I've been reading a bit about the 1619 Project. Slavery and its centrality to American colonial life do get short shrift in American history as usually taught, so it's cool to have something that focusses attention on that central factor.
I'm interested in the perspective with which we read stuff like this, though. A LOT of people seem to see the 1619 Project as some sort of essential corrective to the American history as just a hero story.
But I went to Philadelphia Public Schools in the 70s and 80s--hardly a hotbed of cutting-edge pedagogy-- and we weren't taught the straight-up hero story. Remember the Aztecs and Incas and the conquistadors? Remember the triangle trade? Remember the struggles over slavery and how to count slaves at the Constitutional Convention? Remember the Trail of Tears? Remember this all leads up to the Civil War? (All, by the way, included in my middle-school-and-earlier history classes.)
Clearly not, in many cases. But not because these things were never taught, I bet, but because you weren't paying attention.
The 1619 Project is not so much an antidote to previous attempts to teach you history so much as to your imperviousness to them. When history has a whiff of radical chic, NOW you pay attention.
It is interesting to me, too, HOW we seem to absorb the 1619 project. It's all about our judging the past by our present day criteria. And that, certainly, is part of what history should be about.
But when that all we do, it really devalues history itself. We can look for exemplars and moral tales and things to be proud of and guilty about everywhere. We can make them up (that's called fiction, with exemplary honesty).
If we let go of the absolute primacy of ourselves and our present-day moral and ontological crises for a bit, we can reap other, I'd say greater rewards from history. One of them being, to a degree, appreciating someone else's, radically different, perspective.
1619 doesn't arise out of 2023. People living and acting in 1619 had absolutely no notion of us or the perspective we bring to their stories. What they knew was 1619 and before.
To us, 1619 is important because of the lessons it teaches about who we are, where we come from and how we failed to live up to our ideals from go. To those is 1619, we don't figure into the equation at all. And there was absolutely nothing new about failure to live up to ideals. We'd always been doing that. All of us.
What are ideals for but to fail at them?
And the barbarity of colonization was nothing new either. To anyone. Very few people welcomed the conquering Aztecs to town. The Mongols weren't particularly nice imperial masters. The crusaders were hardly justice warriors so much as savage pirates. The Barbary Corsairs were, literally, pirates and slavers. Rome wasn't a good neighbor to have. Or China. Or the Songhai empire.
Taking whatever you could wrest from someone else; slaughtering people whose presence was inconvenient to your purposes or who just happened to be there when you were in a mood for slaughter; rape; wanton destruction and enslavement were not everyday things in 1619, but certainly they defined the horizon of awful things that could happen to you. And they actually happened with a fair degree of regularity.
None of that--theft, rape, murder, slavery, vandalism, genocide--was new to America in 1619. What was innovatory was the scale on which these things could now be done with a slowly industrializing Europe on one side of the Atlantic and three newly-within-easy-reach continents ripe for ruthless exploitation. *That* situation was relatively new.
The importance of looking at history like America's history with slavery and, later, racial exploitation and hatred is just for us to observe how far we fell from our present-day standards. Or even how far we fell from contemporary standards. But also to see the degree to which these failures were really just another day at the office for human kind. These failures are a big part of what we do and have always done. Except perhaps in 1619 we had upgraded from mimeograph to a Xerox machine.
Years ago, reading Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, I was struck by how matter-of-factly she asserted that in classical times everything that we would call "civilization"--philosophical contemplation, great speeches, debate about matters of public interest, great public deeds, the writing of history--were all built on the foundation of excess wealth created through the ruthless exploitation of slaves and women.
Civilization requires economic excess and the only real place to get it before modernity was by exploiting the labor of other people. And the greater footprint the civilization left, either in terms of archaeological or intellectual remains, the greater the exploitation.
Now I say this not to let us all off the hook of trying to live well through our post-colonial legacy in the West. We still have to do that, best we can. But one of the essential contexts to see 1619 in is pre-1619. 1619 makes a convenient beginning for a story we are still living through today, but it was also the continuation of a story that goes back much further than that, a story at least as ugly and one that implicates us even more so than the one beginning in 1619. A story that we also have to find ways to internalize.
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