1. The freakout over the 1619 Project by the right kind of reveals how unfamiliar many people are with the basic outline of African-American history. The entire project is grounded in very mainstream scholarship -- and indeed lines of argument that go back to Douglass & du Bois.
2. The argument that slavery & racism have been constitutive of social life isn't even necessarily a radical one. I mean reactionary historians like Ulrich Phillips, a white Southerner, basically made that as the frame of his analysis.
3. Also, it's ridiculous that people are applying a left/right spectrum to a series of debates that really cuts across these lines. Even as a Marxist Genovese drew on Philips. And Fogel/Engerman were liberals even as they argued for capitalist efficiency of slavery.
4. What I'd like to see -- maybe from @jacobinmag -- is a Marxist critique of how 1619 Project uses frame of American nationalism that distorts larger global story of settler-colonial expansion.
5. Even beginning story in 1619 (Jamestown!) is to accept very old fashioned frame for USA history. There's another way to tell the story of slavery in the Americas that would note the English were latecomers to an enterprise the Portuguese, Spanish & French pioneered.
6. My larger thoughts on 1619 Projects and the backlash to it, here: thenation.com/article/conser…
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