Teaching That America is Hopelessly Racist

A great piece, from Peter Wood, at Minding the Campus.

The New York Times' Truly Radical Agenda

Very well done, from Andrew Sullivan:

"Arguing that the 'true founding' was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln." https://t.co/4PDFklsx6w via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) September 13, 2019

Reparations Won't Make Blacks Whole

So say blacks themselves. It's about recognition, as if America hasn't recognized its original sin by 2019.

At LAT, "Slavery’s descendants say a reparations check won’t make the pain go away":

Many African Americans in South Carolina support reparations.

But others say that what they want just as much is for the country to grasp the painful history they live with every day. https://t.co/mYWRRcLeCt

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 18, 2019

CHARLESTON, S.C. —  Five years before the first shots of the Civil War rang out from the harbor here in 1861, alderman Thomas Ryan and a business partner opened Ryan’s Mart at No. 6 Chalmers St.
Their merchandise was slaves: African men, women and children who were prodded, picked over and auctioned off to the highest bidders.

The finest adult males could fetch up to $1,600 apiece —$49,000 in today’s dollars. The most able-bodied women could sell for $1,400.

Today, the former showroom in Charleston’s historic quarter, hidden on a narrow lane of row houses blazing with pink blossoms and palmetto trees, serves as the home of the Old Slave Mart Museum.

The museum and other historic sites in the American South lay bare a shameful chapter in the nation’s past, one that’s getting new attention in the debate over whether the government should pay financial reparations to an estimated 40 million descendants of slaves.

Many African Americans in this part of South Carolina support reparations. But they say what they want just as much is for the country to grasp the painful history they live with every day.

Their ancestors often were separated from their children on the auction block. Women were raped by their white owners. Slaves were beaten for waking up too late, not working hard enough or trying to escape. They were stripped of their African names and given the last names of their masters.

The hardship and humiliation didn’t end when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. Black Americans continue to endure racist violence, entrenched poverty and inequities in areas such as education, employment and the criminal justice system.

“What the reparations debate is about is not so much people wanting to get money,” said Daniel Littlefield, a historian from Columbia, S.C. “Black people feel they deserve some acknowledgment of ongoing wrong.”

The reparations debate comes at an especially tense time. Since 2016, there’s been a nationwide rise in racially motivated hate crimes. Videos of police killings of African Americans have become all too common. President Trump’s attacks aimed at black leaders and immigrants have kept people on edge...

Keep reading.

Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton

At Amazon, Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History.

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told

At Amazon, Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello

At Amazon, Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

The '1619 Project' at the New York Times

This is really a lot, I'll tell you.

I read the hard-copy "1619 Project" at the New York Times Magazine yesterday.

No universal healthcare.
Highest rates of mass incarceration.
The brutality of capitalism.
An epidemic of sugar in our diets.

No aspect of modern American life has been untouched by slavery. These essays in our #1619project explain how https://t.co/Lq2z4ZKgqg (thread)

— NYT Magazine (@NYTmag) August 14, 2019

I was actually looking forward to it, and it's interesting and impressive.

It's also wrong.

The main problem is with the central goal and agenda of the entire enterprise, "to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation's birth year."

That is, to "rewrite" history with America's "original sin" as the singular variable that explains all consequent history of the United States, from the landing of the first black slaves sold in Virginia to the present day of political polarization, incessant racist recrimination, and the politics of Twitter call-out culture. Racism, slavery, white supremacy --- this is the "master" paradigm to understand where we are today, and of course, the master variable that implies only one way forward, the leftist Democrat way, the progressive big-government way, that demonizes and destroys the history of the tremendous courage and sacrifice of all Americans in making this nation --- and our exceptional national experiment --- the greatest in human history.

Like I said, there's a lot on this.

Start with Damon Linker, at the Week, "The New York Times surrenders to the left on race":

The New York Times surrenders to the left on race. https://t.co/YovTlDKyUq pic.twitter.com/hmb1FOZq6Y

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) August 20, 2019

This [project] turns historical scholarship into propaganda for a left-wing political movement.

