You’ve Got to Be Well Informed Before Judging
To the Editor:
A recent “pearl clutching” FCR letter (9/22) ended this way: “We cannot expect strong leaders for freedom when truth in any subject is denied the student.” Don’t we all agree? That letter writer was responding to another writer who observed that “we must tell the truth about history to serve the common good through prudent public policy.”
The 9/22 letter claims “the 1619 Project is a mythical rewrite of history for current political purposes and students are being required to use this myth as the sole resource for their assignment in a mandatory History class at the University of Texas at Arlington.” The author continues: “The 1619 Project is part of the required core class materials and for a specific assignment students are told they may only use the 1619 Project as a resource.” Then, the writer asks, “Why?” I hoped the reader would answer that question rather than leave the reader hanging regarding crucial parts of the story. We need to be well informed to judge the assignment, the 1619 Project, and the role the study of history plays in citizenship development.
What was the class? What was the specific assignment? As a person who spent many years in higher education, many questions came to mind as I read the 9/22 letter. Was this assignment the design of one faculty member or several “professors teaching this mandatory history class”? The issue of “mythology” can be rebutted if this Project is used in this history class to spark critical inquiry into one of the daunting challenges regarding American history: The presence, role, and impact of chattel enslavement.
Chattel slavery exists when one human owns another and thereby has virtually total control over that person; an enslaved person enjoys no significant freedom. A chattel slave could be sold against their will. Their children could be sold without parental consent, as a horse or cow might be. Slavery was America’s first big business, both as a source of labor and as the production of valuable offspring. By the time of the American Civil War, chattel slavery had become institutionalized and industrialized. Its defense had been incorporated into the US Constitution.
To help bring FCR readers up to date, if they are not, here is what Wikipedia says about the 1619 Project: “The 1619 Project is a longform journalism endeavor developed by Nikole Hannah- Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine focused on subjects of slavery and the founding of the United States.” This project has been critiqued by faculties in history, journalism, and education in many universities and colleges. Wikipedia continues: “The 1619 Project has received criticism from numerous historians, both from the political left and right, who question its historical accuracy. In a letter published in The New York Times in December 2019, historians Gordon S. Wood (Brown University), James M. McPherson (Princeton), Sean Wilentz (Princeton), Victoria E. Bynum (Texas State University), and James Oakes (City University of New York) expressed ‘strong reservations’ about the project and requested factual corrections, accusing the project’s creators of prioritizing ideology over historical accuracy. The scholars denied the project’s claim that slavery was essential to the beginning of the American Revolution.” It is important that trained historians see the project more as an exercise of journalism than history. That might be the reason why a critical examination of the Project would make sense in a history course.
One can imagine an assignment of this kind in a required history class: “Serious scholars doubt the 1619 Project’s claim that slavery was essential to the beginning of the American Revolution. Make a documented case for or against this claim using documentation from the Project and other relevant course materials.” The 9/22 letter writer says, “the 1619 Project is part of the core class materials.” I don’t know what the assignment being questioned was, its length, and requirements. We don’t know what materials are available to students in addition to the Project. Some materials surely arm students to critique the 1619 Project. The letter writer should tell us those facts so we are not left in the dark, suffering a different kind of mythology. Even so, if we wring our hands over the misuse of taxpayers’ dollars, as the author of the 9/22 letter does, remember that UTA only gets about 30% of its budget from the State of Texas. Also, the author does not prove that the professors of this mandatory class which uses the 1619 Project materials deny students the ability to deal with reality today and make rational decisions about freedom, family and future. Perhaps the opposite is the case.
What we do know, relevant to themes addressed in the Project and elsewhere, is that what became industrialized chattel slavery was introduced into the Americas by the Spanish, starting with Columbus. Even after it was condemned by Spain’s kings and queens, brutal forms of slavery were continued in the Americas. It made its way into what would become the United States, in the Southwest, the Gulf Coast, and the Atlantic Coast. Slavery had existed among the indigenous people of the America’s long before the Spanish, but it never became industrialized before Europeans set that course. In fact, among the indigenous people, slavery actually enriched their gene pools. Slavery was present in what would become the US before slaves came to a very struggling Virginia Colony. White Europeans from several countries used slavery brutally to exploit resources, such as silver and gold long before it was applied to the production of tobacco, cotton, and sugar.
A battle over slavery started early in our country’s history. However important slavery was to the battle for freedom, its protection was fundamental to the controversy over the wording and ratification of our Constitution. “We the People” actually only referred to some of the People. Authors of the Constitution did not use the term slave but did protect it. The three-fifth’s clause allowed slave owners to count slaves as 3/5’s of a person for purposes of representation in Congress and even warranted extra votes to slave holders in the Electoral College. The Constitution protected the international slave trade. Article IV, Section 2 reads: “No person held to Service or Labor in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on the claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due.” This is called the Fugitive Slave Clause. No clause exists for the return of an escaped horse or cow, but only for humans held in chattel slavery. The Constitution prohibited states from passing laws that would have protected escaped slaves.
We can imagine that the battle over whether the 1619 project is mythology is the product of a narrow sense of the United States. All politics and culture are steeped in various amounts of mythology. The question being contested, and worthy of a university class, is the effect that slavery has had on the morals, values, culture, politics, education, and economy of our country. Even today, some people in government and education want to teach children that slavery must not have been bad because it actually was job training. Slowly, convict leasing replaced chattel slavery as a means for gaining cheap labor for difficult work, another form of slavery.
For those looking for an interesting contemporary perspective on this matter, I suggest Robert W. Lee’s book, “A Sin by Any Other Name: Reckoning with Racism and the Heritage of the South.”
This Robert Lee is an ordained minister and the grandnephew of General Robert E. Lee of Confederacy fame. Robert W. Lee’s work combines his public theology with his knowledge of his family’s legacy with slavery and the Confederacy. He has an adoring belief that the South can become less sinful on race and more embracing of humanity and freedom if it follows biblical teaching.