1619 vs. 1776: When Was America Founded?

welcome to today's philanthropy roundtable debate between two fantastic scholars leslie harris a professor of history and african-american studies at northwestern university and john mccorder who teaches linguistics at columbia university hosts the podcast lexicon valley and writes at many fine publications including one where you ought to subscribe that's the atlantic i'm connor friedersdorf your moderator and as it happens as staff writer at the atlantic complete coincidence i won't shamelessly plug it again because our subject today concerns a rival publication last year the new york times magazine dedicated a special issue to what it called the 1619 project a collection of articles photographs and other materials that mark the 400th anniversary of august 19 1619 on that date 20 enslaved africans were sold to english colonists and what would become the state of virginia the project attempted and hear a quote from the times website to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black americans at the very center of our national narrative the project's lead essay by the journalist nicole hannah jones would go on to win a pulitzer prize the pulitzer center developed a 1619 project curriculum for public schools janice johnson the head of chicago's public school system said that the project resonated with many black students helping them to see the great contributions that enslaved people and their descendants made to american history rather than being ashamed of this country or their place within it and the project has sparked countless debates among historians journalists and others including president donald trump who suggested that it ought to be banned from public schools among critics who've read the 1619 project some disputes concern matters of fact or historical interpretation perhaps we'll touch on some of them but the focus of many debates and our debate today concerns a claim not about what happened in the past but about what ought to happen today and in the future in a short essay introducing the 1619 project jake silverstein the editor of the new york times magazine wrote this quote 1619 it is not a year that most americans know as a notable date in our country's history those who do are most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation's birth what if however we were to tell you that this fact which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every fourth of july is wrong and that the country's true birth date the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world was in late august of 1619. later in multiple public appearances silverstein and jones argued that 1619 should be considered america's true founding many critics published articles contesting that suggestion and arguing that 1776 ought to remain the year that we consider america's true symbolic founding although these debates all began back in august 2019 they continue today in the pages of the new york times where columnist brett stevens just published a columnar and criticism of the project among conservative intellectuals some of whom have called for the pulitzer prize committee to withdraw the project's award among leadership at the new york times which just put out statements praising and standing by the project and among the project's many fans who stand by it as well and here today we're lucky to have professors harris and mcquarter to delve deeper into the debate between 1619 and 1776. you've each got three minutes to make opening statements i flipped a coin earlier and professor harris will go first hi everyone connor thank you for that lovely introduction and uh you should know that i uh made my uh subscription to the atlantic this morning um uh thank you to the philanthropy thank you to the philanthropy roundtable for inviting me to be part of this conversation and i'm really looking forward to the discussion with you and with john mcwhorter so i want to start with the idea of the date 1619 but also more generally the idea of dates historians and the general public have often used states other than 1776 to mark the quote-unquote founding of american ideals or to include themselves in the nation inaccurately or not for example 1620 the pilgrim's landing when i was a child that was the day where we began talking about american history it was a way to situate american founding ideals in religious freedom rather than perhaps uh the more chronologically accurate and logical 1607 jamestown that would have situated america in commerce and land ownership the virginians at this early time were not very interested in religion as a foundational element of their settling of north america another date that was important and continues to be important in history classes of course 1492 columbus's arrival in the quote-unquote new world but we know that the emphasis on that date is part of an effort by italian americans in the early 20th century to be included in the nation's story some other less well-known dates as a southerner i visited st augustine florida when i was a child and i learned that 1565 was the date of saint augustine florida's founding and it carries the designation as the oldest quote-unquote city in the u.s and that is important for florida and there are earlier histories of florida that are also linked to slavery more recently historians have begun to talk about the second founding of the civil war era rooted in the ways in which the 13th 14th and 15th amendments solidified the end of slavery uh clarified who determined citizenship for the nation and also made access to the vote on non-racial terms 1619 has had importance in the african-american community at least since the 1960s and it was a date that i knew of as a child larone bennett's 1962 work before the mayflower was an attempt to solidify black americans uh presence on the continent and again the reference to the mayflower shows how important 1620 was at that point malcolm x in 1964 took up this idea and said we didn't land on plymouth rock the rock landed on us i read the use of 1619 and the 1619 project as a polemical device a what if a way to refocus the nation's attention to how people of african descent and the system of slavery that developed in the americas led to north american and u.s particularly successes economically and politically it also