{"id":7150,"date":"2021-12-08T14:51:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-08T14:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ireneeng.com\/?p=7150"},"modified":"2021-12-09T15:38:26","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T15:38:26","slug":"1619-project-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ireneeng.com\/?p=7150","title":{"rendered":"1619 Project, 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

1619 Project<\/em>\u00a0 was on a special magazine issue on Time in the summer of 2019. It then became a book. Controversy follows it from the beginning.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.\u201d \u2026\u7f8e\u56fd\u8fd8\u4e0d\u662f\u7f8e\u56fd,\u4f46\u8fd9\u662f\u5b83\u5f00\u59cb\u7684\u65f6\u523b.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I remember finding this podcast as I was entering Central Park in 2019 … Her good diction kept me ‘wondering’ in the park till it was over. I thought her point of views were unique but the Project did leave me with questions. \u00a0Today New Yorker came out with the following article, worth reading.<\/p>\n

\u5f00\u59cb\u542c\u8fd9\u4e2a\u64ad\u5ba2\u65f6 \u4ffa\u521a\u521a\u8d70\u8fdb\u4e2d\u592e\u516c\u56ed. \u5979\u7684\u58f0\u97f3\u5f88\u597d\u542c \u2026 \u7ed3\u679c\u5728\u516c\u56ed\u91cc\u6f2b\u65e0\u76ee\u7684\u7684\u8f6c\u4e86\u4e24\u4e2a\u5c0f\u65f6. \u95ee\u9898\u591a\u591a.
\n\u4e8c\u5e74\u591a\u4e4b\u540e
\n\u6628\u5929\u7ebd\u7ea6\u5ba2\u7684\u6587\u7ae0\u9648\u8ff0\u4e86\u4e00\u4e9b\u95ee\u9898\u89c2\u70b9\u548c\u4ed6\u4eba\u7684\u610f\u89c1\u2026 \u503c\u5f97\u770b.<\/p>\n

\u65f6\u4ee3\u5468\u520a\u4e3a\u6b64\u51fa\u4e86\u4e00\u96c6\u7279\u520a (eBay\u62cd\u5356$100 \ud83d\ude02) \u5929\u65f6\u5730\u5229\u90fd\u633a\u5408\u9002. \u4f46\u662f\u4e00\u4e2a\u6709\u6b20\u516c\u6b63\u7684\u9879\u76ee (\u7528Project \u672c\u610f\u5c31\u662f\u8fd9\u662f\u6301\u7eed\u7684\u2026) \u600e\u4e48\u4f1a\u6709\u8fd9\u4e48\u591a\u4eba\u80af\u80cc\u4e66\u5305?<\/p>\n

\u5974\u96b6
\n\u90a3\u4e2a\u4eba\u79cd\u6ca1\u6709\u505a\u8fc7\u5974\u96b6?
\n\u5f31\u8005\u603b\u662f\u5f3a\u8005\/\u6743\u7684\u5974\u96b6<\/p>\n

Hannah-Jones \u652f\u6301\u8d54\u507f
\n\u600e\u4e48\u8d54\u507f? \u8c01\u4e70\u5355?
\n\u2026
\nAffirmative action since 1961 \u5e73\u6743\u8fd0\u52a8\u600e\u4e48\u8ba1\u7b97\ud83e\uddee?<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The New Yorker<\/p>\n

The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History
\nThe ambitious Times endeavor, now in book form, reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.<\/p>\n

By Lauren Michele Jackson,\u00a0December 8, 2021<\/a><\/p>\n

In the preface to a new book version of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter and the leading force behind the endeavor, recalls that it began as a \u201csimple pitch.\u201dPhotograph by John Minchillo \/ AP \/ Shutterstock
\nIn August of 2019, a special issue of the Times Magazine appeared, wearing a portentous cover\u2014a photograph, shot by the visual artist Dannielle Bowman, of a calm sea under gray skies, the line between earth and land cleanly bisecting the frame like the stroke of a minimalist painting. On the lower half of the page was a mighty paragraph, printed in bronze letters. It began:<\/p>\n

