I rarely watch a whole 1-hour plus podcast but there have been 2 exceptions lately. One is the 84-minute bloggingheads conversation between Brown University professor Glenn Loury and Columbia University professor John McWhorter. It’s on the New York Times‘s famous (infamous?) 1619 project from this summer.
If you want to know pretty much all the ins and outs of the project, criticisms and defenses, go to Phil Magness, “The 1619 Project Debate: A Bibliography,” AIER, January 3, 2020. Phil definitely has an ax to grind but what’s notable in his contributions is that he is more balanced than most of the critics. He grants a few points that the 1619 Project made.
If you want to watch an entertaining and extremely informative discussion of questions like “Why Now?”, then go to the bloggingheads video “A Critical Look at the 1619 Project,” September 11, 2019. I’ll give some highlights, along with the times at which they occur. Notice that in the YouTube video to which I link most of the times are wrong. The actual times at which those discussions occur are typically 3.5 to 4 minutes later than the listed times.
On or around the 1:30 point: Glenn Loury shows his fun-loving, very attractive personality. Actually his attractive personality comes through in the whole thing.
8:35: Clever comment by John McWhorter. “Low rent thinking disguised as higher wisdom.”
8:50: Loury says that he interprets white guys and a few gals asking him to speak out on the 1619 Project as their request for cover. Sadly, I think that’s true: that’s where we are in this society right now. By the way, I didn’t wait for cover. It didn’t even occur to me to ask for it, explicitly or implicitly. I posted on it in August and, to his credit, Phil Magness posted on it earlier than I did.
9:40: Don’t miss Loury’s question to McWhorter and McWhorter’s one-word answer.
16:00: Why now?
26:00: Somebody who we will leave nameless. Who?
42:45: In a humorous moment, Glenn catches himself playing devil’s advocate very effectively.
43:55: Booker T. Washington was invited to a meal and then White House employees broke the crockery afterwards. True? Wow!
45:00: This is what the post on YouTube says should be happening at about 39:40. The elided history of black shopping districts. (History that I did not know.)
59:30: McWhorter’s critique of the low expectations put on black children.
1:01:28: Great comment. “They sky isn’t necessary going to fall in because there’s no sky on the internet.”
There’s a lot of good content here.
HT2 Jeff Hummel.
READER COMMENTS
Niklas Blanchard
Jan 10 2020 at 6:58pm
Ta-Nehisi Coates.
David Henderson
Jan 11 2020 at 12:20am
Ah, of course. Thanks, Niklas.
Phil H
Jan 11 2020 at 1:43pm
The pushback against the 1619 project is way OTT. If it’s bad history, it’ll be forgotten. At the moment, the critics just sound hysterical.
David Henderson
Jan 11 2020 at 2:15pm
You wrote:
I’m not convinced that’s true. But if it is true, part of the reason is that critics spoke out.
You wrote:
Pretty much all the critics that Magness cites are measured. Can you point to specific instances of hysteria?
MarkW
Jan 11 2020 at 6:24pm
If it’s bad history, it’ll be forgotten.
I’m not at all sure about that. It sure looks like the big push is on:
https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=1619-project-poised-to-reframe-teaching-slavery-how-educators-using-information-curriculum
Mark Z
Jan 11 2020 at 7:04pm
Do you have more of an explanation for how the criticism is over the top? The project makes a lot of extraordinary, broad, grandiose claims about the history of the US and about capitalism, implying severe implications for modern political discourse, and did so in the most prestigious newspaper in the country. If critics are right about the errors project made, then their responses have been entirely proportional. I don’t see how you can have read the 1619 project and not see that the writers themselves definitely believe they are making extremely momentous and ‘socially relevant’ claims.
And, “If it’s bad history, it’ll be forgotten.” Really? If history has taught us anything, it’s that that’s not true.
Phil H
Jan 12 2020 at 12:11am
Mark: Actually, you’ve got a good point. You’re right, it’s a very high-profile publication, and anyone who disagrees with its arguments is probably right to say so in very direct language. I don’t mind that.