Saying so doesn't at all imply that journalists should refrain from drawing on the work of historians. But it does mean that when they do draw on that work, they should do so with caution and a fair amount of historiographical sophistication, realizing that no single narrative of the past is the indisputably right one, and that new interpretations that break sharply from a past consensus often go too far. That's especially true when the new claims advance a radical political agenda.

And the 1619 Project is all about advancing a radical political agenda. The message it aims to convey is clear: The United States is and always has been, from its very origin, a racist country infected by a white supremacist ideology that has birthed and nurtured institutions and systems — from Congress to capitalism — that systematically disadvantage black Americans. Political actors of the present have a simple choice: They can either embrace (invariably left-liberal or socialist) policies that will begin the process of dismantling these pervasive forms of structural injustice — or they can oppose doing so and ensure that the injustices continue, with toxic racism remaining where it has been for the past four centuries, at the very center of American life. Those are the choices.

You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.

That line is a paraphrase of Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panthers, the revolutionary black nationalist organization founded in 1966, and it's fitting to refer to him here, since the publication of the 1619 Project represents the definitive triumph of left-wing activism over journalistic skepticism, circumspection, and restraint at The New York Times — and not just at the NYTM, since the newspaper has promised to publish more contributions to the 1619 Project in the coming days and weeks. As if the content of last Sunday's paper wasn't evidence enough of this development, the leaked transcript of a recent town-hall meeting at the Times gives us an added glimpse of how reporters and editors now think and talk about race. Here is a representative comment addressed to executive editor Dean Baquet:

Staffer: I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it's less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we're thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country. And I think particularly as we are launching a 1619 Project, I feel like that's going to open us up to even more criticism from people who are like, "OK, well you're saying this, and you're producing this big project about this. But are you guys actually considering this in your daily reporting?" [Slate]

Racism is in everything. White supremacy is the foundation of all of the systems in the country. Those are fairly extreme, unmodulated statements. Did Baquet respond by pointing out that, while racism exists and needs to receive coverage in the paper, there are many other ways to talk about America and its history — by placing it in international context, by highlighting aspects of the American past that go beyond race, by raising issues of class and ethnicity and gender, by engaging with contrary intellectual, cultural, and economic currents, social trends, and ways of understanding?

Also very good is Rich Lowry, at the New York Post, "The left's vile smear of America's founding."

The left’s vile smear of America’s founding https://t.co/6ipY4rFGV6 pic.twitter.com/P2ebM6FwGm

— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) August 20, 2019

Plus, Dan McLaughlin has an incredible Twitter thread, which would be better for students to learn in school that NYT's slavery project --- and I don't exaggerate.

At Twitchy, "Class is in SESSION: Dan McLaughlin’s thread on American history makes New York Times look even more desperate."

That's one of the more obviously ahistorical claims in this piece, if you know anything at all about the history of British or American abolitionism or the origins of the American revolution. https://t.co/HariFOnJEk https://t.co/4q5sdTrZf1

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) August 19, 2019

Also, via Memeorandum, at Slate, "Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage?"

The Pulitzer Center has the pdf of Sunday's magazine, so no worry about the Times' paywall.

David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars

At Amazon, David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery by David Horowitz.

Coleman Hughes Testimony Before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (VIDEO)

Gawd, this is fantastic!

Leftists were outraged. I mean, just look at the faces of the black Democrats behind Mr. Hughes. They don't want to get off the leftist-Democrat Party plantation!

Watch:



And at Twitchy, "Blue-check comedian OK’s racial slur against black columnist who testified against reparations."

And from the now-deleted tweet, by Rae Sanni:

It’s okay, just for today, to call Coleman Hughes a coon. He’s arguing against reparations on Juneteenth. He’s Cooneman Hughes til midnight Pacific Standard time

— Rae Sanni (@raesanni) June 19, 2019

Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion.

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name

At Amazon, Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

Margaret Walker, Jubilee

At Amazon, a fantastic book and wonderful Christmas present, Margaret Walker, Jubilee (50th Anniversary Edition).

Iceland's First Black Citizen

I love this story.

Hans Jonathan, a Danish slave from colonial St. Croix, was denied his freedom in Denmark and subsequently escaped to Iceland where he lived out the remainder of his life.

Iceland's really proud of this history. Denmark wants to bury it, the freakin' hypocritical "tolerant" Scandinavian progs.