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.
\nThe name of this endeavor was introduced at the very bottom of the page, in print small enough to overlook: \u201cThe 1619 Project.\u201d The titular year encapsulated a dramatic claim: that it was the arrival of what would become slavery in the colonies, and not the independence declared in 1776, that marked \u201cthe country\u2019s true birth date,\u201d as the issue\u2019s editors wrote.<\/p>\n

Seldom these days does a paper edition have such blockbuster draw. New Yorkers not in the habit of seeking out their Sunday Times ventured to bodegas to nab a hard copy. (Today you can find a copy on eBay for around a hundred dollars.) Commentators, such as the Vox correspondent Jamil Smith, lauded the Project\u2014which consisted of eleven essays, nine poems, eight works of short fiction, and dozens of photographs, all documenting the long-fingered reach of American slavery\u2014as an unprecedented journalistic feat. Impassioned critics emerged at both ends of the political spectrum. On the right, a boorish resistance developed that would eventually include everything from the Trump Administration\u2019s error-riddled 1776 Commission report to states\u2019 panicked attempts to purge their school curricula of so-called critical race theory. On the other side, unsentimental leftists, such as the political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., accused the series of disregarding the struggles of a multiracial working class. But accompanying the salient historical questions was an underlying problem of genre. Journalism is, by its nature, a provisional and fragmentary undertaking\u2014a \u201cfirst draft of history,\u201d as the saying goes\u2014proceeding in installments that journalists often describe humbly as \u201cpieces.\u201d What are the difficulties that greet a journalistic endeavor when it aspires to function as a more concerted kind of history, and not just any history but a remodelling of our fundamental national narrative?<\/p>\n

In the preface to a new book version of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times Magazine reporter and the leading force behind the endeavor, recalls that it began, as many journalistic projects do, in the form of a \u201csimple pitch.\u201d She proposed a large-scale public history, harnessing all of the paper\u2019s institutional might and gloss, that would \u201cbring slavery and the contributions of Black Americans from the margins of the American story to the center, where they belong.\u201d The word \u201cproject\u201d was chosen to \u201cemphasize that its work would be ongoing and would not culminate with any single publication,\u201d the editors wrote. Indeed, the undertaking from the beginning was a cross-platform affair for the Times, with special sections of the newspaper, a series on its podcast \u201cThe Daily,\u201d and educational materials developed in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. By academic standards, the proposed argument was not all that provocative. The year 1619 itself has long been depicted as a tragic watershed. Langston Hughes wrote of it, in a poem that serves as the new book\u2019s epigraph, as \u201cThe great mistake \/ That Jamestown made \/ Long ago.\u201d In 2012, the College of William & Mary launched the \u201cMiddle Passage Project 1619 Initiative,\u201d which sponsored academic and public events in anticipation of the approaching quadricentennial. \u201cSo much of what later becomes definitively \u2018American\u2019 is established at Jamestown,\u201d the organizers wrote. But the legacy-media muscle behind the 1619 Project would accomplish what its predecessors in poetry and academia did not, thrusting the date in question into the national lexicon. There was something coyly American about the effort\u2014public knowledge inculcated by way of impeccable branding.<\/p>\n

The historical debates that followed are familiar by now. Four months after the special issue was released, the Times Magazine published a letter, jointly signed by five historians, taking issue with certain \u201cerrors and distortions\u201d in the Project. The authors objected, especially, to a line in the introductory essay by Hannah-Jones stating that \u201cone of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.\u201d Several months later, Politico published a piece by Leslie M. Harris, a historian and professor at Northwestern who\u2019d been asked to help fact-check the 1619 Project. She\u2019d \u201cvigorously disputed\u201d the same line, to no avail. \u201cI was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking,\u201d she wrote. \u201cSo far, that\u2019s exactly what has happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pushback from scholars was not just a matter of factuality. History is, in some senses, no less provisional than journalism. Its facts are subject to interpretation and disagreement\u2014and also to change. But one detected in the historians\u2019 complaints a discomfort with the 1619 Project\u2019s fourth-estate bravado, its temperamental challenge to the slow and heavily qualified work of scholarly revelation. This concern was arguably borne out further in the Times\u2019 corrections process. Hannah-Jones amended the line in question; in both the magazine and the book, it now states that \u201csome of the colonists\u201d were motivated by Britain\u2019s growing abolitionist sentiment, a phrasing that neither retreats from the original claim nor shores it up convincingly. In the book, Hannah-Jones also clarifies another passage that had been under dispute, which had claimed that \u201cfor the most part\u201d Black Americans fought for freedom \u201calone.\u201d The original wording remains, but a qualifying clause has been added: \u201cFor the most part, Black Americans fought back alone, never getting a majority of white Americans to join and support their freedom struggles.\u201d As Carlos Lozada pointed out in the Washington Post, the addition seems to redefine the meaning of the word \u201calone\u201d rather than revise or replace it. In my view, the original wording was acceptable as a rhetorical flourish, whereas the amended version sounds fuzzy.<\/p>\n

ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n

In the book\u2019s preface, Hannah-Jones doesn\u2019t dwell, as she well could have, on the truly deranged ire the Project has triggered on the right over the past few years. (Donald Trump\u2019s ignorant bluster is mercifully confined to a single paragraph.) But neither is she entirely honest about the scope of fair criticism that the work has received. She files both academic disagreement (from \u201ca few scholars\u201d) and fury from the likes of Tom Cotton under the convenient label \u201cbacklash,\u201d and suggests that any readers with qualms resent the Project for focussing \u201ctoo much on the brutality of slavery and our nation\u2019s legacy of anti-Blackness.\u201d (Meanwhile, even the five historians behind the letter wrote that they \u201capplaud all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history.\u201d) The editors of the book, who include Hannah-Jones and the Times Magazine\u2019s editor, Jake Silverstein, want to \u201caddress the criticisms historians offered in good faith\u201d; accordingly, they\u2019ve updated other passages, including ones on Lincoln and on constitutional property rights. But even the use of the term \u201cgood faith\u201d suggests a hawkish mentality regarding the revisions process: you\u2019re either against the Project or you\u2019re with it, all in. There is little room in a venue as public as the 1619 Project\u2019s for the learning opportunities that arise when research sets its ego aside and evolves in plain sight.<\/p>\n

As Hannah-Jones notes, the disagreements needn\u2019t undermine the 1619 Project as a whole. (After all, one of the letter\u2019s signatories, James M. McPherson, an emeritus professor at Princeton, admitted in an interview that he\u2019d \u201cskimmed\u201d most of the essays.) But the high-profile disputes over Hannah-Jones\u2019s claims have eclipsed some of the quieter scrutiny that the Project has received, and which in the book goes unmentioned. In an essay published in the peer-reviewed journal American Literary History last winter, Michelle M. Wright, a scholar of Black diaspora at Emory, enumerated other objections, including the series\u2019 near-erasure of Indigenous peoples. Wright sees the 1619 Project as replacing one insufficient creation story with another. \u201cBe wary of asserting origins: they tend to shift as new archival evidence turns up,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

The Project\u2019s original hundred pages of magazine material have, in the new volume, swelled to more than five hundred, and certain formatting changes seem designed to serve its \u201cbig book\u201d aspirations. Lyrical titles from the magazine issue, such as \u201cUndemocratic Democracy\u201d and \u201cHow Slavery Made Its Way West,\u201d have been traded for broadly thematic ones (\u201cDemocracy,\u201d \u201cDispossession\u201d) and now join sixteen other single-word chapter titles, such as \u201cPolitics\u201d (by the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie), \u201cSelf-Defense\u201d (by the Emory professor Carol Anderson), and \u201cProgress\u201d (by the historian and best-selling anti-racism author Ibram X. Kendi). Along with the preface and an updated version of the original ruckus-raising essay, Hannah-Jones has written a closing piece, cementing her role as the 1619 custodian. In the manner of an academic text, the Project is showier about its scholarship this time around, sometimes cumbersomely so, with in-text citations of monographs with interminable titles. New essays, by scholars including Martha S. Jones and Dorothy Roberts, pointedly bolster the contributions from within the academy. Perhaps also pointedly, endnotes at the back of the book list the source material, which the series in magazine form had been accused of withholding.<\/p>\n