What I do mind is historians who give weak arguments. Given the space to write big, in-depth rebuttals, I haven’t seen anything very insightful from the masters of American history. It looked like an awful lot of pearl-clutching at the invasion of their territory by the NYT writer (not even a historian!) and not very much solid argumentation. I get that they disagree. That’s why the project needed to be done! That they disagree is a given. That they’re shocked by the young’ins ignoring their eminence and expertise is irrelevant. The fact that they don’t have very strong counter-arguments is damning.
Phil H
Jan 11 2020 at 11:46pm
David: I read a series of long interviews with eminent historians at a world socialist website (links found on Brian Leiter, can’t give them here on my phone because ironically the website it blocked in China). There was one guy who I thought was good (Mac-something? Macpherson?), but most seemed to be pure status-mongers. “Yes you could interpret the fact that slavery was literally written into the constitution as an important historical point, but I’m a very important historian and I’m telling you that the grand liberal vision of the slave owners is much more important, so shut up and listen to me!”
This might just be a function of the places I go to read, of course.
Re: good history won’t drive out bad. What a bizarre position to take! Do you not believe in the marketplace of ideas?
Re: the merits of the project itself, it seems to me that only parochial “American historians” would reject it out of hand. In world history, this is very much a live issue. Colonialism is one of the factors that has been repeatedly chewed over as the cause of the industrial revolution and the rise of the west. There are plenty of counter arguments, to be sure! There’s no consensus on this question. But the idea that the extraction of vast resources from the continents of Africa and America was a key differentiator between the civilisations of Europe and China is definitely a reasonable position, with prominent supporters.
MarkW
Jan 12 2020 at 7:45am
Yes you could interpret the fact that slavery was literally written into the constitution as an important historical point, but I’m a very important historian and I’m telling you that the grand liberal vision of the slave owners is much more important
Saying that slavery is an important historical point and was written into the constitution is nothing new and is not controversial. The controversial claim is that the main motivation of American independence was to break away from England in order to preserve slavery — that the whole project of independence was inherently about slavery (and could be described as a ‘slave-holders rebellion’).
Have you seen Scott Alexander’s discussion ‘Motte and Bailey’ <a href=”https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/“>arguments</a>? If not, you should check it out, because you’re employing the tactic now. The controversial claim is that American Independence was motivated by a desire to preserver slavery. The non-controversial claim is that slavery was an historical fact at the time of independence and was written into the constitution. When challenged on the novel, controversial (and unsupported, ahistorical) claim A you’ve retreated to defending the the non-controversial, easy to defend claim B.
Do you not believe in the marketplace of ideas?
In American public schools and the curricula and textbooks they use? Lol, not really.
Phil H
Jan 12 2020 at 9:47am
Hi Mark.
So, um… I wasn’t defending the 1619 position in that part of the comment. I’m quite happy to defend it, but just to be clear that’s not what I was doing there. That was my impression of the historians who seem to be upset about it.
I am a big fan of Scott Alexander, and I understand where you’re coming from, but that’s really not what I was doing there.
But to defend it… sure, let’s go!
America was one of very few nations in the world to break away from colonial rule while retaining racial inequity. South Africa is your buddy! It happened in other places, but for the most part, when countries became free, they chose freedom and equality. Not so the good ol’ U.S.A. The war of independence was in large part an explicitly economic war. There was plenty of political rhetoric to go with it, to be sure, but the colonies went to war against Britain in large measure over the issue of taxes. And the U.S. economy at the time was largely entangled in the slave trade – this was way before industrialization.
So we have a country that fought off its colonial owner for economic reasons, wrote racial inequity into its constitution, and developed one of the most organized and brutal slavery systems in the world. It doesn’t take a genius historian to put those pieces together and say, hey, this is a country whose history is intimately bound up with slavery (and of course genocide).
The counterargument is mainly: “but the early American rebels didn’t say they were fighting for slavery, they said they were fighting for freedom.” And it’s not a very impressive argument, is it? I mean, what would you expect them to say?
So, yeah, I don’t mind defending 1619. But once again, for the sake of clarity, that’s not what I was doing in the section you quote, not even motte and bailey style.
MarkW
Jan 12 2020 at 11:45am
America was one of very few nations in the world to break away from colonial rule while retaining racial inequity.