led to some great failures of course the continuation of slavery the legacy of racism our continuing struggle with equity in terms of race and class and our continuing struggle with the meaning and practice of democracy in fact i took this question of 16 19 1776 or any other dates to my doctoral students this year not because i expected a yes or no answer to 1619 or 1776 because but because such questions lead us to ask new questions to think of old ideas in new ways and to generate new ideas the over-the-top rhetoric about the dangers of the project and its alleged misuses of history have obscured its creativity are we so afraid to step into the space of 1619 or 1776 creativity creatively i hope not and i hope we get to talk today about what that means to do so thank you all right professor mcquarter um thank you to the philanthropy roundtable for inviting me and i'm honored to be here with dr harris who i have known since we were graduate students together and of course my colleague at the atlantic connor friedersdorf i think that my take on the 1619 controversy is perhaps somewhat more local but the whole episode has worried me and it's partly because of issues historiographical such as dr harris has mentioned but there's been more involved as far as i was concerned and so it seems to me that we can't forget that the fundamental claim of the 1619 project is that the revolutionary war was fought over slavery that's the claim and the issue is is that true and the reason that it's important to stress that is because for example it's not that nicole hannah jones was responsible for showing that anyone who had anything to say about the revolutionary war was concerned with slavery the issue was whether it was a dominant issue and that's what that's what she says and we have to face an inconvenient fact which is that without that particular claim of course the 1619 project has various presentations but without that particular claim it wouldn't have the attention that it does it wouldn't be shaping our historiographical discussion in any way and as much as i hate to say it nicole hannah jones wouldn't have gotten the pulitzer without that earth-shattering claim earth-shattering because if that's true then we really should revise what we think of as the american project and i have to say the fact that they phrased it as imagine if has to be taken as the very deft and effective rhetorical device that it was but we can't say that because she phrased it as imagine that she isn't responsible for the statement and here's why she said imagine and a great many frankly rather august people said that no the revolutionary war was not fought over the slavery question now suppose people had simply said yes we should begin our country's history at 1619 because of what nicole hannah jones said and think of 1776 as just one rather complex year would she have objected no would she have said no i only said just imagine no let's face it so this is the issue when people in positions of authority say that it's okay for a black scholar to make a claim as nervy as that one and say that our founding should be placed at 1619 when africans were brought up onto the beach rather than to enshrine 1776 as the philosophically interesting and unprecedented phenomenon that it was to allow that she can say that and not be corrected that when she's corrected in the public square it's okay for her to just say in various ways that the criticism comes from racism and for her to be let past with that statement is racist i know that a lot of people think they're demonstrating their anti-racism by not holding her responsible but instead it creates a different kind of racism i doubt she perceives it but i do and it disgusts me all right we're going to move into some questions um professor hess i want to begin with you you mentioned that you wanted to talk about how you wish people had reacted to the 1619 project and the rhetorical device that it used in your view and i wonder what do you find to be the biggest shortcomings of the conversation we've had and if someone takes issue with the 1619 project as professor mcquarter does or as many other people have on many different grounds what do you think would be the constructive way to critique it that perhaps would improve on what you've seen and felt badly about thanks that's a great question i think the most disappointing response to the project has been to focus on only nicole hannah jones's essay and within that essay focus on one line and the focus on that one line where she claims that the revolutionary war was fought to defend slavery that focus um really uh detracts from an exploration of many other things that she says in the essay that are interesting um that are about her personal reflection and then many other things in the 1619 project the whole magazine issue as a whole so um i i i too as i've written i was disturbed by the misstatement in that line in my opinion as an historian um but i don't think that it impugns the whole project and i wish that people would uh move beyond that and talk about some of the other issues that are raised in the 1619 project there's a a wonderful essay on for example medical care by linda villarosa which talks about um the ways in which uh medical doctors in the antebellum period thought that african americans were distinctive physically and the ways that those practices and beliefs still affect our medical care today and this is something that um scientists doctors and many others have been talking about that's only one example there are many more essays in the project than nicole hannah jones's essay and much more history in the 1619 project magazine as a whole so i i've been disappointed by that focus um on just her essay one more thing i'll say is that when teachers teach from a document like the 1619 project we don't take it completely at face value the phrase critical thinking is central to teaching in all schools that i know of high school college the the the my students come in uh as freshmen talking about bias constantly what is the bias in this article the 1619 project imperfect as it is is a great teaching tool for all of the reasons um that people have been uh discussing over the past year thank you professor mcquarter um you're far from alone in talking about the relationship between slavery and the american revolution