The central flaw is the idea that if you teach people about how some group has been mistreated it will make them more compassionate and understanding. For a size-able percentage of the population when you teach them those facts they think, “Wow they must have deserved it.”
It’s the same when some people find out someone has cancer or their spouse ran off or they lost their job. They think, “Wow, they really must have deserved it. Because bad things don’t happen to good people like me. Bad things happen to bad people who deserve them.”
If you believe as you say in the last paragraph, then why did you write earlier about how it is more important for leftists to learn history than theory?
I'm currently reading the book and was pretty unfamiliar with what the 1619 project was. Like you, I'm no historian, but I 100% agree that the world and history are more complex than just one event. With that said, as I read this book, there are a LOT of assumptions about things happening in the world today that the authors link to racism without strong arguments to back them. I've read a ton of books on racial issues in the United States, and many create compelling arguments. With this one, it just labels things as racist or linked to slavery without making any type of valid argument, and that bothers me.
PS - shoot me an email and lets get you on the podcast. thanks <3
Like I said the other day, it's race and identity as Reaganomics. The 1619 stuff was all part of a Trump-induced Moral Panic (or TIMP for short). Like somehow if we take people who are already liberal and make them super Woke, that will create change at the ballot box by itself? Makes no sense if you give it a moment's thought.
Liberals use history in a weird way. They'll say black people are worse off since they were slaves 150 years ago. We now have a meme of land acknowledgements: natives saying their oppressed because of colonialism. But like, that's not it, right? There's certainly problems black and native people face today: lead paint, sentencing disparities, wealth and poverty gaps. Those are the reasons those groups are worse off today. Slavery and colonialism may have ultimately caused those issues, but constantly "centering" them doesn't help today.
Like, I'm Jewish. We've had some bad stuff happen to our people throughout history. But I'm fine because 1) I have my material wealth and 2) there's sufficient legal/social pressure to remove anti-Semitism from any sources of power.
I could not even begin to tell you what I learned about history in school because it’s been so buried under what I’ve learned and read since. I’m sure it serves as a general foundation and context to make sense of what I later read on my own and contextualized from world events, but it’s definitely not the entire basis of my philosophical beliefs about what it means to be an American or what our country means to the world.
On the other hand, I do think popular histories and popular works of fiction that portray history really do shape the way a certain sector of Americans think. King Leopold’s Ghost made a huge impact on me. MAUS, the graphic novel about the holocaust, I read as a kid off my parents shelves and as my introduction to that historical event it’s now inseparable from how I think about it even after all I’ve since learned, and certainly stands out more than anything I read in school. 1491 is another popular history that shaped the way I think about pre Colombian America. And yes, reading A People’s History in my early 20s forever affected my understanding of American history, no matter how many other histories and perspectives I have since read. In that way I think that the 1619 Project (which I haven’t read yet, but plan to) will have a real impact on how a large number of people think about this country. I’m not a historian, so I have no idea if King Leopold’s Ghost or 1491 are filled with historical flaws or misleading narratives but they’ve changed my body of knowledge and thinking nonetheless, and the thinking of many others simply by being incredibly interesting, readable and popular. The 1619 project is the same. Even with its criticism you can’t just excise the influence it has had from your brain. The most similar thing I can think of is Guns, Germs and Steel, which is now quite criticized, but which many many people, including myself read 20 years ago. Even though I’m aware of the criticism and incorporate it into my thinking, I’m sure a lot of what was in it settled into my subconscious and remains there. And I think that’s why there’s such a furor over 1619.
> The centrality of slavery to the founding of the United States has been widely discussed for decades
Especially because it’s explicit in our founding documents. The 3/5 compromise, the fugitive slave clause. I remember learning about it in high school, how the interests of slave states were part of the negotiations at the Constitutional Convention. It’s not some scandalous secret that the preservation of slavery was a priority.
I think you're allowing a little conceptual slippage here, though. Slavery was "vitally important to the founding and structure" of the U.S. in the sense that it was a key issue to be dealt with in constructing the Constitution. But it's just not true that slavery was a major CAUSAL factor of the Revolution, which is how Hannah-Jones framed it. ("One critical reason the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies.... At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.")
