Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 14: James Oakes on the 1619 Project (1)
Limitations of nationalist ideology
The historian James Oakes was one of the leading American historians who was highly critical of The 1619 Project. In an analysis of that effort1, he argues that the historical narrative it uses is based on a particular ideological perspective:
The 1619 Project is, to begin with, written from a black nationalist perspective that systemically erases all evidence that white Americans were ever important allies of the black freedom struggle. Second, it is written with an eye toward justifying reparations, leading to the dubious proposition that all white people are and have always been the beneficiaries of slavery and racism. This second proposition is based in turn on a third, that slavery “fueled” America’s exceptional economic development.
He elaborates his first point as follows:
Nationalism is always an interpretation of history, and it is always a distorted interpretation. Think of the way German nationalists, Southern nationalists, or Zionists have all used and abused history to justify their politics. History written with the goal of instilling patriotism in its readers, such as the [Trumpist Christian nationalist] 1776 Project, cannot help but be distorted.
In the case of the black-nationalist tradition he sees as framing the 1619 Project, he also sees a particular class perspective:
[A]bove all, nationalists erase class divisions within the putative national community. Black nationalism — understood not as a protest movement but as the dominant ideology of the black professional-managerial class — is a variation on the theme. It views US history almost exclusively through the lens of race.
And that perspective views the country’s history “almost exclusively through the lens of race,” is how he reads that content.
And he identifies an important problem with the Project’s portrayal of white racism, which he perceives as essentially unhistorical:
It defines racism as America’s original sin, a sin that has been all but universal among whites and is passed down from generation to generation, like DNA. The metaphors of “original sin” and “DNA” are designed to freeze history, to emphasize continuity rather than change.
This passage from Nikole Hannah-Jones seems to fit that description:
Anti- black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fi erce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. ... The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.2 [my emphasis]
She also applies the original sin metaphor this way:
The extremity of the violence [against African-Americans] was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.3
Metaphors are metaphors and they can be valuable. But the latter one especially seems to treat white racism as a basic trait rather than a social pathology. The Christian concept of Original Sin assumes that there is no cure for the condition, only redemption from its consequences through divine intervention. That makes for a gloomy perspective indeed.
But Oakes insist on the social dynamics of racism, while affirming that there is clearly strong elements of continuity in the anti-Black American version: “racism has never had a life of its own. It exists in particular social and political contexts, and as those contexts change over time, so does the specificity and significance of racism.“
Here he especially sees it as a problem that such a more static view of white racism implicitly obscures the significance of the end of chattel slavery: “The persistence of ‘race’ as an idea — for that’s all race is, an idea — cannot obviate the fact that the overthrow of slavery ushered in a revolutionary transformation in the lives of African Americans.”
I’ll write further about Oakes’ arguments on the 1619 Project’s economic analysis. That part does relate to issues raised by the reparations movement. But the original 1619 Project doesn’t focus on the question of reparations as such.
Oakes, James (2021): What the 1619 Project Got Wrong. Catalyst 5:3, 6-47.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole (2019): Introduction. In: The 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine 08/18/2019, 21.
Ibid., 24.