THE CASE FOR THE 1619 PROJECT: ADDRESSING THE CRITICISMS
Wilentz Places Intent Above The Brutal Reality of Slavery
Hence The Necessity of “The 1619 Project”
Since The New York Times published Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “The 1619 Project” in August 2019, the response has been polarizing but predictable. What can you expect in a society still dominated by oppressors? Discussions from critics continue to pull away from the necessity of teaching history written not solely by the “winners” but also by those who lost their freedom and labored to make America live up to its values. The reflexive arguments of white critics underscore an unsettling conclusion: While slavery was foundational to the inception of the United States, its impact on Black Americans, then and now, remains missing from their narratives.
The most notable criticism was a letter sent by Sean Wilentz and four historians to the editor of NY Times Magazine. Wilentz is a prominent Princeton historian who The NY Times has published on numerous occasions. His criticism of “The 1619 Project” can be traced back to an argument he laid out in an op-ed from 2015, “Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution.” In which he argues the U.S. was not founded on racial slavery, calling it a “myth”. To support this he cites President Abraham Lincoln’s stance against slavery, the Civil War, and Frederick Douglass’s shining endorsement of the Constitution as a document declaring freedom for all.
A broader reading of Wilentz’s work shows a common thread. In 2020, The New York Review published an adaption of his Philip Roth Lecture, “American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen.’” In this, he calls on examples of white abolitionists such as, once again, Lincoln or prior, the German Quakers and their protest against slavery in 1688 as proof of burgeoning anti-slavery ideology in the American colonies.
Furthermore, Wilentz’s rhetoric frames white abolitionists as heroic rather than corrective:
Yet, the struggle never ceased. As early as the very first Congress, abolitionists shook the House of Representatives with petitions demanding members press to the very limits of their powers to abolish promptly not just the Atlantic slave trade but slavery itself. Here and there, antislavery advocates won some unlikely victories, passing measures (eventually discarded) to choke off slavery’s advance into the newly-acquired Louisiana Territory, fending off proslavery efforts to undermine the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade (achieved at the earliest possible date in 1808), and forcing a major crisis in 1819 and 1820 over the expansion of slavery, concerning Missouri’s admission to the Union. (Wilentz)
He goes on to add that the “proslavery movement” arose in reaction to a strong abolitionist movement, not as an insistence on the continuation of slavery’s policies:
Americans, earlier than anywhere else, turned that transformation into the politics that would seek to bring slavery to its “ultimate extinction.” In reaction, Americans also produced the mightiest proslavery resistance to those politics the world had ever seen… (Wilentz)
What’s missing from his analysis is a legitimate and whole American perspective, one that upholds the reality of all of America’s inhabitants.
What’s missing from his analysis is a legitimate and whole American perspective, one that upholds the reality of all of America’s inhabitants. While abolitionists debated whether or not to end slavery, enslaved African people were still suffering from the reality of slavery. Even when the American government legally prohibited U.S. involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and declared it piracy in 1820, it continued to operate until the Civil War with New York playing a vital role (Harris). History teaches us what America declares (even as law) and what America does are very different things when it comes to Black Americans.
Whether the quality of life improved for Black people at this time should be the measure of how insistent white Americans were on implementing anti-slavery ideology. Considering how racial slavery was the norm in America, white abolitionists’ effectiveness should not rest on the accounts of white figures. Instead, on the impact of those ideologies on Black people’s lives. How can we believe in an understanding regarding the betterment of the enslaved through the eyes of the enslavers?
Against the backdrop of chattel slavery, which began long before the American Revolution and continued long after, the acknowledgments and intellectual exercise of white abolitionists and the Founding Fathers seem to amount to just that. After all, their fight for independence, the American Revolution, ended at the realization of its promises (for white Americans), not at its debate. The sharp contrast between white colonists’ grievances and the far more severe violations they inflicted against Black people would be comical if it weren’t for the horror. Despite Wilentz’s appraisal of America’s efforts as “the mightiest proslavery resistance to those politics, the world had ever seen” it failed to be a heroic rebuke where it counts.