or the lack of relationship between slavery and the american revolution there was a [Music] socialist website that focused very heavily on this they felt that they needed to defend the american revolution for reasons very particular to their ideology could you talk a little bit about why you think that that line was not only incorrect but significant broadly within the project and why it matters whether people think that the american revolution was or wasn't motivated partly by a desire to protect slavery you know we are living all of these years later um people do seem to think it matters in colleges some protesters what are the stakes why does it matter what narrative we are taught about this time well it comes back to the whole issue of what i think is a creeping sense among even the white intelligentsia in this country that black people are not quite as bright and that the best that we can do is maybe speak rather well and show up so part of the reason that i think that that particular one claim is one that we have to really pay attention to is because it is what has gotten the whole project attention and it is getting a lot of attention and so the question is was the person who put this forth correct or not and if it turns out that it wasn't correct and that this is said by seasoned historians and i'm quite aware that i'm not one but i've seen that seasoned historians have said that that's not correct then it is our civic responsibility to call that person on it whether or not they are a descendant of slaves who came to this country and more to the point something else we're not supposed to talk about this but the american experiment has been a very complex thing and the whole general idea that the main story that we need to tell is the story no matter how hideous of what has happened to the descendants of african slaves here is vastly oversimplified there's been a whole history of the united states that's gotten a lot of attention recently that i was very disappointed in by one of my heroes jill lapore i read everything she writes in the new yorker i've read literally all of her books including that one that was the only one i was disappointed in because i saw her as doing a certain genuflection to the idea that to look at american history we must look only to the fact that people in 1776 were not fully fulfilling the mission of treating individuals with dignity the fact is part of complexity is that history happens in increments history is a grand rehearsal people rarely end up accomplishing perfectly what they put into documents and we're told that we're supposed to suspend our judgment we're supposed to suspend our engagement with complexity when it comes to the one question of what was going on with african slaves and their descendants as if their our whole sense of morality or more to the point just our sense of empiricism and what a complex thing social history is is supposed to go out the window and honestly it's condescending because i'm quite sure because i am giving full respect to the people who are letting this sort of thing pass they understand that social history is complicated but i really fear that they think that nicole hannah jones can't be held to that standard that black people can't be held to that standard now very quickly part of it is that they're scared nobody wants to be called a racist in the public square that's part of it but what people don't understand is that in hiding and cringing in their homes so that nobody articulate and probably black will call them a racist on twitter they're creating a different kind of racism by absolving both black people not to mention america from engaging the complex thing that american social history is that's why this offends me because once again i'm not just trying to beat the same drone it's that black people are being treated as dim i must crusade against that even if it gets me called anti-black it's not it it's pro-black so i understand everything professor harris is saying fully but i do think we need to pay attention to that one thing because if it weren't for that one thing we wouldn't be having this conversation because that's why that package is being given to students to study the other parts of and it's why it was given the pulitzer that gives it the imprimatur to continue being treated that way i mean wait for the movie next we have to talk about what the central driving claim was thank you um professor harris professor mccorder has been talking a little bit about different pressures that inform the way people talk about this debate and engage in it and i've been struck writing about it that almost every faction in the debate feels itself to be uh the underdog so the socialist website thinks and uh there's so much taught about uh the history of slavery and the founding in the civil war and no one ever talks about the workers movement that's what kids should be learning about right and conservatives feel as though uh it's liberals that are controlling the education system and nicole hannah jones feels that she's being attacked by this republican president in a way that is unfair and um i'm struck that one central claim of the 1619 project is that children haven't been taught uh this narrative about 1619 adequately haven't been taught adequately about slavery and its enduring impact i honestly don't know if those observations are as apt today as they were in bygone eras in american education or not i know my own catholic high school education in the 1980s i grew up in a pretty conservative place in orange county california and we watched roots and we read beloved and we learned about sharecroppers during reconstruction and i don't know if that was typical or atypical and i wonder uh when you survey what americans are taught both in the classroom and in popular culture what do you think about the 1619 project is it best understood as a necessary addendum to a kind of failure in the primary narrative or is it best understood as the main narrative that people are being taught about american history now thanks that's a great question i um have thought about this a lot and particularly in terms of the response to the 1619 project but also in terms of how it got created and i have to say that both as a college teacher as someone who has worked in neh seminars with k-12 teachers who are looking to