The problem isn't that she called it the sole factor. It's that, according to the period-expert history professor the Times hired to fact check 1619 (and then ignored), it wasn't a meaningful cause at all:
"More importantly for Hannah-Jones’ argument, slavery in the Colonies faced no immediate threat from Great Britain, so colonists wouldn’t have needed to secede to protect it. It’s true that in 1772, the famous Somerset case ended slavery in England and Wales, but it had no impact on Britain’s Caribbean colonies, where the vast majority of black people enslaved by the British labored and died, or in the North American Colonies. It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies, and when it happened, it was in part because a series of slave rebellions in the British Caribbean in the early 19th century made protecting slavery there an increasingly expensive proposition."
In other words, the strong claim is wrong, but it hasn't been misrepresented. That was her actual claim!
And I just don't agree that historical education has no impact on how people act and vote. People routinely marshal historical arguments and precedents in order to justify a particular political outcome, and as "RC" points out, works of popular history especially sink in and affect people's thinking. (Zinn himself was a pretty sloppy historian -- but how many leftists were born from his work?)
"...what people are taught about history becomes what they know about history and that what they know about history has some material impact on how they think and act and vote. I don’t think any of those things are true."
On an almost weekly basis I learn about someone's role in history -- often an important role -- that I never learned about growing up. As just one example, women were almost completely absent from the history I studied 50+ years ago. Roles for women when I entered the workforce in 1974 reflected that same lack of representation.
So yeah -- it was a different time, and things have changed. One of the things that's changed is that we're hearing more about the people left out of past historical narratives. I don't know that I could quantify how this might impact how a person thinks or votes, but I *can* say that I've found it inspiring to learn about women who were not passive participants in the historical narrative of our country. And there is a power in being able to see yourself in those who came before you.
I'm not a historian either, but I've read big chunks of the 1619 project and I'll be honest: A lot of the details were new to me. I was absolutely not taught much about slavery in (US, public) school; it was a sidenote, a casualty of history let's say, but for an average kid, those knots were absolutely not tied in class.
I'll start by quoting a previous comment of mine regarding this tomfoolery:
"The main issue with the 1619 Project lies in what it reveals: our "paper of record" is willing to devote a lot of resources to a fundamentally ahistorical project helmed by the shallow and intellectually dishonest Nikole Hannah-Jones. It's pathetic that she's still popular after she publicized her own uniquely shitty version of "if you don't vote for me you ain't black.""
The 1619 project is just another one of many sure signs that the NYT has not learned anything at all from its massive and invalidating failures starting with their support of the second Iraq war. Their leadership and the vast majority of their staff are losers who have lost sight of life, and they are totally unapologetic after even massive objective failures. It's time for the corporate death penalty to apply here, and failing that it's time for reasonable people to ignore and shit on the NYT at every opportunity.
The banality of the central claim, that slavery is one of many causal factors of why america is what it is today, really gets me thinking that the media world must be up to something weird. I get the feeling that they pay more attention to the person making an argument than the argument. It's always been that way but I think that in the past there was more of a semblance of a coherent discourse. Editors seemed like they were probably more likely to say "This is an old idea. Not sure it's worth publishing."
But today, it seems like you find the person you want to succeed (n hannah jones) and then give them a platform, and then you look at whatever ideas they have, and then you promote those ideas.
I think the biggest problem with the 1619 Project is that it's called the 1619 Project and the argument over which year was the "true" founding of this country. If they called it something else, there wouldn't be this much hand wringing. I found many (not all) of the essays in the 1619 project pretty convincing IMHO. I am not sure if history changes how people think and vote but it does cause me to suspect the motivations of certain political actors. For example, if libertarians have a market-based solution to a problem that better helps the poor but their history has never shown one iota of care about the poor (i.e. they didn't support any programs for the poor in the past, then I'm less likely to support their solution.
The central flaw is the idea that if you teach people about how some group has been mistreated it will make them more compassionate and understanding. For a size-able percentage of the population when you teach them those facts they think, “Wow they must have deserved it.”
