"Despite the
pretence of establishing the United States' "true" foundation, the
New York Times' 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of History.
It aims to create a historical narrative that legitimises the effort of the
Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritising
of personal "identities"—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity,
and, above all, race.
The New York Times's
1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history-By Niles
Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North.
What is a Negro
slave? A man of the black race. ... A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain
conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for
spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn
away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or
sugar is the price of sugar
Marx, Wage Labour
and Capital (1847)
"Men make their
own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under
self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
Karl Marx 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Introduction
On August 19, 2019, the New York Times published its "The
1619 Project,". If you are one the lucky ones to get a copy (you can only access
the articles online for a limited time due to subscription paywall), you would
see with a cursory look that the articles contained in the magazine are a
revisionist interpretation of American History.
The date of 2019 is important for the New York Times(NYT)
because it signalled the 400th anniversary of the arrival of 20
African slaves at Point Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America.
The Project, according to the Times, intends to "reframe
the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the
consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very
centre of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."[1]
One issue arises from this blatantly false and revisionist
account of American historical development. Firstly why is it that virtually
the whole of American academia has ignored this reactionary piece of
historiography, and this goes for academia around the world? In Britain, not a
single academic institution or historian has published comments on this subject.
Major magazines such as The Times Literary Supplement Literary review or History
Today have not published a single article commenting on the 1619 Project.
This brings me to the review of these two publications by
Mehring books. The first pamphlet contains four articles attacking in different
ways 1619 Project. 1. David North, Tom Mackaman, Niles Niemuth-The New York
Times 1619 project: A racialist falsification of the U.S. and world history.2. Book
review: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri
Leigh Merritt-By Eric London-9 September 2019.3 Why are reparations for slavery
being made an issue in the 2020 U.S. elections? June 21, 2019, and lastly The
attacks on Green Book and the racialist infection of the affluent middle class-by
David Walsh and Joanne Laurier-8 March 2019. The second part of the review will
cover the pamphlet: The 1619 Project and the falsification of History: An
analysis of the New York Times reply to five historians-By David North and
Eric London-December 28 2019.
The bourgeois and radical presses in America have been
forced to admit that it is only the Marxist's from the World Socialist Website
(W.S.W.S.) that have challenged this falsification of History. The World
Socialist Website not only marshalled its journalists and historians but
published an array of interviews from leading historians known throughout the
world.
One of the more shocking claims that W.S.W. Journalists and
historians sought to refute is the assertion by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the staff writer and New America Foundation
fellow and lead journalist of the Project that "Anti-black racism runs in
the very D.N.A. of this country."[2]
As the World Socialist Website pamphlet points out "this is a false and
dangerous conception. D.N.A. is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic
code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and
development. The transfer of this critical biological term to the study of a
country—even if meant only in a metaphorical sense—leads to bad History and
reactionary politics. Countries do not have D.N.A.; they have historically
formed economic structures, antagonistic classes and complex political
relationships. These do not exist apart from a certain level of technological
development, nor independently of a more or less developed network of global
economic interconnections.
The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is an idealist
(i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around)
and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of History
is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse.
Slavery is viewed and analysed not as a specific economically rooted form of
the exploitation of labour, but, instead, as the manifestation of white racism.
However, where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones,
in the historical D.N.A. of American "white people." Thus, it must
persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions."[3]
As the pamphlet highlights, Nikole Hannah-Jones's dangerous
conceptions have provoked other equally reactionary commentators to espouse
their false comments. The pamphlet's authors quote neurologist Robert Sapolsky who
writes in Foreign Affairs that "the
dynamics of human group identity, including the resurgence of nationalism—that
potentially most destructive form of in-group bias—requires grasping the
biological and cognitive underpinnings that shape them."[4]
The authors of the pamphlet attack Sapolsky's "simplistic
dissolution of History into biology recalls not only the reactionary invocation
of "Social Darwinism" to legitimise imperialist conquest by the late
nineteen and early twentieth-century imperialists but also the efforts of
German geneticists to provide a pseudo-scientific justification for Nazi
anti-Semitism and racism."[5]
Much of Sapolsky's ideas and for that matter, Hanah-Jones
have an echo in academia and political institutions throughout the world. This would
partly explain academia's hostile attitude towards the Trotskyist's exposure of
the 1619 Project.
