Rescuing American History: Essay Reviews (3)

In this blog posting, we continue (from the September 6, 2021 and November 1, 2021 postings) a review of some essays on the topic of American-history education in the U.S.  These essays were recently published in the book “Red, White, and Black,” which includes critiques of the revisionist history published as the “1619 Project” by the New York Times.  The editor of “Red, White, and Black” is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.  Bibliographic data is included in Essay Reviews (1) appearing as the September 6, 2021 blog posting.  (There was a typographical error in that 9/6/21 posting: The correct name is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.)  Today’s blog posting will review another essay in “Red, White, and Black.”   

The essay appearing on pages 143 - 150 in Woodson’s book is titled “Critical Race Theory’s Destructive Impact on America.”  Its author, Carol M. Swain, currently a political commentator on nationally well-known news outlets, is a former university professor of political science and law at Princeton and Vanderbilt universities.  Swain finds that the 1619 Project is a revisionist history of race in America that invokes newfangled and morally repugnant claims in order to justify its thesis that racism is an American way of life that is irremediable - - unless the 1619 Project’s teaching materials are universally adopted.  The basis of this project is to assign 1619, the year that Africans first appeared in Virginia, as the founding year of the United States.  The 1619 Project holds that all of U.S. history revolves around the practice of slavery. (One notes in passing that 17th century Englishmen would have been astonished to learn that what they had considered as a North American seaboard ripe for colonization was instead a land destined to become a republic by virtue of what was, for them, an isolated sequence of transactions starting in 1619.)  

Swain mentions that this revisionist history has been put into the form of classroom materials for K-12 education without the normal, lengthy peer-review process.  As of February, 2020 these materials were in 3,500 classrooms.   However, a “small detail” seems to have been overlooked by the purveyors of the 1619 Project: Swain finds that during the forty-two years from 1619 to 1661, there was a mix of slavery and indentured servitude in North America.  The result was that some blacks became free.  Free blacks, American Indians, and whites all competed in buying slaves, which were legally imported after 1661.  “Early Negroes imported into Virginia held the status of indentured servants … [and received] ‘freedom dues’ in the form of land at the end of their term of service.”  There are documented cases of free black individuals who were able to pay for the import of additional indentured servants and to receive 50 acres of land for each indentured servant imported.

The picture of colonial individuals who maintained some measure of mobility among slave, indentured, and free classes “differs substantially from the narrative advanced by the 1619 Project contributors.”  There is the appearance, Swain thinks, that the 1619 Project is a stalking horse for the larger project of extracting and administering reparations for slavery.  Reparations would flow from sufficiently non-black individuals to sufficiently black individuals.  Reparations would be theoretically justified by the assumed existence of torts and malfeasance by some remote ancestors against other remote ancestors.  

Swain maintains that reparations are wrong, first, on utilitarian grounds: The real problems of some black citizens would not be addressed by reparations, and the real progress shown by other black citizens would not be recognized.  Second, reparations are wrong on moral grounds: Today’s white Americans are not responsible for great-great-great grandparents who might have been insufficiently zealous in abolishing slavery (or who might have been residing in Slovakia or Lithuania).  Moreover, free blacks, American Indians, and whites all bought slaves.  Finally, one notes in passing the problem that, for the purposes of reparations, it would be impossible for any individual, of any race, to prove that some remote ancestor had not held slaves at some time in the remote past.  What should one say about African Americans whose near ancestors were slaves in North America, but whose remote ancestors held slaves in Africa?  Proving a negative is no more likely of success in reparations theory than in any other endeavor.

Swain goes on to define “critical race theory” (CRT) as an analytic framework to analyze institutions and culture, dividing the world into white oppressors and non-white victims.  CRT uses anecdotes and “personal narratives” in place of traditional historical data.  The goal is to create a new ruling class.  Such a class would be available for administrating reparations.  Although left unsaid by Swain in her essay, one notes in passing that any new ruling class will owe homage and fealty to the theorists of the 1619 Project and to sufficiently “woke” individuals of any race - - or so those theorists and “woke” individuals hope.  (An individual is said to be “woke” if he or she is a connoisseur of life’s inequities, being adept in their detection and elimination.)

In the world of the 1619 Project, Swain states, “education is now about white privilege indoctrination.”  Even poor Appalachians (and one thinks also of the descendants of the Okies who fled the dust bowl) are guilty of incorrect skin color.  Swain maintains that “The 1619 Project is a misguided effort to keep open historical wounds while telling only half the story … Blaming today’s families for the mistakes of our ancestors is not a prescription for unifying the country or empowering racial and ethnic minorities.”  Swain is able to perceive this misguided effort, because “I [Swain] reached my formative years before critical race theory and cultural Marxism gained a dominant foothold.”

Rescuing American History: Essay Reviews (2)

In this blog posting, we continue (from the September 6, 2021 posting) a review of some essays on the topic of American-history education in the U.S.  These essays were recently published in the book “Red, White, and Black,” which includes critiques of the revisionist history published as the “1619 Project” by the New York Times.  The editor of “Red, White, and Black” is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.  Bibliographic data is included in Essay Reviews (1) appearing as the September 6, 2021 blog posting.  (There was a typographical error in that 9/6/21 posting: The correct name is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.)  Today’s blog posting will review two of the essays in “Red, White, and Black.”   