But when the U.S. broke away, England itself still had slavery! The British Atlantic slave trade was not abolished until 1807 and slavery in the British Empire not until 1833 — and even at that point, abolition was a gradual, not immediate process. In the end, Britain only ended up fully abolishing slavery in its territories about 25 years ahead of the U.S. In contrast, Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780 (the first democratic government in the world ever to do so) and all of the northern states had abolished slavery before Wilberforce pushed through the Slave Trade Act in 1807 (which only prevented British ships from engaging in the slave trade — the U.S. had banned American ships from the trade a decade earlier). And remember that the U.S. Revolution started in the North, not the South. Had the British not attacked Norfolk Virginia, the southern states might not have joined the rebellion at all. That’s because the South was very dependent on selling crops to British buyers — who had proved perfectly willing to purchase slave-produced goods. Which is not the least bit surprising since the British were busy growing their own slave-produced crops in the West Indies and elsewhere.
It happened in other places, but for the most part, when countries became free, they chose freedom and equality.
Oh, c’mon, that’s really weak. To the extent this is true, it’s only because these countries became independent so much later — long after slavery was gone or on the way out. Tell me — which countries gained independence in the 18th century, abolished slavery and chose ‘freedom and equality’ immediately?
Look at the <a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom“>Late Modern</a> section here. During the 18th century, emancipation of slaves and serfs was a gradual global process. The fledgling U.S. was not an outlier.
The counterargument is mainly…
No, it isn’t. You’re strawmanning. You claim to be a Scott Alexander fan, so you know what ‘steelmanning’ is. Try that. The U.S. became independent at a time when slavery was still a near-universal global phenomenon and abolition movements were just getting started. Some of the U.S. states were early adopters of abolition, while others were late (but not so very late — France, for example, finally abolished slavery in its colonies in…1848).
Christophe Biocca
Jan 12 2020 at 12:44pm
I’m going to use slavery instead of “racial inequity” because it’s easier to put a date on it. Otherwise we’ll end up in a debate about residential schools and the pass system in Canada and whether that counts.
– Brazil: Independence 1822, slavery abolished 1888.
– Cuba: Attempted independence in 1868 (failed after a 10 year war), abolished slavery in 1886 (by Spanish royal decree), actual independence achieved in 1902.
– Spanish Haiti (now Dominican Republic). Declared independence in 1821. Was invaded the following year by Haiti, and it was under Haitian rule that slavery was abolished.
– Paraguay: Independence in 1811, abolished slavery in 1844.
– Colombia: Independence in 1819, abolished slavery in 1851.
There are others where laws phasing-out slavery gradually were passed during or soon after independence (children of slaves would automatically be free persons upon reaching adulthood) so I’m not counting them as fitting this criteria (however note that New York and New Jersey passed similar laws after independence).
I didn’t check all the countries in South America, because there’s a lot of them that did not survive to the present day (a lot of empire building and re-splitting happened back then). But former Spanish colonies are going to be the main examples of your criteria simply because Spain took so long to abolish slavery, giving the breakaway colonies the choice to keep or abolish it.
And you’re still doing motte-and-bailey; the person you’re replying to said:
Phil H
Jan 12 2020 at 3:33pm
Thanks, both of you.
Those are a curious set of arguments you’ve served up. In an attempt to claim that the USA did not become independent in order to maintain slavery, Christophe presented me with a list of lots of other countries that did become independent while maintaining slavery… What’s your point? That America is like them? Unlike them? Mark says, “The fledgling U.S.A. was not an outlier” – so, committed to slavery during the 18th century, then?
Christophe wants me to focus on this point: “the main motivation of American independence was to break away from England in order to preserve slavery”
Sure. What kinds of evidence might be relevant to that claim? One kind would be whether England was threatening the institution of slavery at that time. I agree that the evidence that Britain was serious about abolition is weak. But it is clear enough that there was already a recognition of the fact that slavery was evil – there was the Somerset case, and Wilberforce was active by the 1780s. How much did this influence the thinking of the rebels? I don’t know.
Another kind of evidence would be to look at outcomes. What happened after American independence? Well, the south went on to develop a massive slave industrial complex. Did the rebels fight “for” that? I dunno.
You could also look at who was fighting: on the American side, many slaveowners, fighting for the right to do their own thing, which included slave ownership. To what extent was slavery the “main” motivation? Honestly, I think it takes remarkable historical brashness to make the claim either way.