Slavery
One of the more insidious attacks on the journalists and
historians who contributed articles and interviews to the World Socialist website on the 1619
project has been that they downplay the importance of slavery in the History of
the world. Anyone with an ounce of historical knowledge will see this as untrue
and a politically motivated attack. The fact that American slavery is a
monumental subject with vast and enduring historical and political significance
cannot be denied.
However, as the authors of the pamphlet point out, slavery
did not begin in America. Slavery in America is but one crucial episode in the
global History of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world, and of
the origins and development of the world capitalist system.
The Marxist movement has not underplayed slavery's
importance and have produced a vast body of literature dealing with the
widespread practice of slavery throughout the world and has insisted that it
cannot be understood apart from its role in the economic development of
capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Karl Marx explained
in the chapter titled "The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist" in
Volume One of Das Kapital: ”The discovery of gold and silver in
America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the
turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins,
signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic
proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels
treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a
theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant
dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium
wars against China."
The American Revolution
and Abraham Lincoln
While it comes as no surprise that the bourgeois journalists
and historians from the 1619 Project are hostile to any Marxist attacks on their
historiography, it does come as a significant shock that they attack the very
conception of an American bourgeois revolution and one its finest by-products,
Abraham Lincoln. The 1619 Project
portrays the Revolution as a sinister attempt to uphold the slave system.
As the pamphlet points out this is not just a "reframing"
of History, it is a falsification that ignores more than a half-century of
scholarship. It is highly unlikely that Hannah-Jones (or any of her
co-essayists) have even heard of, let alone read, the work on slavery carried
out by Williams, Davis, or Peter Kolchin; on the American Revolution by Bernard
Bailyn and Gordon Wood; on the political conceptions that motivated union
soldiers by James McPherson; on Reconstruction by Eric Foner; on Jim Crow
segregation by C. Vann Woodward; or on the Great Migration by James N. Gregory
or Joe William Trotter."[6]
As for Hannah-Jones belief that the American revolutionaries
such as Thomas Jefferson were nothing more than racist Hippocrates it would be
nice to think that this is just her piece of reactionary journalism, unfortunately,
it appears this is also echoed in a broader attitude amongst historians and
writers.
Dr Jonathan W. Wilson points out in his review of the book
Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution by Robert G.
Parkinson that "typically, historians have responded by crediting the
American Revolution with imperfectly realised but laudable ideals, as well as
with crucial contributions to 19th-century reform. Over the last decade,
however, many historians have dispensed with treating the American
revolutionary era as an ideologically coherent moment. Instead, they depict it
as a moment of complicated social division and civil war, part of a broader
context of Atlantic and continental conflict. Their accounts suggest the
violence – which neither began nor ended with the imperial crisis – helps
explain subsequent decades of racial hatred and oppression in the United States.[7]
As the writers of the pamphlet point out it is not to defend
or attack figures like Jefferson but to understand the context of their actions
as the Marxist writer David North explains "It is undeniable that
Jefferson was painfully aware that there existed conditions in which the right
of property was in direct contradiction to that of life and liberty. He was,
after all, a Virginian and a slave-owner. However, it is of historical and
political significance that in a preliminary draft of the Declaration of
Independence Jefferson included as one of the indictments against George III
his perpetuation of the slave trade: "He has waged cruel war against human
nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying
them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their
transportation thither. This piratical warfare, this opprobrium of infidel
powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to
keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his
negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain
this execrable commerce. In the context of this discussion, Jefferson's
redefinition of the concept of natural rights, substituting "the pursuit
of happiness" for property, endowed the document with an enduring,
world-historical significance. In using this formulation to justify the
rebellion of American colonists against the Mother Country, Jefferson inspired
a more revolutionary, universal and humane concept of what truly constituted
the "Rights of Man."[8]
The second pamphlet in this review is The 1619 Project and
the falsification of History: An analysis of the New York Times' reply to five
historians by David North and Eric London.