It’s the same when some people find out someone has cancer or their spouse ran off or they lost their job. They think, “Wow, they really must have deserved it. Because bad things don’t happen to good people like me. Bad things happen to bad people who deserve them.”
If you believe as you say in the last paragraph, then why did you write earlier about how it is more important for leftists to learn history than theory?
I'm currently reading the book and was pretty unfamiliar with what the 1619 project was. Like you, I'm no historian, but I 100% agree that the world and history are more complex than just one event. With that said, as I read this book, there are a LOT of assumptions about things happening in the world today that the authors link to racism without strong arguments to back them. I've read a ton of books on racial issues in the United States, and many create compelling arguments. With this one, it just labels things as racist or linked to slavery without making any type of valid argument, and that bothers me.
PS - shoot me an email and lets get you on the podcast. thanks <3
Like I said the other day, it's race and identity as Reaganomics. The 1619 stuff was all part of a Trump-induced Moral Panic (or TIMP for short). Like somehow if we take people who are already liberal and make them super Woke, that will create change at the ballot box by itself? Makes no sense if you give it a moment's thought.
Liberals use history in a weird way. They'll say black people are worse off since they were slaves 150 years ago. We now have a meme of land acknowledgements: natives saying their oppressed because of colonialism. But like, that's not it, right? There's certainly problems black and native people face today: lead paint, sentencing disparities, wealth and poverty gaps. Those are the reasons those groups are worse off today. Slavery and colonialism may have ultimately caused those issues, but constantly "centering" them doesn't help today.
Like, I'm Jewish. We've had some bad stuff happen to our people throughout history. But I'm fine because 1) I have my material wealth and 2) there's sufficient legal/social pressure to remove anti-Semitism from any sources of power.
I could not even begin to tell you what I learned about history in school because it’s been so buried under what I’ve learned and read since. I’m sure it serves as a general foundation and context to make sense of what I later read on my own and contextualized from world events, but it’s definitely not the entire basis of my philosophical beliefs about what it means to be an American or what our country means to the world.
On the other hand, I do think popular histories and popular works of fiction that portray history really do shape the way a certain sector of Americans think. King Leopold’s Ghost made a huge impact on me. MAUS, the graphic novel about the holocaust, I read as a kid off my parents shelves and as my introduction to that historical event it’s now inseparable from how I think about it even after all I’ve since learned, and certainly stands out more than anything I read in school. 1491 is another popular history that shaped the way I think about pre Colombian America. And yes, reading A People’s History in my early 20s forever affected my understanding of American history, no matter how many other histories and perspectives I have since read. In that way I think that the 1619 Project (which I haven’t read yet, but plan to) will have a real impact on how a large number of people think about this country. I’m not a historian, so I have no idea if King Leopold’s Ghost or 1491 are filled with historical flaws or misleading narratives but they’ve changed my body of knowledge and thinking nonetheless, and the thinking of many others simply by being incredibly interesting, readable and popular. The 1619 project is the same. Even with its criticism you can’t just excise the influence it has had from your brain. The most similar thing I can think of is Guns, Germs and Steel, which is now quite criticized, but which many many people, including myself read 20 years ago. Even though I’m aware of the criticism and incorporate it into my thinking, I’m sure a lot of what was in it settled into my subconscious and remains there. And I think that’s why there’s such a furor over 1619.
Let's check in on what target our brave, loudly self-proclaimed leftist man of the people is attacking today... oh.
> The centrality of slavery to the founding of the United States has been widely discussed for decades
Especially because it’s explicit in our founding documents. The 3/5 compromise, the fugitive slave clause. I remember learning about it in high school, how the interests of slave states were part of the negotiations at the Constitutional Convention. It’s not some scandalous secret that the preservation of slavery was a priority.
I think you're allowing a little conceptual slippage here, though. Slavery was "vitally important to the founding and structure" of the U.S. in the sense that it was a key issue to be dealt with in constructing the Constitution. But it's just not true that slavery was a major CAUSAL factor of the Revolution, which is how Hannah-Jones framed it. ("One critical reason the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies.... At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.")
