Thread by @salimfurth

Getting into the first #1619Project essay, and the author (Nikole Hannah-Jones) is both laudably writing blacks into American history and shamefully writing some inconvenient others out of it.

She really wants the white colonists to be not merely misguided, but evil. That's harder with the non-slaveholding northerners, who began and sustained the rebellion, so they disappear in her text.

"One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery."

This isn't true of northern colonists - most of their states ended slavery immediately upon gaining independence, something Great Britain hadn't allowed them to do. Pennsylvania voted for gradual emancipation in 1780, with the war still raging.

I *NEVER* hear about these emancipations in popular storylines. In fact, I had to go look it up myself recently--when exactly did the north abolish slavery? Massachusetts did it by including the word "free" in constitutional language very similar to the later US constitution.

Hannah-Jones notes that "In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade". Indeed. And a provision for ending it was contained in the US Constitution, and it was ended in 1807. That didn't end slavery, either in the US or British colonies.

Anyway: this is annoying. I'm a friend. I'm a Bostonian. My favorite movie as a kid was Glory. (Still is). I fly a 35-star American flag in front of my house, which is multiracial. My immigrant grandparents marched with Dr. King. Why are you going out of your way to piss me off?

Is the goal to jujitsu anybody who disagrees in the slightest into a position of supposedly defending slavery? Or is this Trump-style gaslighting, where you prove loyalty by agreeing to increasingly embarrassing distortions of reality?

OK, back to reading.

Ah, Jefferson's "dizzying profits" from slavery. The man was an idealist, a hypocrite, an enlightment man, a torturer and many other things. But he wasn't profitable.

OK, I said she was laudably writing blacks back into history where they've been ignored. Check out Sen. Hiram Revels. The biography is terse, but imagine the balls it took to be a northern black serving as a U.S. Senator in occupied Mississippi. 🎱🎱
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Rho…

And her paragraphs on Reconstruction are practically glowing - oddly unlike the antebellum abolitionists, the postbellum Reconstructors (?) get praise: "Today, thanks to this [14th] amendment, every child born here to a [any] immigrant gains automatic citizenship."

Hannah-Jones writes in Isaac Woodard, a South Carolinian WWII veteran, beaten blind while still in uniform.

"There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming."

Later: "Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the decades-long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights movement." (I'd love to learn more about the sparks of the Civil Rights movement.)

Here's probably Hannah-Jones most controversial claims:
"For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet we never fought only for ourselves... This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution...

But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion and ability... Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the U.S."

I don't have a snappy comeback to this. But it's the heart of the essay, which aims to break the thread from the founding, through abolition, reconstruction, and civil rights.

To the extent that she's trying to substitute a "black-only" history (blacks have "the one truly American culture" in her mind), it's factually false and unthreatening. It's chauvinistic, sure, but it can't travel.

But if the bigger project is to unmoor "real American-ness" from the founding, to actively poison references to institutional authority, that could be bad for all of us. Not because the founders were better, but because the institutions they made are durable.

America is an extremely young country by cultural standards, but it's quite old politically. The Founders - both those who abolished slavery and those who shielded it - were able to write into being an incredibly resilient country.

No other place threw off a slavocracy without replacing the entire governing structure, after all. Let's recognize that this country's founders, white and black, gave us both evil and the tools to overcome it.

One more thing: Hannah-Jones deploys generalization ("whites did X") in a way that would never, ever be allowed in the NYT in any other context. It's clearly done for effect.

I'm fine with some degree of collective guilt for collective or popular political actions: giving up on Reconstruction, enforcing segregation, etc. But ascribing specific acts of violence to "whites" generally seems intended to induce disagreement.

This goes back to my tweet about gaslighting. What exactly is the intent? There's lots of great stuff in here, but it seems packaged so as to guarantee that only a true believer can really lean into it.

NEXT ESSAY: Matthew Desmond (of "Evicted") fame. This is the essay that has come in for tons of well-deserved criticism. It's overwrought, with movie-villain plantation owners who are not only wicked but brilliant.

This doesn't even really deserve critique. It's a funny form of American exceptionalism to place a frontier commodity-for-export region at the center of global capitalism. London is laughing at you.

(For those keeping score at home, note that I'm utterly dismissive of the one White Man in the lineup. Also note, I attentively read Evicted.)

The #1619Project poetry is really good. It's nice to see the integration of literary arts in space that's more naturally polemic.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Last essay before I go to bed *ridiculously late*: Jamelle Bouie on some people having more power than others.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Unlike Hannah-Jones, Bouie's account of antebellum history is largely conventional, with Calhoun and his "nullification" theory playing a prominent role. Bouie's also specifically tracing political history.

Bouie is very much working on a #2019Project, or maybe 2011. He uses the word "Democrat" 15 times, in an article about equally split between the modern day and the 19th century, but "Democrat" never once describes the party of Calhoun or Jim Crow. What a coincidence!

His essay is kind of disappointing, tbh, a set piece that tie every objectionable use of the filibuster back to Calhoun & nullification. There's an interesting debate to be had around protections for political minorities; this isn't it.

Bouie: "his initial impulse" was "to give political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself." Out of context, does this mean the person in question was protecting black voting rights or covering for Jim Crow?

It's the latter - and "he" is William F. Buckley - but sometimes it's really important to give "political minorities a veto" over democracy! There are two sides to the coin of obstruction.

This isn't just theoretical. While Bouie only chronicles obstruction from the right, it happens on the left for non-trivial reasons. Sanctuary cities are a current example. Filibusters are common on both sides when the math works out.

Bouie does try to take this above mere politics (which always features majorities and minorities using the tools available to them):
"The larger implication is clear enough: A majority made up of liberals and people of color isn’t a real majority."

This last is a reasonable critique, and there's too much willingness on the right to use (coded) racist appeals. My least favorite version of politics is the "You're not a real American"/"Trump is not my president" attitudes, which limit who gets to be "American".

(Sorry libs, Trump is your president. Sorry conservatives, those hippies in Portland are Americans too). Maybe this is why I disliked Hannah-Jones' essay - she was pretty explicitly making "more American than thou" claims.

Anyway, calling out racism in the modern GOP is fair game and it's obviously tied to the legacy of slavery. But I'm unconvinced that obstructionism is uniquely slavery-bound.

His essay was too much like Desmond's ("Plantations had accounting. Corporations have accounting. Coincidence??? I THINK NOT"), selecting just enough evidence to draw conspiratorial lines without really exploring or eliminating easier explanations.

FIN.