Forgetting vs. Overcoming: Abuses of History and the 1619 Project

[Kamaji]

Forgetting vs. Overcoming: Abuses of History and the 1619 Project

The 1619 Project is, strangely, a history project that encourages forgetting as much as it remembers.

Robert C. Thornett
2 Mar 2023

“t is impossible to shake off this chain” of a stained history, said Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1874 meditation On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. But we don’t need to shake off history, he added. We need to overcome it.

1619 is the year the first slave ships arrived in Virginia. In January, Hulu released The 1619 Project, a six-part docuseries based on the book of the same name currently used in some 4,500 classrooms in the US. The written version of The 1619 Project is a revisionist history of America published by the New York Times, first as a magazine supplement in August 2019 and then as a book in 2021, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The first edition contained numerous glaring factual errors and dubious claims, which drew widespread criticism from scores of leading historians. The second edition has only partly corrected these, and many of its unqualified controversial claims remain. But what is sometimes lost in the debate—necessary as it is—over the veracity of its specific facts is the project’s fundamentally misguided use (or abuse, as Nietzsche put it) of history.

In the Hulu docuseries, the 1619 Project’s founder Nikole Hannah-Jones states that the project’s goal is to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” But what is most important is what goes unsaid: that the video, like the book, is a work of strict and meticulous historical redaction. I taught in China several years ago, and reading or watching The 1619 Project is a lot like reading or watching the news in China: every line, every phrase, has been run through a filter, in this case to scrub out all traces of black-white unity, cooperation, and common goals from America’s history, all in order to leave the audience with a deeply warped caricature of America as having only known racial disunity and conflict. The facts of history defy this narrative; thus, the only way The 1619 Project manages to spin it is by abusing history.

National identity by reductionism

In the years just after Germany unified and became a nation in 1871, Nietzsche saw his fellow Germans combing through their fragmented past, venerating some aspects and discarding others. They were searching for elements that could be used to promote nationalism by creating a new common German identity, such as the operas of Richard Wagner and the heroes of the Franco-Prussian War. This made Nietzsche ask: What are the right and wrong ways to use history? Among his many answers to this question, Nietzsche wrote that it was dangerous to use the past to manufacture a narrative about a nation’s present identity. Germany was formed by combining many duchies, principalities, free cities, kingdoms, and other states, and Nietzsche thought that a Germanness cobbled together from selected bits of such diverse pasts could be oversimplified, obsolete, biased, and reductionist, ignoring whatever Germans didn’t want to hear.

The 1619 Project originated from a critique similar to Nietzsche’s: Hannah-Jones said she aimed to correct reductionist narratives taught in some American schools, which avoid confronting—and sometimes whitewash—the horrors of slavery. In theory, it was a worthy goal. But in practice, her project commits the very same error of reductionism she condemns, except now swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction by avoiding confronting America’s transformation and progress on race.

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To dispel a common myth, the primary issue with the 1619 Project is not that it teaches facts of history that people don’t want to hear. There are probably people somewhere in America who don’t want their kids to hear the gory details of slavery, but the real issue is just the opposite: that the 1619 Project systematically occludes the vast array of facts that contradict its thesis that America is defined by racism and slavery. The project is at its best in the rare moments when it puts aside its identity-driven crusade and simply lets the facts speak for themselves. Perhaps the best instance of this is the refreshingly objective and reasoned essay “Sugar” by Harvard professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad. He tells the story of how blacks and sugar have been connected for over 1,200 years, from slavery on Arab sugar plantations around the Mediterranean in the eighth century up to the diabetes and obesity epidemics that processed sugar has contributed to in the black community today.

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The unrelenting race-based reductionism of the 1619 Project is no small problem. College history professor Duke Pesta gave his students preliminary quizzes over 11 years to test their knowledge of American history. He found that most thought slavery was almost entirely an American phenomenon, and they could say virtually nothing about slavery outside America. Having taught secondary US history myself, including in a majority-black school, I can confirm that the 1619 Project only worsens this problem. It proceeds as if American students somehow know all the “regular” history already and can handle this “new perspective,” even if it is slanted. But the reality is just the opposite. American students are woefully deficient in their knowledge of history. And moreover, they often are not told that the 1619 Project is a very slanted perspective. Instead, they are taught that the regular textbooks are the products of white supremacist systems of oppression, whereas the 1619 Project represents “real history.”

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The 1619 Project purports to correct “a history that never happened.” But it offers a new history that never happened by systematically excluding any traces of black-white unity, cooperation, and common goals from America’s history, including in the abolition movement, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, or even today.

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Source:  https://quillette.com/2023/03/02/forgetting-vs-overcoming-abuses-of-history-and-the-1619-project/