At NYT, "Iceland’s 1st Black Citizen? An Ex-Slave and War Hero Denmark Now Disregards":

Iceland’s 1st Black Citizen? An Ex-Slave and War Hero Denmark Now Disregards https://t.co/69fWcPWmKF

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 15, 2018

COPENHAGEN — Long after his death, Hans Jonathan has, at last, gotten some attention. He is the subject of a well-received biography and a groundbreaking genetic study, and is something of a celebrity in Iceland, where he is thought to have been the first black person.

But in Denmark, where Hans Jonathan (he had no surname) was a slave, fought in a war, lost a noted case on slavery, and escaped bondage by fleeing to Iceland, his extraordinary story has not drawn much interest.

An American descendant got a polite rejection when she asked the Danish government to declare him, posthumously, a free man. When people stroll past a five-story mansion that sits less than 100 yards from the royal Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen, there is no historical marker to tell of the Schimmelmann family who owned it, or the slaves they kept there, including Hans Jonathan.

“People who speak or write about slave trade and Danish colonialism speak to deaf ears,” said Gisli Palsson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Iceland, and author of “The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan.”

The colonial past has largely disappeared from Danish collective memory. The country has communities of people with historic ties to Greenland and the Faroe Islands, but relatively few residents whose ancestry traces to its former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and India.

Danes’ long-ago status as slave owners and colonial masters rarely appears as a theme in mainstream culture. Today, Danish views of ethnic minorities are heavily influenced by recent tensions over waves of migration to Europe from the Middle East and Africa.

Other western European countries have had trouble squarely facing such history; many Belgians were unaware of the atrocities in Congo under Belgian rule until the past generation. But Denmark, with less of a colonial record to confront than some countries, has had more trouble confronting it, according to Mr. Palsson.

“Somehow it annoys them more than others knowing about this background,” he said.

Hans Jonathan was born in 1784 in St. Croix, then a Danish possession and now part of the United States Virgin Islands. His mother was a black house slave owned by the Schimmelmanns, a Danish-German family, and his father was a white man.

When he was about 7, the Schimmelmanns took him to Copenhagen. In 1801, he volunteered to fight with the Danish navy, and emerged unharmed from a fierce battle with British ships.

“It was crazy warfare,” said Mr. Palsson, whose biography of Hans Jonathan was published in Icelandic in 2014, and in English in 2016. “The ship was bombarded heavily.”

Hans Jonathan earned the support of his superior officers, who spoke on his behalf to the royal household. Denmark’s crown prince and de facto ruler, the future King Frederik VI, wrote in a letter that Hans Jonathan “is considered free and enjoys rights.”

The French revolution had unleashed new ideas about equality and liberty. Like several other colonial powers, Denmark still allowed slavery in the Caribbean, but abolition movements at home were gaining ground, and the status of slaves brought to Europe from the colonies was murky.

Henrietta Schimmelmann tried to reclaim Hans Jonathan and take him back to St. Croix, and he went to court to assert his freedom, in a case that was famous in its time. But he could not produce the letter from Prince Frederik, for reasons unknown, and in 1802, the court dismissed his claim and ordered him to return to the Schimmelmanns, who wanted to sell him in St. Croix...

More.

Indian Slavery

This is pretty fascinating -- and tells you something about how far down identity politics has infested historiography and cultural assimilation.

At NYT, "Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico. Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It."

Latinos with roots in New Mexico are discovering ancestors who were Native American slaves, prompting new debates over identity https://t.co/B6VpNjXmq1

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 28, 2018

Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy

This is interesting and worth pondering, no matter your ideological inclinations.

From Annette Gordon-Reed‏, at Foreign Affairs, "America’s Original Sin":

America’s Original Sin | Foreign Affairs https://t.co/8wySaAdlnI

— Annette Gordon-Reed (@agordonreed) December 12, 2017

... The most significant fact about American slavery, one it did not share with other prominent ancient slave systems, was its basis in race. Slavery in the United States created a defined, recognizable group of people and placed them outside society. And unlike the indentured servitude of European immigrants to North America, slavery was an inherited condition.