You may think I’m being a bit slippery, and perhaps I am. I think the mainstream narratives about America and democracy and liberal values are equally slippery. I also think that the ideas presented in 1619 are refreshing, interesting, and unthreatening. It’s an exciting new perspective on American history. It doesn’t have to displace all other perspectives. It doesn’t have to be “true”. What history is? It just has to illuminate a little more.
MarkW
Jan 12 2020 at 5:56pm
Mark says, “The fledgling U.S.A. was not an outlier” – so, committed to slavery during the 18th century, then?
No. The U.S.A. as a whole was absolutely not committed to slavery during the 18th century. The northern states were the ones who fired the first shots and where nearly all the fighting was done, and they all abolished slavery following independence. It’s simply absurd to suggest that the northerners who started the revolution in Boston, Lexington and Concord did so with the goal of preserving slavery. Pennsylvania voted to abolish slavery 3 years before the Revolutionary War officially ended with the Treaty of Paris. Massachusetts and New Hampshire abolished it that same year (1783) and Connecticut and Rhode Island the year after. Slavery was abolished in these ex-British colonies 50 years before in colonies that remained part of the British empire. Slavery actually lasted longer in the Canadian provinces because they remained part of the empire.
What I meant by the U.S. not being an outlier is that slavery in the U.S. states and European countries was abolished in a series of stages. Banning slavery in some areas but not others. Passing gradual emancipation laws before complete abolition. Banning the slave trade but not immediately freeing slaves. The U.S. state and European countries went through these various stages during the same overlapping time period that lasted nearly a century after U.S. independence.
I agree that the evidence that Britain was serious about abolition is weak. But it is clear enough that there was already a recognition of the fact that slavery was evil.
Yes, but this was true in the American colonies as well as in Britain. The First Great Awakening of evangelical religion in the 1730s and 40s (which happened in both the colonies and in the UK) is claimed to have played a key role.
Phil H
Jan 13 2020 at 12:47am
“No. The U.S.A. as a whole…”
Great, so all we have to do to make your argument work is ignore half the USA. Talk about cherry-picking! That kind of argument is not acceptable in economics, and it’s no better in history. If you want to talk about a bunch of virtuous northerners, you can, but why should anyone believe that your story is the “story of the U.S.A.”? Why is your story better than the 1619 story of the slave-obsessed south?
Personally, I doubt the virtue of these northerners. If they were so opposed to slavery, why were so many of them slave owners? The could have unilaterally freed their own slaves at any time, but they preferred to go to war over taxes. I think they were just as economically driven as anyone else. But even if they really were all humanists and abolitionists, they made common cause with the south, and that’s the country.
MarkW
Jan 13 2020 at 9:00am
Great, so all we have to do to make your argument work is ignore half the USA
No. My argument is that the 1491 Project’s claim that American independence was primarily about slavery is plainly false. To believe that premise YOU have to ignore the immediate abolition in the northern colonies. The fact that the colonies that sparked the rebellion also abolished slavery during and immediately after the war refutes the idea that the primary purpose was to preserve slavery. Period. In fact, had Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, et al remained in the empire, they probably could not have abolished slavery when they did (since they would have remained under British law where which slavery remained legal in the colonies until 1833)
Phil H
Jan 13 2020 at 11:37am
Thanks, Mark. I think what you’ve written is clear and precise. Above you raised the issue of the “motte and bailey”. I feel like we’re in a position now to identify some mottes and baileys (if I can remember which is which…)
I feel like your evidence, plus some stuff about Madison and Adams below, and the comparisons with other countries given by Christophe above, illustrate fairly convincingly that a significant subsection of “America” was progressive on slavery, recognised its wrongness, and took legal action against it, well in advance of many other places in the world. That looks to me like a strong bailey, and I don’t intend to argue with it.
There’s another similarly strong bailey around the awfulness of the slave economy in the south, and the dedication of southern whites to slavery.
The mottes are any claims about which of these positions characterises the USA. The whole point of the 1619 narrative is to counter the 1492-1776-1863-2008 narrative, where white guys discover the Americas, white guys found the best nation evah, white guys rescue black guys in a big war, and white guys graciously vote in a black guy as president. All of that is motte, and it’s worth attacking, complicating, rejecting, reconsidering…
MarkW
Jan 13 2020 at 4:07pm
The whole point of the 1619 narrative is to counter the 1492-1776-1863-2008 narrative, where white guys discover the Americas, white guys found the best nation evah, white guys rescue black guys in a big war, and white guys graciously vote in a black guy as president.
