Thread by @wesyang

The weird irony is that the “whiteness” approach to American history and society, which definitely was once true, became mainstream at precisely the moment when it is provable at a glance that it is no longer true

This, by the way, is why what feels like a weird non-sequitur in NHJ’s 1619 essay, where she takes a shot at the litigants in the Harvard Asian American discrimination lawsuit, is actually at the very center of that project’s concerns.

Students activists at Cornell and Stanford called for tracking of the ancestral American formerly enslaved population at the schools and for set asides specifically targeted for them distinct from black immigrants who tend to take up a large share of diversity admits

The alternative to the 1619 narrative of “this country was founded on slavery” is that this was a country built by immigrants.

The latter ultimately has much stronger empirical basis.

When I say the alternative has a stronger empirical basis, I am not saying that it is the sole explanation. I am saying of two alternative framings, one is more correct than the other.

Slavery was crucial to the early American economy, but the decades before the war it was clear that wage labor and mass immigration was the basis of the next stage of American economic growth. It's why the North was richer and stronger than the South

The United States was not the only slave holding settler colonial project in the Western hemisphere. It was one of many. It did not merely eat the low-hanging fruit of plunder and violent exploitation (though it did that) -- the dynamics of political economy became non-zero sum

It did not do that because that was the noble intention of the Founders and we were perfect from the start, but because of popular struggle and the fact that the original framework wound up being amenable to having adjustments forced on them by popular struggle

In ways that turned out not to be as true in Latin America