"The 1619 Project"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“The ‘1619 Project’”

September 9, 2019

“The goal of the 1619 Project is to reframe American history,

making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this country is built.”

                                                                                                New York Times

                                                                                                Sunday, August 18, 2019

“In August 1619, the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies arrived in Virginia.

It was the beginning of a barbaric trade in human lives. Today, in honor, we remember

 every sacred soul who suffered the horrors of slavery and the anguish of bondage.”

                                                                                                President Donald J. Trump

                                                                                                July 30, 2019

                                                                                                Williamsburg, VA

Slavery is barbaric, but to argue that it was the “foundation”on which our country was built is hyperbole and disingenuous. In 1619, Virginia was a colony of Britain. It would be 157 years before the American colonies revolted, and they did so to be free and independent. In that year 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” words, as we know, that did not capture the truth of slavery, but which suggested a road map for the banning of international slave trade, which was done in 1808; the freeing of slaves in 1863 under the Proclamation Emancipation, and for the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. One might argue that 188 years is too long, but keep in mind slavery has been in existence since before written history. Also, remember, in 1776 slavery existed in all thirteen colonies and throughout Europe. And it persists today, enslaving forty million people, particularly in Asia, Africa and Central Asia.

To suggest that American history be “reframed,” as the New York Timesdid, is the way of totalitarian regimes. Liberal democracies do not re-write history. Certainly, there are, and there have always been, different interpretations of historical events and people. Victors and survivors write post-war histories. Successful and educated nations write histories, not the poor and illiterate. Liberalism recognizes those aberrations, so scholars can better interpret the past. Totalitarianism prefers the narrative to the facts. 

Slavery was a blight on our new Republic’s beginnings and its conscience. Of that there is no question. But history can only be understood within the moral, legal and accepted standards of the time. To apply today’s standards, as the New York Times is wont to do, promotes a narrative and ignores inconvenient facts. In the early 19^thCentury, according to David P. Forsythe, professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, “an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will, either in some form of slavery or serfdom.” The ubiquity of slavery at the time, however, does not (and did not) justify it, but it provides a framework to better understand this scourge. 

To read and believe the Time’s piece is to accept the notion that slavery existed solely in the American colonies and only involved black Africans. The truth is that slavery was so pervasive four hundred years ago I would venture that there are few of us today who do not descend from someone who was, at one point, a slave or an indentured servant. If the New York Timesis successful in adding the ‘1619 Project’ to high schools’ curriculum, will students be taught that slavery was a curse dating back thousands of years, and involved all races as masters and slaves? Will they condemn African traders who captured and sold fellow Africans to European traders? Will they learn that slaves were first brought to Brazil almost a hundred years before they were transported to Jamestown? Will they be taught that over 90% of African slaves carried across the Atlantic went to Mexico and Central and South America? Will students who study the ‘1619 Project’ learn about the enslaving of an estimated one million white, European Christians by Muslims between 1530 and 1780? Will today’s students confront and condemn slavery where it exists now – in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and parts of Africa? It has only been in the past hundred years that slavery was outlawed in much of Africa (Kenya, Northern Nigeria, Botswana, the Sudan, Cameroon, Mauritania, Morocco and Ethiopia), the Middle East (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman) and parts of Asia (Myanmar, Nepal, Hong Kong, British Malaya and Thailand). The editors of the Times assuredly know this, but will high school students a generation from now?

As any student of history knows, the United States is far from perfect, but, as any student of history also knows, no other country in the world has done as much for liberty, whether providing the rights we citizens have that are embedded in our Bill of Rights or the sacrifices Americans have made in defending liberty in foreign lands. There is a reason why emigrating to the United States is the goal of so many in dictatorial and poor parts of the world. It is not benefits proffered; it is opportunities offered. 

In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley wrote: “Liberals want to harp on how blacks have been treated, but a focus on how they have progressed in earlier eras, notwithstanding that treatment, would be of far greater use to today’s black underclass.” Examples abound of American men and women who overcame the slavery into which they were born, to succeed as free men and women: Richard Allen, minister, writer and educator, was born a slave in 1760. Frederick Douglass, writer, orator and abolitionist, was born in 1818. Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and political activist, was born circa 1830. Booker T. Washington, educator, author and advisor to Presidents, was born in 1856. Others born after slavery ended but during the Jim Crow period would include Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, James Baldwin, Clarence Thomas, Oprah Winfrey and dozens more. Consider sports stars like Michael Jordan and Serena Williams; entertainers like Mariah Carey and Jay-Z; businesspeople like Sheila Johnson and Herman Cain; academics like Thomas Sowell and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and politicians like Barack Obama, Edward Brooke, Tim Scott and Kamala Harris. As an opinion writer, Mr. Riley belongs among that pantheon. 

Harriet Tubman, who escaped the chains of slavery around 1849, once wrote, “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars, to change the world.” In his autobiography Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote: “I have learned that success is measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles he has overcome.” Should we not today celebrate the courage, determination, intellect and will of those who overcame the anguish of bondage and the discrimination of bigots?

Should not those who succeeded in overcoming servitude, segregation and humiliation serve as paragons to be emulated? Is it not better to view life through the positive lens of aspiration and opportunity than through a negative optic of defeat and victimhood? While real victims deserve our sympathy and empathy, we should not assume they have no will or self-motivation to fight back. As well, we blur the distinction between those who truly have been victimized and those who claim to have been.

The ‘1619 Project’ arose because the ‘Russian collusion’ story failed. Executive editor of the Times Dean Baquet admitted the new focus: “To write more deeply about the country, race and divisions.”His message not only does not conform to the Times’ motto, it cannot compete with the optimism and hope offered by Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington, former slaves who overcame obstacles that the editors of the New York Timescannot even imagine. Yet they rose to prominence from chains of bondage, and they did so with a belief in God and in themselves, while bearing a positive view of what was possible.