deepen their understanding of slavery and of african-american history and just in conversation with friends who have children [Music] that there still is a gap in terms of when students come to my classroom when i talk to those k-12 teachers there is a big gap in terms of what's being taught in the classroom in terms of slavery that there really is a lack and i think that some of the uh more tendentious claims of the 1619 project are a response to that lack there is to me a big gap between what is happening in academia what happens say in my college classroom versus what happens to kids um in k through 12. i don't think there's been a time that i've taught the african-american history survey that i haven't had a student come up to me and this is both when i taught at emory in atlanta and recently when i taught here in chicago at northwestern and said one i have never heard any of this history i didn't know that i didn't know anything about the transatlantic slave trade i didn't know about southern slavery i we and two the other thing that i hear is we were made to watch uh gone with the wind the 1939 film gone with the win as an historical document and as historical fact and i this is uh literally my first year teaching at northwestern i had a student who i think was from missouri who said that to me that in high school she was watching gone with the wind so connor i think you were very lucky i do know high school teachers who um and high schools that are particularly well resourced that have their students read beloved that go more deeply into primary sources around slavery but um the washington post actually did an article around the same time the 1619 project came out and it surveyed and interviewed teachers and students about what they know and what they teach about slavery and again the results were not good there is a big gap and a wide variation in terms of the teaching of the history of slavery let me say one more thing part of that gap between academia and the general public is that in the early uh late 1980s early 1990s there was an effort to put forward national history standards and lynn cheney was then the head of the neh and she thought that those standards which sought to integrate not only african-american history but native american history some of the african-american heroes like harriet tubman during the civil war just to have a more complex history about who all these people were and how they came to understand the meaning of america she thought it was too negative that discussing slavery was too negative uh focusing on harriet tubman and not some of the presidents um she she and so she kybosh the whole thing now a hundred thousand copies were still printed teachers themselves uh bought these copies and so i think there are teachers who used those new history standards which had been uh requested not as a requirement by the federal government but as a way to bring some of the new histories into uh and make them accessible to schools some teachers did take that but much like is happening with the 1619 project um lynch haney and others focused on a few things that they disagreed with and saw it as a way to push aside the whole project and so we continue to have a gap between what academic historians have learned about slavery about the meaning of race about our founding fathers to some degree a gap between what we know at the college level and what gets taught in our schools and and that is too bad professor mccarter i'd love it if you would address the same matter whether today's young people are um being taught a narrative that ought to be augmented by things like the 1619 project or whether it is the main narrative and perhaps also by extension how we decide how much we should focus on the positive versus the negative parts of our history stipulating that we want to teach people the whole truth um how do you decide how much of each thing to teach the idea that we must teach a fundamentally positive narrative strikes me as somebody who watched too much 1950s tv i do not agree with that at all i think that you know talk about what it is to engage social history to intelligently engage it and to be a country that is perhaps a step ahead of the official narrative that many countries promote for themselves is to acknowledge that a lot of things have gone hideously wrong and that they continue to the idea is not for our history to be a celebration as if we were in you know some movie in 1930 by no means but on the other hand i hear what professor harris is saying and i don't mean to remotely imply that she is not being completely sincere i i understand what she means that is what she has seen and what she has seen carries considerable authority especially as a historian but i can't say that it squares with what i've seen and i can't claim to be a historian in any official sense but i teach in universities and you know i know people who are under 18 it seems to me that the idea that slavery is something obscure to a critical mass of people squares more with the way things were in the 70s and into the 80s than they are now and i just think of what we see in hollywood what we see celebrated by the intelligentsia and long before the 1619 project all sorts of things that are going on in any large city at any particular time there comes a point when i've often found myself wondering at what point for example can we say that it's not an obscure fact that there was slavery outside of the south i live in new york city where there are museum exhibits and archaeological digs and it's always said no one knows about this after about 20 years i start to wonder is it really true that no one knows or is that just what you're supposed to say as an enlightened person in order to be symbolically part of a certain struggle and professor harris i don't mean that as any kind of dig but i mean there's a certain kind of person where sometimes i think about that and what it really comes down to is is this and here i'm not being a contrarian on purpose this is something that i truly believe i'm not sure how informed we can either expect or need the general public to be beyond a certain point about any aspect of history i mean we always talk about how historically ignorant americans are and to be honest i would extend that to human beings in general most people live in the present