The essay appearing on pages 37 – 42 in Woodson’s book is titled “Slavery Does Not Define the Black American Experience.”  Its author, Wilfred Reilly, is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University.  (A different essay by Reilly was reviewed in the 9/6/21 blog post.)  No one denies, writes Reilly, “that the ‘land of the free’ once used captives from other societies almost as cattle,” in a slaving system that ranged from Latin America to the Muslim states of the Middle East.  A balanced view of history, in Reilly’s opinion, requires the recognition that the primary factor in the building of the U.S. economy was not slavery; indeed, the South was considered to be a feudal backwater conquered by the Union army.  In 1860, the South had 25% of the U.S. population but only 10% of its capital and 10% of its skilled-trades workers.  Moreover, Reilly quotes the economist Thomas Sowell as saying that “the prevalence of slavery in the antebellum South resulted in a mocking and disparaging attitude towards hard work that continues to plague both ‘white trash’ and inner-city black communities today.”

In 1619, Reilly estimates that there were 210 English-speaking settlers on the North American continent.  It is not clear whether the 20 Africans held by the English-speaking settlers were slaves or indentured servants; or whether the 20 Africans (upon learning English) were in addition to, or a subset of, the population of 210.  Riley cites the following statistics: By the time of the first U.S. Census in 1790, there were, in round numbers, about 4 million Americans including 0.8 million people of African descent.  By the 1790’s, 10 states and territories were slave-free.  Civil War deaths numbered about 360,000 for the Union Army and 258,000 for the Confederate Army.  There were about 9 or 10 slaves freed for each Union Army death.  In 1865, slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  

A critically important consideration for Reilly is that some contemporary problems that are commonly attributed to “the legacy of slavery” have only appeared in the last few decades, long after the conclusion of the Civil War.  Chief among those problems is that the black illegitimacy rate is about 75% today; whereas some data from 1925 New York City shows that all but 15% of black households were then headed by two parents.  Empirically, Reilly finds that contemporary factors such as pay-per-child welfare and under-policing of black neighborhoods seem to be responsible for contemporary problems in black communities.  Reilly agrees with the 1619 Project contributors that slavery was horrible.  However, slavery was the world-wide norm until Western societies began to fight it.  Slavery prospered only in the poorest region of the U.S., and more than 600,000 lives were lost during liberation.  While there are contemporary problems in American minority communities, Reilly observes that “ironically, more than a few of them seem to be the result of ‘compassionate’ liberal social welfare policies implemented during just the past few decades.”

The essay appearing on pages 23 – 36 in “Red, White, and Black” is titled “We Cannot Allow ‘1619’ to Dumb Down America in the Name of a Crusade.”  Its author, John McWhorter, is an associate professor of English at Columbia University.  McWhorter finds the 1619 Project to be an exercise in historical misinterpretation.  Being honest about the performance of American Presidents should also include the “Hester Prynne factor”: No matter what the background of a person is - - as revealed by a scarlet letter or by some latter-day equivalent - - that person can be kind and virtuous at the present moment.  It is inappropriate to think of slavery as overwhelming all other factors in a complex world.  Overemphasizing scarlet letters of whatever type calls for the dumbing down of history in the name of a moral crusade.  The gradual abolition of slavery was itself a miracle, facilitated by Jefferson’s signature on some legislation of 1808 banning the foreign slave trade in the United States.  The year 1808 was the earliest date permitted by the Constitution for such legislation.

McWhorter notes that it makes no more sense to think of American history as being comprehensively captured in an orbit about slavery than it would be to think of that history as being exclusively explained by a feminist critique of the fate of colonial white women.  One notes in passing that a historical analysis based on colonial white women would presumably require a “1587 Project” commemorating Virginia Dare, the first white indigenous female in the Roanoke Colony.

The purveyors of the 1619 Project ask us to believe that the existence and ill-treatment of slaves negates all the other characteristics of the colonial and revolutionary-war ruling class.  But McWhorter says that “a smart ten-year-old could see through the willful cluelessness on which this supposedly enlightened conception of social history is based.  Who seriously condemns persons of the past for being unable to see beyond the confines of their own time?”  The 1619 Project’s view of history is familiar from Marxist ideology; and although it makes for bad history, it may be serviceable for use in extracting reparations for favored groups at some time in the future.

McWhorter finds that the 1619 Project also serves as an explanation for disparities between black and white achievement.  In his view, such an explanation is problematic: For example, there were plenty of black students with sky-high IQs in the Chicago of the 1930’s; but by 2020 “we would not find that kind of IQ performance among those very students’ great grandchildren.”  The reader is left to infer the passage from 1930 to 2020 was adversely affected by the 1960’s and its Great Society.  

Regarding the 1619 Project, McWhorter notes two peculiarities that detract from the idea of its being a reliable historical guide: First, “countless human groups have succeeded amidst dismissive attitudes … [but] for some reason, in the late 20th century in the United States … one particular oppressed class, the descendants of African slaves, could only fitfully succeed once the ruling class underwent a profound transformation … down all the way to its basal, pre-cortical impulses.”  Second, for many people, “questioning the 1619 Project elicits irritation, of a kind that suggests personal insult rather than difference of opinion.  This is because the 1619 Project is indeed all about personality, a certain persona that smart black people are encouraged to adopt as a modern version of being a civil rights warrior.”