Much like how the efforts of white abolitionists in the American colonies come up lacking, so does the white privilege permeating Wilentz’s criticism. In “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts” for The Atlantic, Serwer interviews Wilentz: “‘Anti-slavery ideology was a ‘very new thing in the world in the 18th century,’” he said, and ‘there was more anti-slavery activity in the colonies than in Britain.’”. It’s clear from the perspective of Wilentz, a white-presenting American man, that judging the enslavers’ commitment to abolition by their willingness to debate the plight of the enslaved is reasonable.
Wilentz repeats the hypocrisy by impeding the speech of Black Americans and the telling of their history.
By centering on the narrative of the oppressors, he ascribes to the truth as it is convenient to them. The explosive “moral revolution of the 1740s and 1750s,” which called for anti-slavery efforts, did not bring an end to the practice of slavery. Wilentz repeats their hypocrisy by impeding the speech of Black Americans and the telling of their history in the present.
Narratives such as Wilentz’s continue to decenter the issue of imminent threat and persecution faced by Black Americans today, which result from the facts of history — not the contentious intentions of historical figures. Despite the abuse of power by police against Black American citizen George Floyd, the United States Senate has yet to pass the George Floyd Policing Act of 2021, H.R. 1280. Police brutality against Black people can be traced back to slavery. The preservation of the slavery system was one of the driving forces that led to the creation of police forces (Waxman).
Black Americans’ lives are also robbed in the present-day U.S. through punitive sentences: “children as young as 13, almost all black, are sentenced to life imprisonment for non-homicide offenses” (Stevenson). In “The 1619 Project” Stevenson tracks the criminality of being Black from slavery to the evolution of Black Codes to modern times. In which, “Black defendants are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty for crimes whose victims are white, rather than black — a type of bias the Supreme Court has declared ‘inevitable.’”
If Wilentz is so eager for us to embrace the efforts of white abolitionists as herculean in the 1700s, we cannot do so without acknowledging the heroism of Black Americans who faced significantly more dire consequences than their white counterparts in protesting slavery. In fact, despite the brutal reality of slavery, the heroism of Black Americans persists through America’s history even when asked to fight for the betterment of their enslavers. Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in the opening essay of “The 1619 Project”,
The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.
In what can only be poetic justice, Wilentz’s work proves precisely what “The 1619 Project” is calling for, which is to teach the entirety of American history alongside the history written by the enslavers (and all its derivatives) to arrive at a more just reckoning.
To measure whether or not America was founded on racial slavery based on the prevalence of anti-slavery ideology amongst whites is not a matter of protecting history from presentism. White Americans have denied Black Americans the right to speak on equal terms since America’s inception: enslaved people were barred from learning to read, restricted from meeting privately in groups, and had no legal standing in most courts (Hannah-Jones).
Wilentz’s argument reflects this asymmetry. Yet he shows little regard for the impact of the slave codes and violent practices in place to prevent enslaved people from putting their thoughts and history on record.
In short, I would argue and do so with Wilentz’s own words that “anti-slavery ideology was very much present in the Americas” the moment an African person, forcibly taken from their home and placed in bondage, resisted.
Their rebuke, in contrast, was prompt and heroic, “Enslaved people did not meekly accept their fate. Approximately one out of 10 slave ships experienced resistance, ranging from individual defiance (like refusing to eat or jumping overboard) to full-blown mutiny” (Elliot & Hughes).
As a historian, the least Wilentz can do is to acknowledge the enormous challenges that Black Americans living under the brutal conditions of slavery faced propagating such ideology on their behalf — but did so despite it all.
Works Cited
Hannah-jones, Nikole. “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html.
Harris, John. “The Atlantic Slave Trade Continued Illegally in America Until the Civil War.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 28 Jan. 2021, www.history.com/news/us-illegal-slave-trade-civil-war.
Serwer, Adam. “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 21 Jan. 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/.
Stevenson, Bryan. “Why American Prisons Owe Their Cruelty to Slavery.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/prison-industrial-complex-slavery-racism.html.
Waxman, Olivia B. “The History of Police in America and the First Force.” Time, Time, 6 Mar. 2019, time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/.
Wilentz, Sean. “American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’: by Sean Wilentz.” The New York Review of Books, 25 June 2020, www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/19/american-slavery-and-the-relentless-unforeseen/?lp_txn_id=1247869.