that's the nature of being a human being now you can seek to have people understand what happened in the past and especially how it relates to the present but sometimes it seems to me that we're claiming it as a fundamental assumption that we want all americans who've been anywhere near a school to be able to do an intelligent recitation of what has happened to black people on these shores and i don't mean an academic one but i mean that even that they might be able to give a kind of an informal oral report over 10 minutes one i'm not sure that could ever happen because most of them couldn't give an informal oral report about when the revolutionary war even was we all know that that's the nature of humanity and americans actually are human and then also i'm not sure why we need it and by we here i'm talking about black people i'm not sure that in order for black people to overcome all americans need to understand what we've been through and exactly why they're the disparities today i think there's a difference for me between politics in the present that creates a future and what sort of historically informed consciousness we're forging and i genuinely and i'm not putting this out as some sort of debate team point i genuinely don't understand why the american public needs to be better informed about the history of black people than it is roughly now with it being more with people who go to good schools than others certainly there's also the thing that we don't like to talk about as americans there's going to be a class dimension too but i'm not sure why we have to work so very very hard at that and to see there being such a yawning gap when people can't do the kind of recitation that i talked about i don't think they ever will be and you can say that that's partly racist but i'm not sure whether that matters to poor black people who need help so that is my real take on that question yeah uh professor harris do you want to respond to that directly yeah i think you know this is a larger question about how much education do we need in today's society and um i um one of the things that i look at is uh how complex our society is and one of the ways that history can help us uh thinking about history can help us is to it can sometimes be a practice ground for the complexities we experience in real time but even more importantly john's uh question about why do we need to know i'm sure many of you know that the national association of scholars um is uh has a i think they have a grant i was reading an article about it where and they claim that only 15 of americans know anything about say the constitution even our founding documents um and i you know that's a problem that's a big problem and it is a problem right now because we are trying to figure out for example what are the duties of our president uh the supreme court and congress and people are voting based on those ideas people also vote based on their ideas of uh what is uh the meaning of race in america and how should we address that through our uh our judicial system they vote based on ideas uh incorrect or not um about uh the role that african americans have played in this country um there are people who think that african americans i think did nothing to contribute to america and so i think it's important to bring those things in but there's a larger question here too about the meaning of education in an increasingly complex world and we really as a nation need to reckon with the fact that we are uh well the year 2020 has demonstrated that we need a more educated populace not a less educated populous and part of that education has to be an understanding of where we came from as a nation what our ideals are what happens when we fail and everyone fails this is not unique to the us and how then we can overcome and continue and those lessons are available in history um and and can provide some guidance if we're honest about that as well as being available in the present but working that historical muscle sometimes can give us a sense of how people can solve problems one of the things that for me when i think about history and teaching my students is is to let them know that historical actors were not perfect even when they had these wonderful ideals and so then how do how does historical change happen we really need to have a realistic sense of as john said it is incremental it doesn't happen overnight a lot of people struggle so what does that mean for me as an individual what does that mean for us as a nation what is that what is the role of government in that all of these things can be learned through a study of history as well as through our current experience and we can then make informed choices about what we want to bring forward as opposed to what we want to leave behind i just think it's it's part of education it has been part of every society we are unique and john is right here we are unique as a nation in our example as wanting to give education to all that was not the case before fairly late into the 19th century but we thought that and we still think that an informed citizenry is our best defense i hope an informed citizenry is our best defense for our national ideals and to be informed means to know all so that we can move forward in a much better way uh bringing us back to the central matter in this debate the idea of 1619 and 1776 and the relationship between them professor harris is there any question that you want to put directly to professor mccorder about his thoughts or positions that he's expressed thus far or just in general i'm curious i mean you're based in new york and uh one of the things i was thinking is more of a response to uh your question about how much people know about slavery in new york and i was very involved with an exhibition there what has been interesting to me is that um how episodic knowledge can be that that happened in 2005 that exhibition i'm not surprised that people later don't know about it and i guess it's this question still about how do we retain knowledge of any kind in society things are moving people come and go um i guess i'm just curious about um you know and you're a linguist and uh you've written a lot of books i mean do you expect that uh the knowledge that you put out into the world remains available and accessible and what's the life cycle of it i'd love to hear more