As a former history teacher, I was obviously interested in The 1619 Project, put forth by the New York Times. It purports to tell the real story about slavery and its legacy.
It spares nothing, including its attitude. You can just feel the anger, controlled anger but real anger, flying right off the page.
The timing is significant. 1619 marked the 400th year after slavery first came to our shores and grabbed ahold of our culture like a strangler. It got here, as the collection of essays points out, even before the Pilgrims did.
The job of the essays is to blow up the moderation with which slavery has been considered and taught. There are people who are considered deeply famous in our midst, who have monuments devoted to them in Washington, DC, who do not fare particularly well: Jefferson and Lincoln, to name two in particular.
But the thing is, there are no exaggerations. There is no hype. What is revealed within the project's pages is the honest truth. It's just truth that makes us uncomfortable--and if you read it (just access it on Google), you will be.
Many things are simply repeated, like the conditions of slavery and their utter dehumanization. Those things have been written elsewhere.
But what the Project does is present them as one flowing process. It indicts the North as much as the South in perpetuating and establishing a co-dependent relationship with slavery. Put simply, the North needed slavery to produce, at increasing rates, the raw cotton it would need to operate its mills and weave it into cloth and clothing. Yes, there were anti-slavery societies that sprung up, but economics beat out morality until the inevitable war emerged. But that took two and a half centuries of abuse, dehumanization and devastation to a whole people based solely on their color.
The authors don't just want you to feel ashamed of all that. They want you to feel ashamed enough, thoroughly ashamed, even and especially if you had nothing to do with it. They want you to walk around with it, to feel it deeply. They're sitting across the table, pointing at you, and saying firmly: Feel this.
A whole country, one that would become the world's richest and by far the most productive, operated and flourished based on the intentional captivity of millions of people who were doing nothing else than trying to carve out their lives successfully. Then they were stolen from their family and friends, never to see them again.
Think about that. Plenty of us got upset when Lady Gaga's dogs were stolen from her walker. That was bad and wicked enough. What about this?
Nearly two million, by reasonable estimates, never made it to dry land again, either. They died below decks and, because there was nowhere to bury them, were fed to the sea, to the sharks that, wrote Richard Hofstadter long ago, would often follow the slave ships, knowing that a handy, easy meal would soon arrive.
We all want to look away, or to look at it briefly but not absorb its full meaning. We all want to assume that, in these modern days, we wouldn't lower ourselves to participate in this barbarity. But we fool ourselves. Technological improvements have nothing to do with moral development, or the lack of it. The latter is a much heavier lift.
There is plenty more that has been written, and will be written, about this. I'd just like to recommend a few books that you might read, if you already haven't:
- The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin (really, anything he wrote)
- Collective Poems of Langston Hughes (again, anything by him)
- The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison (she also has a treasure troft of marvelous books)
- Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
- The Blood of Emmett Till, by Timothy B. Tyson
- Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David Blight
- Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
That should get you started. That should also take you a while. Happy reading. May it be meaningful.
We are at the end of another Black History Month, and some of us, at least, have emerged with a greater awareness and appreciation of where we are in terms of race relations and the enormous distance we still have to go. We should feel shame, yes, but with greater and deeper knowledge, we can also ground ourselves for better and deeper conversations. The 1619 Project wants to do that. Be sure to read that, too.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Three days until a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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