The land of the free... or a nation founded on slavery?
The New York Times’s latest project is breathtakingly ambitious, said Inae Oh in Mother Jones. In August 1619 – a year before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth Rock – an English ship brought the first enslaved Africans to sell in the colony of Virginia. To mark the 400th anniversary of this event, the newspaper has launched The 1619 Project – a series of articles examining the legacy of slavery: aiming, in its own words, to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery” at the centre of the national story.
Remember when The New York Times “used to at least feign impartiality”, said Joshua Lawson in The Federalist.
Nowadays America’s “newspaper of record” is offering up divisive contemporary posturing disguised as historical fact. Slavery was “an abomination”, certainly, but it did not represent the nation’s founding principle. In the 17th century slavery was a feature of life all over the world. It existed in European colonies into the 19th century, and until the 20th in China and several Middle Eastern countries. The United States was in fact one of the leaders of the fight to end slavery. It is simply not true to claim, as the Project’s flagship essay states, that “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written”, and that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country”. That is “an odious and reductive lie”, agreed Rich Lowry in The New York Post. On the contrary, the Founders purposely kept the term “slavery” out of the constitution, setting in motion the forces that led to the Civil War and slavery’s abolition.
White supremacy wasn’t a stated principle of our founding, said Eric Levitz in New York magazine. But it’s undeniable that America’s early economic expansion was fuelled by the forced labour of black slaves, and that the prosperity that flowed to white owners as a result of that labour was deemed by them to be a sign of God’s favour. The 1619 Project’s great triumph is in drawing the “genealogical lines” between that openly racist system and its legacy in modern America, including the vast chasm between average white and black family wealth, “the huddled masses in its prisons”, and the abandonment of black inner cities.
Indeed, the legacy of slavery can be “found in every nook and cranny of the American experience”, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. For a century after the Civil War, whites literally stole land from freed slaves, enacted Jim Crow laws that stripped blacks of nearly all rights, used lynchings and other violence to terrorise them into submission, and even excluded black citizens from New Deal and postSecond World War programmes designed to build middle-class wealth. The Times is quite right to point out that without persistent, heroic efforts by African-Americans to force America to live up to the promises in our constitution, our democracy “might not be a democracy at all”. One cannot honestly argue that white supremacy has not “fundamentally shaped” America, agreed Ellis Cose in USA Today. Even today, angry “white supremacists with guns” long to restore America’s historic racial hierarchy, and are prepared to kill their fellow citizens to do so.
The 1619 series is right on many points, said Timothy Sandefur on Reason.com, but it goes wrong in trying to prove that slavery was – as its authors put it – the source of “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional”. Slavery was abolished because millions of people, both black and white, did believe that “all men are created equal”, and laid “their lives on the line, not only in the 1860s but ever since, to make good on the promissory note” of the Declaration of Independence.