On December 20, 2019, the New York Times finally felt the need
to reply to a letter signed by five leading and internationally recognised
historians. In the letter, they requested that the Times correct the historical
falsifications upon which the 1619 Project was based.
It took the Times over four months to reply to criticisms of
its 1619 project. The historians outlined their "strong reservations about
important aspects of the 1619 Project" and state they "are dismayed
at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it."
These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation
or "framing." They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the
foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a
displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections
on racial grounds—that they are the objections of only "white historians"—has
affirmed that displacement.[9]
The historians also point out that only a select few were
chosen for the Project. The Times deliberately chose only those writers and
historians they knew would go along with the Project's falsifications. The
historians attacked this, saying "The process remains opaque. The names of
only some of the historians involved have been released, and the extent of
their involvement as "consultants" and fact-checkers remains vague.
The selective transparency deepens our concern".
The response of the New York Times to the historians was to
reject their criticisms and continue as if nothing had happened. The New York
Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein said "We are familiar,"
with the objections of the letter writers, as four of them have been
interviewed in recent months by the World Socialist Web Site. The Project was
intended to address the marginalisation of African-American History in the
telling of our national story and examine the legacy of slavery in contemporary
American life. We are not ourselves historians; it is true. We are journalists,
trained to look at current events and situations and ask the question: Why is
this the way it is?.[10]
North and London point out in the pamphlet that "Silverstein's
response to questions raised by the historians about the background of the 1619
Project is evasive and disingenuous. The 1619 Project is not merely a
journalistic endeavour. The Times launched it with the explicitly declared
intention of changing the teaching and understanding of the History of the
United States fundamentally."[11]
North and London continue "When challenged on its
numerous factual errors, the paucity of its source material, and the ignoring
of the scholarly literature, the Times excuses itself by arguing that its
authors do not claim to be historians. But when it is pointed out that the
authors have failed to present accurately, as is expected of competent
journalists, the conflicting arguments in the debate over America's founding,
the Times proclaims that it is writing a new history."
The political
consequences of historical falsification
If the "mistakes" in the Times 1619 Project were
just that then while being reprehensible, they would not do too much damage to
the study of History. However, that is not the case. When the editor of one of the
most prestigious history journals in America if not the world defends the 1619
Project this is not just bringing the historical falsification to a broader
audience, which is bad enough as the authors point out it would have political
consequences that extend beyond the ivory towers of the American Historical
Review.
The editor of the A.H.R. wrote in February 2020 that he did
want to be dragged into this debate stating" I did not want to devote this
column to the recent dispute between the New York Times and the handful of
prominent historians who have offered sharp criticism of that publication's
purportedly revisionist narrative of the American story—the 1619 Project—that
puts racism and the struggle for black liberation at the core of the national
experience. However, of course, it was all anyone asked me about at the A.H.A.'s
Annual Meeting during the first week of January, so I feel I must."[12]
The response of the A.H.R. like the New York Times is evasive
and continues the historical falsification. Editor Alex Lichtenstein writes “the
letter writers do not just object to errors they claim to have identified; they
call for the Times to issue corrections. What, in fact, might these look like?
The primary offender seems to be Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her sweeping essay
that frames the entire Project. Again, one could read the critics and miss the
fact that the 1619 Project includes dozens of elements beyond Hannah-Jones's
opening essay. Many others may—or may not—contain errors, but Hannah-Jones's
essay has been singled out as representative of the whole. Particularly
objectionable, the historians insist, is her assertion that "one of the
primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from
Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery." As
the letter bluntly points out, "This is not true." Admittedly, at a
minimum, her formulation seriously overstates the anti-slavery bona fides of
the British Empire at the time, not to mention the universality of pro-slavery
views in the colonies. Fair enough. So, then, what would suffice in its stead? "One
of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence"?