about that i know that sounds a little abstract but it seems important to understanding these issues of slavery which consumed the nation quite literally and so at what point do you think we should stop you know talking about certain kinds of issues as a nation not to even as individuals but as a nation that's that's an interesting question it's not that we should ever stop because the truth is if you don't keep saying it then the signal of course fades so even in terms of linguistics they're messages that we want to get out there including thoroughly race neutral messages where those of us who try to do it in the public eye are often told and are often telling each other that you have to keep doing it people on madison avenue know that you've got to keep running that soap commercial for 10 or 15 years you don't run it for a month and then wonder why 10 years later nobody is buying that soap so you've got to keep pushing it but it seems to me that the question is often framed as no one knows anything about this that america is in denial about slavery and i fully get why somebody would have said that in 1975 but at this point it's not only that there are bookshelves groaning with documentation of slavery and a great deal of that documentation by white scholars but it's just at what point like i would even put it as a different question at what point would one say and leslie i get the feeling you would say we're just not at that point but at what point would you say that the public knows about as much about slavery as they know about the new deal and they know more about slavery than they do about the spanish american war which they don't know existed nor could they tell you who john c calhoun is but they know about slavery they know that there was something called jim crow and you know frankly after 2020 a lot more people are going to know that there's something called systemic racism or institutional racism to me i figure well that's about as good as it gets but i sense that for many people there's an idea that because we're talking about black people in slavery we have to expect something more and i'm just not sure that that could ever happen because there's so very many things to pay attention to and even 400 years there's an awful lot of history to remember so even to an extent leslie i'm engaged in the same sort of project you are in terms of for example looking at the ex-slave interviews that were done in the 1930s by the works progress administration and getting the word out that you can listen to people talk about their experiences under slavery you don't have to read a book about it you don't have to watch 12 years of slave you can listen to a person who actually went through it these are things that people should know but my sense of it is well it's only going to go so far and my sense of it is definitely that if we want people to be better educated about these things then our flags do have to go up when somebody makes a claim about it that simply isn't true and is told well that's okay you're cute i don't think that should be part of the general education that we promote um professor house we've only got about two minutes left before we go to questions so i'll put this last question that i raised to you do you think that the the 1776 part of the american founding the ideals of the declaration and the 1787 parts the structure of the constitution are those things adequately taught today in schools or do they also need a kind of injection in the way that some people think that the history of slavery needs an injection i you know i'm never going to argue against teaching 1776 the declaration and uh the constitution and and you know to the degree that we can at different points teach the context within which these ideas happen when we look back at that moment in history it is definitely a signal moment for everyone who is on the north american continent and we can i often teach it from the perspective of multiple different groups of people we have for example enslaved uh people who take up the declaration and say oh you're declaring freedom so me too you know and take this to court and so there are many fascinating ways in which we can and we should teach these documents i think that um and we can't move forward as a nation they are our founding documents i don't think anyone's arguing against that but we also have to and here i agree with john very much we have to understand how the implementation of those documents as lived reality the ideals as lived reality were incremental and so many of my colleagues in one way or another teach how do we get from 1776 for example to 1865 right so we have 1776 and then 1787 these moments of high ideals and then compromise on slavery and then of course the great unraveling and the horrors of war and we really have to be honest about the fact that that war in which so many american lives were lost we still haven't matched it came out of a fundamental flaw in that beginning and that is the narrative when i'm teaching about african-american history i'm also teaching about politics and the place in the nation and so uh i always teach about the constitution and the declaration of independence in my surveys through the lens of african americans but in the general survey through the lens of as many people as i can bring on board who spoke about these issues this year 2020 uh the anniversary of suffrage i would like to say out loud abigail adams said remember the ladies they didn't get remembered again until the early 20th century that's just another example of uh the limits of that time yeah you've gotten me thinking about other dates that we're going to seize on in future years and decades and and what that will teach us about american history um i would love to keep asking you questions forever but the audience needs a chance and so i'm going to read some of their questions um first one any comments on the fact that we have two separate museums in dc one for american history and one for african american history it seems that there we should be able to tell one story about american history and uh john why don't we let you start this time no i actually here's how i think it should go if i could wave a magic wand there should be an african-american museum and there is one but that puts into question the whole claim that we often hear that