But it’s crazy to think that the only options are A) the dishonest propaganda that is the 1619 project and B) some bowdlerized, jingoist version of American history. It’s also crazy to think that B has been the default all this time and that only now have the courageous creators of the 1619 project come along to challenge the dominant triumphalist view. In fact, that view has been challenged for a very, very long time. Read, for example, Frederick Douglas’s amazing speech ‘What to the Slave is the 4th of July?’ That was from 170 years ago.
Larry m. Blaine
Jan 12 2020 at 1:28am
Historians who have specifically studied US economic history have exposed all sorts of problems with the claims of the “Project.” Here’s a good example: https://historyhalf.com/the-1619-project-is-propaganda/
Weir
Jan 13 2020 at 1:29am
Let’s say a student presents a paper: “This country was founded on white supremacy and every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression even in our democracy.”
We’ll call him Beto because that’s what he calls himself. He gets an A from his teacher. Not because he fleshes out this big passionate denunciation with an argument demonstrating how he’s uncovered the single cause explaining everything in American history but simply because his teacher loves to hear moralistic and categorical claims from kids.
Here’s another student, young Pete: “It’s an embarrassing thing to admit, but the people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing and did not respect civil rights.”
And once again the attitude and the feeling is inspiring and suggests the child has a bright future ahead of him.
On the other hand, James Madison must have known slavery was a “dreadful calamity” and “dishonorable to the National character” because those are his words. (“The magnitude of this evil among us is so deeply felt, and so universally acknowledged, that no merit could be greater than that of devising a satisfactory remedy for it.”)
Students who understand the three-fifths clause better than their teachers are going to have to lie or at least disguise what they’ve discovered from their own reading by camouflaging the facts in-between some heated denunciations of how Madison was stupid and a bad guy whose ulterior motive for everything was to make slavery impossible to dislodge.
An intellectually curious student would try to engage with the history of how Madison inherited a slave named William Gardner and, in 1783, sold Gardner into an apprenticeship. This is Madison: “I do not expect to get near the worth of him; but cannot think of punishing him by transportation merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, & worthy the pursuit, of every human being.”
Madison himself called it “the original sin of the African trade.” The New York Times calls it America’s “DNA” but Madison, it turns out, was way ahead of the Times. But that’s what happens when you can become an A student without developing any curiosity about history. You’re never going to know that there were people, including slaveowners like Madison, who understood ahead of you that slavery was a bad thing.
Why wrestle with that history if your teacher doesn’t know anything about it? If you begin and end with the idea that you came up with the idea of justice, then history begins with you. There’s nothing to grapple with or make sense of because people in the past were simply depraved. Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, however, are good people. (They probably worry a lot about the suicide nets at the Apple factory.)
Here’s some history that seemed important to Charles Sumner and to Frederick Douglass and to Abraham Lincoln and to everyone who argued against the claims of John Calhoun (which are now the claims of the New York Times, adopting Calhoun’s claims without knowing it). We know that Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts “thought we had nothing to do with the conduct of the States as to Slavery, but we ought to be careful not to give any sanction to it.” Roger Sherman of Connecticut “was opposed to any tax on slaves imported, as making the matter worse, because it implied they were property.” (“Mr Madison thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”)
Advice to students who want to get top marks: Pretend you don’t know anything your teacher didn’t get from the New York Times.
The Times told your teacher that Calhoun was right, and that James Henry Hammond was right. Hinton Rowan Helper? They never heard of him. Nor Benjamin Lay, Samuel Webster, Nathaniel Appleton, John Allen, John Woolman, James Otis, David Rice. But that’s the thing when you’re a good student and a good person. There’s a lot of history to not learn.
robc
Jan 13 2020 at 7:57am
“I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs.” — John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1776
Adams never owned a slave. As the quote attests, while he worked with the southerners on independence, it was tough for him. That he made common cause, and that that common cause was absolutely not slavery, should be clear.
Adams was an extremist, even in the North. But he was also a leader, and his position probably gets more weight.
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