I recommend @AdamSerwer's fair and insightful summation of the recent flap over the 1619 Project. There's an additional dynamic having to do with generations, social media, historiographical debates, and intra-left politics that I want to tease out here. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
@AdamSerwer The historians who've been critical of the 1619 projects all first went public at this website, some as transcripts others as videos. I feel fairly safe in saying that none of these historians are 100% on board with the Trotskyite politics of this site. wsws.org/en/topics/even…
@AdamSerwer Gordon Wood was my undergrad professor. He's the reason I became a historian. When I first saw that he'd granted an interview to a Trotskyite website I thought "WTF?"
@AdamSerwer Wood, an expert on the founding era, has been notably quiet about contemporary politics since 2016. I'm sure many a journalist has contacted him to weigh in on our slow-moving constitutional crisis, but as far as I can tell, not a peep.
@AdamSerwer So to see Wood, whose politics are quite far from the Trotskyites, take the time to sit down for an interview to criticize the 1619 Project struck me as odd. wsws.org/en/articles/20…
@AdamSerwer The folks at WSWS, from what I can tell, are quite exorcised about what they see as the heresies of the 1619 Project. This mostly has to do with the old Marxist chestnut about the historical relationship between race and class. The 1619 Project, they think, got it terribly wrong.
@AdamSerwer This is the intra-left inside baseball stuff that, I'm fairly certain, none of the historians critical of the 1619 Project have any interest or investment in. For the WSWS folks, like good Marxists, they think getting the history right is essential to getting the politics right.
@AdamSerwer As I see it, the senior historians who weighed in on the WSWS site were engaged in a very different project that had nothing to do with intra-left arguments about race and class. They were fighting a historiographical turf war.
@AdamSerwer It's not a coincidence, I'd posit, that none of the senior scholars featured on the WSWS site have a significant profile on social media. I say that not as a compliment nor as an insult, just as an observation. These are smart people, but not wise in the ways of web 2.0.
@AdamSerwer I wouldn't go so far as to say they were played by the WSWS folks (and I don't say this to take their side in this dispute), but I don't think these historians sensed the binary way this would play out on social media. "Major Historians say 1619 Project is wrong."
@AdamSerwer The WSWS folks need the 1619 Project to be wrong for their particular, sectarian politics to be right. This is their investment in the 1619 Project.
**This is the key irony. These senior historians criticized the "presentist" politics of the 1619 Project on a WSWS website that is 100% about the present day political implications of historical analysis.
The question about how we should interpret the relationship between the nation's founding, slavery, and race has absorbed the attention of historians for generations now. It will for generations to come, and our understanding of it will evolve over time.
The 1619 Project captured a selective but not distorted snapshot of where historical interpretations have been headed over the past decade or so. Of course there will be senior people who disagree with that. Their criticisms are worth considering. But they're not just "right."
When I read the 1619 Project I saw it as drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship as well as a rich and diverse African-American political tradition that stretches back through DuBois, Wells, Douglass, David Walker, and Lemuel Haynes. history.howstuffworks.com/revolutionary-…
There's something about the often dismissive reaction the 1619 Project has received in some quarters that has echoes of how the work of all of the above mentioned writers was received in their own historical moments. Not the same, but it rhymes.
There were virtually no white Americans who would have read David Walker's Appeal in 1829 and agreed with it. He was alternately ridiculed and persecuted for saying things that most of us today would regard as pretty much on the mark. docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/walk…
The New York Times, that old grey lady, turned one edition of their weekly magazine over to a group of accomplished African-American journalists and scholars for them to put forward an ambitious rethinking of American History in light of the 400th anniversary of 1619.
And now some folks are acting like the sky is falling, the bastions of truth and Western Civilization have been overturned. The American Project has been declared dead and over. It cannot stand without retraction. I mean seriously, come on now.
Not only is that NOT what the 1619 Project argued...it's also a pretty hysterical overreaction to some essays about the past that sought to offer a distinctively African-American perspective on America's past and present.
I'll let David Walker have the last word here. Ultimately what he wanted, but was refused, was an opportunity to just be heard. Not defensively, not angrily. Just with a generosity of spirit.