america is in denial about the sorts of things that that museum so effectively gets across museums like that are part of how america has become so much more enlightened about black issues since the bad old days of as recently as 1980 so yes that's part of what we need to do but what worries me is if a museum like that exists and yet there's this constant call from many people that america doesn't want to confront slavery no well then what in god's name is that building in washington dc and let's remember that there are museums of black history in many cities i grew up in philadelphia going to one probably two times a year so that's where i would put that we do need to tell the story but then we can't then pretend that it isn't being told professor harris you told me earlier that you'll never argue against teaching 1776 perhaps it's a different thing when the federal government is stepping in instead of educators at various levels do you have any thoughts about the new 1776 commission being set up by the trump administration well unfortunately the commission is also tied to statements that those teachers who use the 1619 project those school systems might lose their federal funding so we're uh that necessarily makes me skeptical about the 1776 commission you know one of the things uh that uh many of us are very worried about is uh you know and this may be a place of uh common concern is government overreach and this seems to be an example of government overreach and um you know again uh 1776 is being taught in every u.s history course i know about no one has stripped that away um and so i'm not clear what the 1776 commission seeks to do except to micromanage how teachers handle these complex topics yeah conor may yeah go ahead um on this one um yes it's definitely overreach and it disappoints me massively but unfortunately it's not all their fault and this is the single time i have ever said this about anything emanating from that administration to the point that i'm not going to write about this because i don't want to confuse people but i'm just going to say it here which is that what got them going was not what we would just simply call you know learning an awareness of the unpleasant parts the injustice the racial injustice in american history if it was just that then we would have heard from them a long time ago what has set them off is the excesses of this that have become particularly problematic as they say in 2020 where what people are taught is not just that slavery existed etc but that to be a white person in 2020 is to be integrally complicit in a racist society and should therefore be felt as a kind of original sin that you should listen to anything that a black person says or claims whether or not it seems to make sense because impact matters more than intent and then frankly what kicks this off also is this 1619 project coming out where a leading claim in it and the claim that gets it all the attention and the prizes that are awarded to it is a false one and yet it's allowed to pass because god i hate to say this because the person who put it forth is black and so that is what got some people in that department to the point where they thought okay enough of this and then they come up with something that goes way way too far and has all sorts of people in the country now refraining from just simply teaching racial history and even racial sensitivity but let's face it what we mean by racial sensitivity training in october of 2020 is quite different from what it would have meant in a default sense even just a year ago and so it's those excesses that have ended up creating another excess it's not wrong to think that everybody in america should not be made to read white fragility that's what this new thing is the idea is that you're supposed to think of robin d'angelo and ibraheem kennedy's work as a biblical significance it's not wrong to question that but the trump administration has completely overdone it and i don't agree with it but it came from something that was almost equally egregious which is the distortion of anti-racism that we have come to see in the wake of the murder of george floyd can i just i have to say john i really don't think that uh that is why i think trump was losing the election and he thought he or someone in his office thought let's do some culture warrior work i really find it hard to believe that 1619 project had been out for over a year when uh this call from the white house as opposed to the call of other people who had been working on this for much longer there's a different 1776 project i'm not talking about that one but the the 1619 project had been out for over a year when uh trump uh put together this uh call from the white house and i think it was grasping at straws in order to stir up his base i there are lots of controversies and controversy is not necessarily bad and i'll also say that many people have criticized nicole hannah jones including myself as you know very honestly and openly and as quickly as i could but the reason that the 1619 project has gotten attention is not because of her essay alone not at all but because of so many other things in the new york times magazine that were revelatory and when you you know i do read some of the comments that people post on uh in response to different articles and things and there are lots of people who say i did not know i am learning this for the first time so anyway we'll have to disagree on that but i think that there's a more insidious reason why the white house has put out a 1776 project and unfortunately i don't think it's much about history i really don't think there's a reason that they did it at that time it was that that cynical reason but i think what they're thinking of as using what they're using at this cynical moment is this particular kind of anti-racism they're exploiting it but i see what you mean i understand yes let me uh yeah let me step in here and move this along the california legislature is currently discussing reparations in the state of california as a californian i found this fascinating partly because i'm a student of california history and know that california came into the union in 1850 and banned slavery by consensus in its constitution i've also reflected on the history of america through the lens of california a place where one in 10 residents