1619 Half-Truth

The 1619 Project is even less than half true, but "half-truth" is a concept we recognise that captures the connotation I am looking for, so I will stick with it here. Half-truths are more dangerous than complete fabrications.  While there are some who believe that 5G cell towers create measles, or at least our current equivalent, they are few in number, they don't run anything, and they don't cause us much danger. The larger number of more powerful people who believe that Hillary Clinton just had another email and set up good equipment for it, occasionally forgetting which account she was on and talking with some government friends about meetings and stuff are much more dangerous.

But there is some truth to the idea that slavery and the treatment of black people has been more central to American history than is typically credited.  In school texts, there is the big balloon of the immediate lead-up to the Civil War, a bit about Reconstruction, then the Civil Rights Movement, and some nods to whatever the authors think young people need to be indoctrinated about with regards to the last decade or two. Those events are given disproportionate emphasis in discussions of 1840-1880, the 1960s, and the present day. One would think nothing else happened in the 60s, except maybe the Beatles and Woodstock.

Yet it is fair to note that in the other decades slavery and the treatment of blacks doesn't get mentioned much at all. At one level that is unsurprising, as history texts record changes, developments, and deteriorations. Things that are the same don't get mentioned. Lots of black people were slaves in 1720.  Boy that's a suck of a way to live, and deeply unjust. Lots of black people were slaves in 1730.  Boy, that's a suck of a way to live... It does come down to questions of what we think history texts are supposed to record.  Are they supposed to be archives, annual yearbooks, treating all information of equal importance?  I doubt anyone thinks so.  Yet an uninteresting life, or a million of them, does matter as much as an interesting one. Human beings have value, but is it the job of history books to enforce that?  It has come up a good deal in discussing women's history. The lives of women were more circumscribed, and thus changed less and were less dramatic. The intense effort to study their lives has produced some interesting new perspectives, looking more closely at food preparation, marriage customs, child-raising, home production and the like, which I at least have found worth knowing.  Wars sometimes don't really change much, however dramatic they are to diagram and read about.

In the podcast I have been listening to about American presidential elections, slavery or black rights was the dominant issue, or one of the two (the other being tariffs) in every single election for the first hundred years of the republic. Other issues, such as corruption or fears of tyranny would be important some of the time, but slavery was the overriding issue, time and again. As new states came in it mattered to the original states how they would stand on the issue, and what would be allowed.  Whether slaves had to be returned, whether freed slaves would have their rights protected, whether owning another person was going to be allowed at all - these were dominant in one form or another every election.

That is not to say that it was the most important issue at all times to most Americans.  We go about our lives worrying about this year's crops, or our daughter's pregnancy, or that group down at the church who is trying to bring in the wrong sort of pastor. In that sense we are not much involved in our national history even as we live through it. We have other things to do. In the South, slavery was there and that was that, in the North it wasn't and that was that.  Some people thought about where their money came from and everyone had an opinion what the rights of other people were, but these weren't dinner conversation night after night.

So what is the history text supposed to record?  Is it supposed to give equal voice to everyone whoever lived here or just tell us the cool and interesting stuff?

Let me note two errors - and they were not accidental in the 1619 Project right off the bat.  It was not named the 1519 project, even though that was closer to the time when slavery came to the New World. The idea was to focus on "us," on America.  But there was no America in 1619 nor would there be for many decades. Retroactively fitting current boundaries and institutions back onto disconnected colonies is not fully honest.  Why not discuss what was happening in Santa Fe then as well? Or what the Apaches were doing to other tribes at the time? Secondly, before 1776, questions about slavery were either my business or not my business. No unifying theme, really.

No, 1619 was chosen to beg the questions right from the start.  They have a point that slavery and black rights have not been the consistent themes of our understanding ourselves in the sense of page after page.  Fair enough. But then in other eras, those issues have loomed very large in our understanding, pushing out other issues that might deserve a hearing as well. Does it balance? 

It depends on what you mean by balance, and then we are right back to the question What is history supposed to record?