The problem isn't that she called it the sole factor. It's that, according to the period-expert history professor the Times hired to fact check 1619 (and then ignored), it wasn't a meaningful cause at all:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
"More importantly for Hannah-Jones’ argument, slavery in the Colonies faced no immediate threat from Great Britain, so colonists wouldn’t have needed to secede to protect it. It’s true that in 1772, the famous Somerset case ended slavery in England and Wales, but it had no impact on Britain’s Caribbean colonies, where the vast majority of black people enslaved by the British labored and died, or in the North American Colonies. It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies, and when it happened, it was in part because a series of slave rebellions in the British Caribbean in the early 19th century made protecting slavery there an increasingly expensive proposition."
In other words, the strong claim is wrong, but it hasn't been misrepresented. That was her actual claim!
And I just don't agree that historical education has no impact on how people act and vote. People routinely marshal historical arguments and precedents in order to justify a particular political outcome, and as "RC" points out, works of popular history especially sink in and affect people's thinking. (Zinn himself was a pretty sloppy historian -- but how many leftists were born from his work?)
"...what people are taught about history becomes what they know about history and that what they know about history has some material impact on how they think and act and vote. I don’t think any of those things are true."
On an almost weekly basis I learn about someone's role in history -- often an important role -- that I never learned about growing up. As just one example, women were almost completely absent from the history I studied 50+ years ago. Roles for women when I entered the workforce in 1974 reflected that same lack of representation.
So yeah -- it was a different time, and things have changed. One of the things that's changed is that we're hearing more about the people left out of past historical narratives. I don't know that I could quantify how this might impact how a person thinks or votes, but I *can* say that I've found it inspiring to learn about women who were not passive participants in the historical narrative of our country. And there is a power in being able to see yourself in those who came before you.
I'm not a historian either, but I've read big chunks of the 1619 project and I'll be honest: A lot of the details were new to me. I was absolutely not taught much about slavery in (US, public) school; it was a sidenote, a casualty of history let's say, but for an average kid, those knots were absolutely not tied in class.
I'll start by quoting a previous comment of mine regarding this tomfoolery:
"The main issue with the 1619 Project lies in what it reveals: our "paper of record" is willing to devote a lot of resources to a fundamentally ahistorical project helmed by the shallow and intellectually dishonest Nikole Hannah-Jones. It's pathetic that she's still popular after she publicized her own uniquely shitty version of "if you don't vote for me you ain't black.""
The 1619 project is just another one of many sure signs that the NYT has not learned anything at all from its massive and invalidating failures starting with their support of the second Iraq war. Their leadership and the vast majority of their staff are losers who have lost sight of life, and they are totally unapologetic after even massive objective failures. It's time for the corporate death penalty to apply here, and failing that it's time for reasonable people to ignore and shit on the NYT at every opportunity.
The banality of the central claim, that slavery is one of many causal factors of why america is what it is today, really gets me thinking that the media world must be up to something weird. I get the feeling that they pay more attention to the person making an argument than the argument. It's always been that way but I think that in the past there was more of a semblance of a coherent discourse. Editors seemed like they were probably more likely to say "This is an old idea. Not sure it's worth publishing."
But today, it seems like you find the person you want to succeed (n hannah jones) and then give them a platform, and then you look at whatever ideas they have, and then you promote those ideas.
I've always found strange these people's expectation that kids won't just ignore or rebel against propaganda in schools.
I think the biggest problem with the 1619 Project is that it's called the 1619 Project and the argument over which year was the "true" founding of this country. If they called it something else, there wouldn't be this much hand wringing. I found many (not all) of the essays in the 1619 project pretty convincing IMHO. I am not sure if history changes how people think and vote but it does cause me to suspect the motivations of certain political actors. For example, if libertarians have a market-based solution to a problem that better helps the poor but their history has never shown one iota of care about the poor (i.e. they didn't support any programs for the poor in the past, then I'm less likely to support their solution.
1619 a very straightforward example of a motte-bailey.
Bailey: "US founded to protect slavery from British"
Motte: "We're just saying slavery was bad."
Re Pulitzers, remember that time a NYT journo won a Pulitzer for helping cover up the Ukrainian famine?