theatlantic | The clash between the Times authors and their historian
critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of
American society. Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current
racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America
conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its
founding principles? These are not simple questions to answer, because
the nation’s pro-slavery and anti-slavery tendencies are so closely
intertwined.
The
letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain
march toward a more perfect union. The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s
introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation,
in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which
black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may
never fully realize. Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not
about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white
anti-racism. It is a harsh verdict, and one of the reasons the 1619
Project has provoked pointed criticism alongside praise.
Americans
need to believe that, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of
history bends toward justice. And they are rarely kind to those who
question whether it does.
Published 400 years after the first Africans were brought to in
Virginia, the project asked readers to consider “what it would mean to
regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” The special issue of the Times Magazine included essays from the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, who argued that sprawl in Atlanta is a consequence of segregation and white flight; the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who posited that American countermajoritarianism was shaped by pro-slavery politicians seeking to preserve the peculiar institution; and the journalist Linda Villarosa, who traced racist stereotypes
about higher pain tolerance in black people from the 18th century to
the present day. The articles that drew the most attention and
criticism, though, were Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay chronlicling black Americans’ struggle to “make democracy real” and the sociologist Matthew Desmond’s essay linking the crueler aspects of American capitalism to the labor practices that arose under slavery.
The letter’s signatories recognize the problem the Times
aimed to remedy, Wilentz told me. “Each of us, all of us, think that
the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently
needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts
of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism
to American history is a wonderful idea,” he said. In a subsequent
interview, he said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project,
our letter is intended to help it.”
The letter disputes a passage in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay,
which lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full
democracy and says that “one of the primary reasons the colonists
decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they
wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment
began rising in Britain.
This argument is explosive. From
abolition to the civil-rights movement, activists have reached back to
the rhetoric and documents of the founding era to present their claims
to equal citizenship as consonant with the American tradition. The
Wilentz letter contends that the 1619 Project’s argument concedes too
much to slavery’s defenders, likening it to South Carolina Senator John
C. Calhoun’s assertion that “there is not a word of truth” in the
Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase that “all men are created
equal.” Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery
movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a
radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around
the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white
supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.
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