British-sponsored slave “insurrections” and Native “massacres.” He was hiding just how important race was to the founding.
Recently, a controversy over “critical race theory” has ignited public debate about the centrality of race to American history. As a part of that debate, which has been ongoing since the publication of the 1619 Project, the nation’s founding has come under the most scrutiny. How much did 1776 have to do with race and slavery? The answer is: you can’t tell the story without it. We have given the founding fathers passes when it comes to race. Although we have sometimes condemned an individual founder like Jefferson as a hypocrite, we have explained it away, either by citing the language in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration, or the emancipation efforts of some northern states, or by saying, well, it was the eighteenth century, what can you expect? Yet you only have to look at the very moment of Revolution to see how deeply race was embedded in the patriot cause.
The History You Didn't Learn: Black Women and the Right to Vote
Volume 0%
Once the shooting started, patriot leaders started talking about race in very different ways than they had before. As soon as the news of Lexington and Concord spread throughout North America, colonists began to think, talk, and worry a lot about what role enslaved people might play in this new world of war with Great Britain. For the next fifteen months, between April 1775 and July 1776, they would read about British agents trying to incite slave rebellions all over the South. Patriot leaders broadcast news of royal officials throughout America plotting with slaves to put down the rebellion. In November 1775, Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore famously issued an emancipation proclamation, but he was not the only royal governor accused of embracing such tactics. Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and their colleagues worked diligently in those fifteen months to alert as many colonists as they could about such British “treachery.” One of those British officials who had been chased from Charleston, South Carolina wrote that “massacres and instigated insurrections were Words in the mouth of every child.”
The patriots’ efforts to get stories about “instigated insurrections” into the mouths of American children culminated in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it comes at the climax of the document. The Continental Congress accused King George of twenty-seven crimes. These were the “facts to be submitted to a candid world” that led the colonies to the necessity of declaring independence. The very last one was about enslaved and Native peoples potentially joining the King to destroy American liberty.
Jefferson had written a moving passage that referred to the African slave trade as an “assemblage of horrors” and a “cruel war against human nature itself.” Tragically, Congress cut nearly the whole thing—but not all of it. They kept the bit that was in the mouth of every American child, referring to slaves with the albeit veiled with common 18th century way of referring to slaves as “domestics.” The final grievance against King George, the ultimate deal-breaker, reads: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” After leveling that charge, the Declaration pivoted to say what American independence would look like. Because patriots had rejected these efforts to recruit enslaved and Native fighters, Americans were now to act as free and independent states and “do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” This talk that was intended to generate racial fear was a key factor in the march toward independence.
That the Continental Congress felt like Jefferson’s antislavery sentiments were too controversial, but the accusation of “instigated insurrections” was not, suggests just how successful their campaign had been. Patriot leaders found one thing that white colonists shared: racism. The founders embraced and mobilized colonial prejudices about potentially dangerous African Americans and used those fears to unite the colonists in one “common cause.” For too long we have taken an elderly John Adams at his word about what brought the thirteen colonies together. He had forgotten—purposefully—how four decades earlier he had mobilized American prejudices about Black people (what today we would call racism) to get the colonies to come together as one union. That effort made America independent, but it also buried race deep in the cornerstone of the American republic that was born on July 4, 1776.