Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 15: James Oakes on the 1619 Project (2)-White activists against slavery and white racism
One of the themes in The 1619 Project is how Black Americans have borne the struggle for their rights and freedom largely themselves, with little support from white America in particular. “For the most part, black Americans fought back alone,” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones.1
But in an ironic twist of history, white Americans have not only benefitted enormously from slavery. But they were also the major beneficiaries of the expansion of rights for which African-Americans fought:
Yet we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle. This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion and ability.
Even immigrants benefitted hugely from the political gains won by the Black freedom movement:
Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a country in which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.
This is largely true. But it also has a touch of the tradition Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote about with Irish-Americans:
The ethnic enclaves thus developed a compensatory literature. Inspired by group resentment and pride, this literature very often succumbed to the Platonic temptation of "noble lies." Professor John V. Kelleher, Harvard's distinguished Irish-American scholar, provided gently satiric testimony about the Irish case:
My earliest acquaintance with Irish-American history of the written variety was gained from the sort of articles that used to appear in minor Catholic magazines or in the Boston Sunday papers. They were turgid little essays on the fact that the Continental Army was 76 percent Irish, or that many of George Washington's closest friends were nuns or priests, or that Lincoln got the major ideas for the Second Inaugural Address from the Hon. Francis P. Mageghegan of Alpaca, New York, a pioneer manufacturer of cast-iron rosary beads.
This is what Professor Kelleher called the there's-always-an-Irishman-at-the-bottom-of-it-doing-the-real-work approach to American history. Such ethnic chauvinism was largely confined, however, to tribal celebrations.2
James Oakes criticizes the 1619 Project for what he sees as its black-nationalist perspective.3
He doesn’t argue that it was whites or some other group that provided the impulses and activism and the most important part of the leadership in the movements that expanded access to democratic rights for Black people in America from Colonial times until now.
But he makes this important point:
[R]acism the [not the] only continuous force in US history. There is also a history of anti-racism that barely registers in most histories of racial ideology. [Winthrop] Jordan famously observed that slavery and racism developed hand in hand, but [his 1968 book] White Over Black also demonstrated that racism and anti-racism developed hand in hand. And, like racism itself, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anti-racism did not look and sound like late twentieth- and twenty-first-century anti-racism. But it is impossible to read antislavery documents from the revolutionary era and not notice the attacks on racism. The opening paragraph of Pennsylvania’s 1780 abolition statute is devoted entirely to a forthright condemnation of anti-black racism, for example. Abraham Lincoln is often quoted and justly criticized for his offensive remarks that pandered to his racist audiences, but most of the things Lincoln had to say about race were egalitarian, and he repeatedly denounced the racial demagoguery of his archnemesis Stephen Douglas. Anti-racism has always been part of the progressive tradition, and the challenge for progressive historians is to examine the conditions that activate the anti-racist tradition and submerge the racist one.
He criticizes the 1619 Project for presenting “a relentlessly monocausal explanation for virtually all of US history.” He points to the New York Times editor’s defense of the publication:
Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.4 [my emphasis]
Oakes’ characterization of that narrative as “monocausal” could be taken as hyperbole. But the point he makes about the anti-racist tradition and the historical development of both racism and anti-racism in the US is an important one. And he applies the observation to slavery and the American Revolution
If nearly everything was caused by racism and slavery, it must follow, as night follows day, that the defense of slavery had to be one of the “primary” reasons for the American Revolution. This absurd, insupportable claim is derived from a syllogism rather than source material. The jury is not out on the question, because juries deliberate over evidence. When confronted by the absence of evidence, the Times changed to wording that read that protecting slavery was the primary reason “some” Americans rebelled. That may be true, but there’s more evidence that “some” Americans rebelled so they could begin to undermine slavery. Either way, the effect of that rewording is to destroy the intellectual architecture of the entire project, for if — whatever the individual motives of “some” people — the revolution itself was not driven primarily by the defense of slavery and racism, it follows that slavery and racism cannot explain one of the most important events — if not the most important event — in US history.
Oakes is probably overreaching to say that the change of wording “destroy[s] the intellectual architecture of the entire project.“ But it does undermine any portrayal of the American Revolution as being heavily influenced by the perceived need to protect American slavery from an imminent push by Britain to abolish slavery.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole (2019): Introduction. In: The 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine 08/18/2019, 14-26.
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur (1991): The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, 25. Knoxville: Whittle Direct Books.
Oakes, James (2021): What the 1619 Project Got Wrong. Catalyst 5:3, 6-47.
Silverstein, Jake (2019): Why We Published the 1619 Project. New York Times Magazine 12/20/2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html> (Accessed: 2023-07-04).