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER<\/p>\n

Christmas and Divorce: Who Gets the Kids?<\/p>\n

At the same time, many of the essays in the book remain shaped according to the conventions of the magazine feature. First, a contemporary scene is set: the day after the 2020 election; the day Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on a Minneapolis street; Obama\u2019s first campaign for President; Obama\u2019s farewell address. Then there is a section break, followed by a leap way back in time, the sort of move that David Roth, of Defector, has called, not without admiration, \u201cThe New Yorker Eurostep,\u201d after a similarly swerving basketball maneuver. For the 1619 Project, though, the \u201cEurostep\u201d isn\u2019t merely a literary device, used in the service of storytelling; it is also a tool of historical argument, bolstering the Project\u2019s assertion that one long-ago date explicates so much of what has come since. Modern-day policing evolved from white fears of Black freedom. Slave torture pioneered contemporary medical racism. For each of those points a historical narrative is unfolded, dilating here and leapfrogging there until the writer has traversed the promised four hundred years and established a neat causal connection.<\/p>\n

For instance, an essay by the lawyer and professor Bryan Stevenson traces the modern plague of mass incarceration back to the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery but made an exception for those convicted of crimes. In his eight pages outlining the \u201cunbroken links\u201d between then and now, Stevenson breezes past the constellation of policies that gave rise to mass incarceration in the span of a single sentence\u2014\u201cRichard Nixon\u2019s war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, \u2018broken windows\u2019 \u201d\u2014and explains that those policies have \u201cmany of the same features\u201d as the Black Codes that controlled freed Black people a century and a half ago. (The language here has been softened: in his original magazine piece, Stevenson deemed the Black Codes and the latter-day policies \u201cessentially the same.\u201d) It is not an untruthful accounting but it is an unstudious one, devoid of the sort of close reading that enlivens well-told histories. Alighting only so briefly on events of great consequence, many of \u201cThe 1619 Project\u201d contributions end up reading like the CliffsNotes to more compelling bodies of work.<\/p>\n

At its best, the book\u2019s repetitive structure allows the stand-alone essays to converse fruitfully with one another. Matthew Desmond, explaining the origins of the American economy, describes the lengths the Framers went to secure the country\u2019s chattel, including by adding a provision to the Constitution granting Congress the power to \u201csuppress insurrections.\u201d The implications of that provision and others like it are explored in the essay \u201cSelf-Defense,\u201d by Anderson, whose note that \u201cthe enslaved were not considered citizens\u201d acquires richer significance if you\u2019ve read Martha S. Jones\u2019s preceding chapter on citizenship. But the formula wears over time. With few exceptions\u2014among them, a piece by Wesley Morris, a masterly stylist\u2014the voices of the individual writers are unrecognizable, hewn to flatness by the primacy of the Project\u2019s thesis. Regretfully, this is true even of the book\u2019s poems and short fiction, which, in a rather utilitarian gesture, are presented between chapters along with a time line that aids the volume\u2019s march toward the present.<\/p>\n

For instance, the book\u2019s very first listed event\u2014the arrival of the White Lion in August, 1619\u2014is followed by a poem by Claudia Rankine, which sits on the opposite page and borrows its name from that ship: \u201cThe first \/ vessel to land at Point Comfort \/ on the James River enters history, \/ and thus history enters Virginia.\u201d A short piece by Nafissa Thompson-Spires depicts the interior monologue of a campaigner for Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for President, after Chisholm decided to visit George (\u201csegregation forever\u201d) Wallace in the hospital following an assassination attempt in 1972\u2014a visit noted in a time line on the preceding page. As in much of the other fiction in the volume, Thompson-Spires\u2019s prose is left winded by the responsibilities of exposition: \u201cIt seemed best not to try to convert the whites but to instead focus on registering voters, especially older ones on our side of town, many of whom, including Gran and PawPaw, couldn\u2019t have passed even a basic literacy test.\u201d<\/p>\n

