discrediting black knowledge production
The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf published an unfortunate piece yesterday attempting to take down the The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project:
Like many critics, I hope the Times Magazine’s work succeeds in causing more Americans to recognize the remarkable faith that African Americans showed in our country’s promise even in eras when America least deserved it. Yet the core reframing that the 1619 Project advocates would unwittingly set back, rather than advance, the causes of equity and racial inclusion. Placing America’s founding moment in 1776 honors the diversity of its people in a way that 1619 does not.
1619 retold the history of America’s founding by centering the African-American experience. The primary sentiment of Fridersdorf’s essay was an offensiveness at being offered a corrective in the first place. Secondary was annoyance about the fact that race was being asked to be taken even more seriously than it already is (a curious claim, to be sure). The real grievance was that 1619 rejected the liberal tact of telling a story about diversity and inclusion and, instead, insisted on a revolutionary re-interpretation of something as legend as the founding. “1776 Honors America’s Diversity in a Way 1619 Does Not” was, essentially, the fear of losing white identity dressed up as a reasonable concern about historical accuracy.
The analysis was shallow and, of course, included appeals to personal absolution:
What relationship, I wonder, does an indigenous Hawaiian have to 1619? How about Andrew Yang? And what about me? I was born in New Mexico, which entered the union in 1912, and raised in California, whose 1850 constitution banned slave labor by consensus. Circa 1860, travelers still arrived more quickly from Manila than New York City or Washington, D.C., and one in 10 California residents was Chinese. Years before I set foot in any of the 13 original colonies, I visited Spanish missions not far from my house, where the hierarchy of the Church in which I was raised subjugated indigenous people. My ancestors were German farmers who settled in the Midwest in the middle of the 19th century and French Cajuns who were expelled from Canada by the British and harassed in Louisiana by Catholic-hating Klansmen. I have no English ancestors I’m aware of. If English Virginia circa 1619 was America’s true founding, I’m not sure what that means for me, let alone a member of the Chumash tribe or a once-interned Japanese American.
But if America’s true founding was the moment in 1776 when universalist ideals were put forth with the aspiration of a nation that would realize them in the future — if those ideals resonated with people from Haiti to France to Russia, with people of all races and religions, benefiting wildly diverse groups as they were more widely realized — that moment is equally inclusive of everyone, past, present, and future, who shares those ideals.
The fact is that the 1619 narrative could have universal implications on par with 1776. Perhaps he never really addresses this possibility because he can’t bear to understand black subjugation as an appropriate starting point for understanding the endured brutalities of the very groups he identified as excluded from the Project— “indigenous Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and almost everyone whose ancestors got here after the Civil War.” It is, in fact, a pervasive lack of understanding about anti-black racism as a foundational American ideology with far-reaching implications beyond black people that has prevented much identification and cross-cultural coalition between these groups. Friedersdorf suggests that posing the question of how the story of the U.S. changes if the beginning of its history is marked in 1619 instead of 1776 is an attempt to make America’s founding the property of African-Americans rather than an intervention designed to more accurately contextualize developments in U.S. history across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He wants children to learn history as sets of inspirational ideals that flow across time, not as the man-made development of human societies.
If I’m being generous, the flawed interpretation here might stem from a lack of understanding about how history operates as an academic discipline and functions as an epistemological tool. The process of periodization (categorizing the past into discrete blocks of time to facilitate analysis) that Nikole Hannah-Jones and the rest of the 1619 Project’s contributors were engaged in is a staple in a field that routinely asks, “how do historical events provide perspective on the problems of the present?” All systems of periodization, including identifying 1776 as the founding, are more or less arbitrary. For a capitalist democracy like America, it’s actually not all that controversial to suggest that a narrative of the founding track its central economic system and actors.
The biggest flaw, though, is that it fails to understand the emancipatory spirit in which the project was written in. It assumes 1619 to have the very same motives of domination and supremacy that it’s aimed at dismantling. In doing so, it reveals anxiety as its driving force. It completely misses the point.