How about "some of the Patriots fought for independence in the knowledge
that it would secure their investments in slavery"? Presumably, at least
some of the letter writers would find the following counter-formulation no less
objectionable: "there were many reasons the colonists decided to declare
their independence, but the preservation of slavery was not among them."
While Hannah-Jones may be guilty of an overstatement, this is more a matter of
emphasis than it is of a correct or incorrect interpretation.[13]
It is not the intention of London and North to say that everyone
involved in the Project is in their words “engaged in deliberate deception or is
merely chasing career opportunities.
However, they continue "The falsification of History
invariably serves very real, even if unstated, contemporary political interests.
The racial narrative is intended to replace one that is based on the analysis
of objectively existing social and class interests. The New York Times, as a
corporate entity and, more importantly, a powerful voice of the ruling class
and its state, has a very real political agenda, which is carefully coordinated
with the Democratic Party. Silverstein never explains why the Times now adopts,
as the basis of an essential change in the teaching of American History, the
race-based narrative of Lerone Bennett, Jr., which it explicitly and forcefully
rejected 50 years ago. Nor does he explain why the Times rejects the criticisms
of Gordon Wood and James McPherson, whom it was describing less than a decade
ago as the leading authorities in the fields of Revolutionary and Civil War-era
studies.
Conclusion
It is clear from these two pamphlets and the many articles
on the W.S.W.S that the 1619 Project is a fraud and a huge exercise in historical
falsification. It is up to the many scholars, students and workers who know
that the 1619 Project makes a travesty of History to do something about it. As
the pamphlet states "It is their responsibility to take a stand and reject the
coordinated attempt, spearheaded by the Times, to dredge up and rehabilitate a
reactionary race-based falsification of American and world history”
.
Postscript
Recently the editor of the 1619 project Jake Silverstein was
forced to announce that the 1619 Project " would slightly amend its claim that the
American Revolution was a racist endeavour undertaken to fight plans by the
British Empire to end slavery”.
As Tom Mackaman points out “In his update, Silverstein does
not apologise to the five eminent historians who, in a letter sent in December
to the Times, specifically objected to the claim that the Revolution was
undertaken in defence of slavery. Historians Victoria Bynum, James McPherson,
James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood asked that this assertion be
corrected, along with several other egregious errors and distortions in the
Project”[14].
Both pamphlets can be purchased at https://mehring.com for US buyers and for UK - https://socialequality.org.uk/
[1]
Why we Published he 1619 Project-By Jake Silverstein-DEC. 20, 2019-https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html
[2]
The Idea of America- by Nikole Hannah-Jones-New York Times-1619 Project
[3]
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and
world history-By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North
6 September 2019
[4]
This Is Your Brain on Nationalism-The Biology of Us and Them
By Robert Sapolsky March/April 2019-https://www.foreignaffairs.com/
[5]
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and
world history-By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North
6 September 2019
[6]
The New York Times's 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world
history-By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North
6 September 2019
[7]
Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution-Robert G.
Parkinson-Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2016, ISBN:
9781469626635 ; 640pp.; Price: £33.52
[8]
Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-By David North 24
October 1996-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
[9]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html
[10]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html
[11]
A reply to the American Historical Review's defense of the 1619 Project-By
David North and Tom Mackaman-31 January 2020
[12]
From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That -The American Historical Review,
Volume 125, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages xv–xxi,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa041
Published: 03 February 2020
[13]
From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That -The American Historical Review,
Volume 125, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages xv–xxi,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa041
Published: 03 February 2020
[14]
New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein attempts to slither away from
central 1619 Project fabrication-By Tom Mackaman-16 March 2020