The didacticism does let up on occasion. An ennobling found poem by Tracy K. Smith derives its text from an 1870 speech by the Mississippi Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first Black member of congress, who, a month after his swearing in, had to argue to keep Georgia\u2019s duly elected Black legislators, who\u2019d been denied their seats by the Democrats. (\u201cMy term is short, fraught, \/ and I bear about me daily \/ the keenest sense of the power \/ of blacks to shed hallowed light, \/ to welcome the Good News.\u201d) A poem by Rita Dove channels the antsiness of Addie, Cynthia, Carol, and Carole, the four children who perished in a church bombing in Birmingham on September 15, 1963: \u201cThis morning\u2019s already good\u2014summer\u2019s \/ cooling, Addie chattering like a magpie\u2014 \/ but today we are leading the congregation. \/ Ain\u2019t that a fine thing!\u201d But, on the whole, the literary creativity fits awkwardly with the task of record-keeping. It is a shame to assemble some of the finest and most daring authors of our time only to hem them in with time stamps.<\/p>\n

So what are the facts? There are plenty in the volume that aren\u2019t likely to be disputed. In the late seventeenth century, South Carolina made its whites legally responsible for policing any slave found off of the plantation without permission, with penalties for those who neglected to do so. In 1857, the Supreme Court decided against Dred Scott, ruling that Black people \u201care not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word \u2018citizens\u2019 in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides.\u201d In 1919, the U.S. Army strode into Elaine, Arkansas, and gunned down hundreds of Black residents. In 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater mourned the decline of states\u2019 rights heralded by Brown v. Board of Education, contending that protecting racial equality was not federal business. In 1985, six adults and five children in Philadelphia received \u201cthe commissioner\u2019s recipe for eviction,\u201d as Gregory Pardlo writes in a poem, including \u201cM16s, Uzi submachine guns, sniper rifles, tear gas . . . and one \/ state police \/ helicopter to drop two pounds of mining explosives combined with two \/ pounds of C-4.\u201d In 2020, Black Americans were reportedly 2.8 times more likely to die after contracting covid-19. What the 1619 Project accounts for is the brutal racial logic governing the \u201cafterlife of slavery,\u201d as Saidiya V. Hartman has put it in her transformative scholarship (which is referenced only once in this book, in an endnote, but without which a project such as 1619 might very well not exist).<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s final essay, by Hannah-Jones, argues in favor of reparations so that America may \u201cfinally live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded.\u201d By \u201cwe\u201d here she is referring to the nation as a whole, but embedded in Hannah-Jones\u2019s vision is a more provincial collective identity. The convoluted apparatuses of anti-Black racism don\u2019t spare individuals based on the specifics of their family trees. Black Americans encompass those whose roots in this country date back for many generations, or for one. Yet Hannah-Jones\u2019s unstated but unsubtle suggestion is that a particular subset of Black people, namely those of us who can trace our ancestry to slavery within the nation\u2019s borders, are the truest inheritors of America, both its ills and its ideals. We represent the country\u2019s best \u201cdefenders and perfecters,\u201d are \u201cthe most American of all,\u201d and are not \u201cthe problem, but the solution.\u201d These dubious honors are pinned, like badges of pride, at the volume\u2019s beginning and end, and, for me, the imposition of patriotism is more bothersome than any debated factual claim. In spite of all of the ugly evidence it has assembled, the 1619 Project ultimately seeks to inspire faith in the American project, just as any conventional social-studies curriculum would.<\/p>\n

This faith finds its most sentimental expression in another new book about 1619, \u201cBorn on the Water,\u201d which was co-authored by Hannah-Jones and Ren\u00e9e Watson for school-aged readers. Beautifully illustrated by Nikkolas Smith, it centers on a young Black girl\u2019s familiar dilemma during a classroom genealogy assignment\u2014what knowledge does she have to share about an ancestry that was torn asunder by the Middle Passage? One answer comes on the story\u2019s final page, in which the girl is seated at her desk, smiling, her hands poised midway through crayoning stars and stripes for \u201cthe flag of the country my ancestors built, \/ that my grandma and grandpa built, \/ that I will help build, too.\u201d Here the 1619 Project has left the genres of journalism and history for the realm of fable. But a similar thinking resides at the center of the 1619 Project in all of its evolving forms\u2014past, present, and future, arranged in a single line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1619 Project\u00a0 was on a special magazine issue on Time in the summer of 2019. It then became a book. Controversy follows it from the…<\/p>\n

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