1/3 If you follow folks like @KevinMKruse @jbouie @AdamSerwer, you’ll see they’ve been doing work all day long pushing against the idiotic claim that the 1619 project on slavery by @nytimes is an attempt to delegitimize the country. From my own scholarship I can tell you this:
2/3 The dead still rotted in the fields when Congress took up the first Freedmen bureau bills in late 1864 & 1865. During those debates - while black people were placing ads in newspapers looking for family members sold off during slavery - people called the bills divisive.
3/3 Then, as now, Congress members said our constitution was the greatest tool of liberty in the world and bills aimed specifically at repairing some of the harms of slavery were racially decisive. It seems when it comes to slavery, silence & forgetfulness are what’s required.
So I’ll add this final coda: if the history of slavery doesn’t belong at the center of the nation’s cultural identity and collective memory, then neither does the history of the American revolution and constitutional convention.
I lied. One more thing: the book I wish every critic of the 1619 project would read is not about slavery. It’s titled The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning by James Young. It’s always - always - hard for a nation to reconcile what it says it is with what it is.
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