As a result, American slavery was tied inexorably to white dominance. Even people of African descent who were freed for one reason or another suffered under the weight of the white supremacy that racially based slavery entrenched in American society. In the few places where free blacks had some form of state citizenship, their rights were circumscribed in ways that emphasized their inferior status—to them and to all observers. State laws in both the so-called Free States and the slave states served as blueprints for a system of white supremacy. Just as blackness was associated with inferiority and a lack of freedom—in some jurisdictions, black skin created the legal presumption of an enslaved status—whiteness was associated with superiority and freedom.

The historian Edmund Morgan explained what this meant for the development of American attitudes about slavery, freedom, and race—indeed, for American culture overall. Morgan argued that racially based slavery, rather than being a contradiction in a country that prided itself on freedom, made the freedom of white people possible. The system that put black people at the bottom of the social heap tamped down class divisions among whites. Without a large group of people who would always rank below the level of even the poorest, most disaffected white person, white unity could not have persisted. Grappling with the legacy of slavery, therefore, requires grappling with the white supremacy that preceded the founding of the United States and persisted after the end of legalized slavery.

Consider, by contrast, what might have happened had there been Irish chattel slavery in North America. The Irish suffered pervasive discrimination and were subjected to crude and cruel stereotypes about their alleged inferiority, but they were never kept as slaves. Had they been enslaved and then freed, there is every reason to believe that they would have had an easier time assimilating into American culture than have African Americans. Their enslavement would be a major historical fact, but it would likely not have created a legacy so firmly tying the past to the present as did African chattel slavery. Indeed, the descendants of white indentured servants blended into society and today suffer no stigma because of their ancestors’ social condition.

That is because the ability to append enslaved status to a set of generally identifiable physical characteristics—skin color, hair, facial features—made it easy to tell who was eligible for slavery and to maintain a system of social control over the enslaved. It also made it easy to continue organized oppression after the 13th Amendment ended legal slavery in 1865. There was no incentive for whites to change their attitudes about race even when slavery no longer existed. Whiteness still amounted to a value, unmoored from economic or social status. Blackness still had to be devalued to ensure white superiority. This calculus operated in Northern states as well as Southern ones.

CONFEDERATE IDEOLOGY

The framers of the Confederate States of America understood this well. Race played a specific and pivotal role in their conception of the society they wished to create. If members of the revolutionary generation presented themselves as opponents of a doomed system and, in Jefferson’s case, cast baleful views of race as mere “suspicions,” their Confederate grandchildren voiced their full-throated support for slavery as a perpetual institution, based on their openly expressed belief in black inferiority. The founding documents of the Confederacy, under which the purported citizens of that entity lived, just as Americans live under the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, announced that African slavery would form the “cornerstone” of the country they would create after winning the Civil War. In 1861, a few weeks before the war began, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, put things plainly:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast had anticipated this as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.

Despite the clarity of Stephens’ words, millions of Americans today are unaware of—or perhaps unwilling to learn about—the aims of those who rallied to the Confederate cause. That ignorance has led many to fall prey to the romantic notion of “the rebels,” ignoring that these rebels had a cause. Modern Americans may fret about the hypocrisy and weakness of the founding generation, but there was no such hesitancy among the leading Confederates on matters of slavery and race. That they were not successful on the battlefield does not mean that their philosophy should be ignored in favor of abstract notions of “duty,” “honor,” and “nobility”; Americans should not engage in the debate that the former Confederates chose after the war ended and slavery, finally, acquired a bad name.

It has taken until well into the twenty-first century for many Americans to begin to reject the idea of erecting statues of men who fought to construct an explicitly white supremacist society. For too long, the United States has postponed a reckoning with the corrosive ideas about race that have destroyed the lives and wasted the talents of millions of people who could have contributed to their country. To confront the legacy of slavery without openly challenging the racial attitudes that created and shaped the institution is to leave the most important variable out of the equation. And yet discussions of race, particularly of one’s own racial attitudes, are among the hardest conversations Americans are called on to have...

RTWT.

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught

I'm surprised I'm just finding out about this book just now. It came out in February.

At Amazon, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

I finally picked up my copy.

And available at Amazon, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club).

Margaret Walker, Jubilee

At Amazon, Margaret Walker, Jubilee.