in 1860 was from china just a very different history than the rest of the united states but this seems to be motivated in part by things like the 1619 project and that lens on american history and i wonder professor harris how do you respond generally to calls for reparations and to this particular effort by california which is maybe uh special right that's a great question and a great question about california history as well so california did outlaw slavery but it also um drove blacks out and when i taught when i think about reparations to be honest i don't think about slavery i do think it would be very difficult to figure out how to do reparations for slavery but we also have a history of redlining in this country we have a long history a 20th century his well 20th century history of jim crow segregation and so i would be interested in looking at the california reparations act to see if it's dealing with those issues where uh uh the state definitely does have a history of um of racism of uh what do they call covenants for on property ownership um and and any a number of things so um i actually the other thing i'll say about the california's example is that these uh calls for reparations have a longer history than the 1619 project if you recall it was uh maybe two or three years ago uh when um the house became democratic they did a series of hearings and um uh i'm forgetting his name um who did the series on reparations for was it for the atlantic or yes so that excuse me ta-nehisi coates you mean yes tahasi coates right that that was another moment when um and this is an agreement with john when uh these issues rose to the fore not simply around slavery but around uh post-civil war uh segregation redlining property ownership differential wealth so the question of reparations has surprising to me become much broader than it had been before so i i'll be curious to see where california goes because you're right it has a somewhat different history from the rest of the nation in terms of slavery but its history of racial segregation is similar more similar to say that history in northern states and in western in western states we've got time for one last question if you could try to keep it to about two minutes each and i want to pose it to both of you if you had to give young black people a message about how to think about 1619 and 1776 what would that message be um and if you'd like to add uh if you were to talk to an asian american student or an indigenous student or a new immigrant from ethiopia or syria uh would that message be the same or different um john why don't you go first i would say that um in terms of what makes america unique that 1776 or various years thereabouts are absolutely crucial and i'll try to explain to them why and get you know beyond the flags and the songs because it can be hard after all this time to really understand why it's significant i would tell them that this land was built on the backs of unpaid laborers and slave people i like that new usage actually enslaved people and that went far back beyond 1776 and that the whole nation's history has been a grand rehearsal and that we're not even at the dress rehearsal part now but frankly i would also tell that young black person to resist the idea of supposing that the entire history of the united states must be reduced to a story of how well people were doing in learning to think of black people as equals i find that to be a bare bones dishonest hopelessly oversimplified and even sometimes unempirical account of what the history of the united states of america should be and i would tell that young black person don't think that what makes you special is to make claims along those lines as opposed to you doing what you as an individual find that you are good at and that you like now as for the asian person it would be a variation on that i would say understand that black people have a history in this country that that history continues all the way through to for example redlining and that some and i would tell them not all because you have eyes and you can see it but some of the discrepancies between white and black people today are due to that legacy and so you should realize that there's nothing wrong with black people and that's why you should know some of that history but you know after i had said those things to this hypothetical black person i'm raising two or about to be those black people and then the asian i'd be done as far as i was concerned that's what they need to know then they're going to go off and do one of the 999 out of a thousand other things they're going to do as opposed to thinking about issues of race in america i hope that doesn't sound good but that is my honest answer to that question professor harris i i wouldn't say much uh different from john i you know that we have to understand both moments i would say there are many other moments we have to understand we also have to understand 1619 not just in the place of the united states but also to understand our place in the world that you know 1619 is part of a longer history of europeans in the americas and their interactions with native people and their interactions and uh forced uh coerced uh migration of people from west africa that happened long before 1619 but it's intimately related 1776 was a critical moment in uh beginning to turn away from a system of slavery that although it looked like other systems of slavery had really become much different in the americas and the reason for me that 1776 has power is because people said i don't want to be enslaved to great britain their example of slavery was the enslavement they participated in right here and the powerful call for freedom was because of the wrongs that they felt that they had enacted that many of them felt really conflicted about that and so the message is not that uh there's uh it's not just that there was a big problem and there was in terms of the ideals of freedom and the continuation of slavery it's that how do people think through that what were the limits on their thinking and how why did it take so long for it to end i think these are important questions because we need to understand how change happens historically if we want to make change we have to understand that you can't just drop out you have to be committed and sometimes you have to have generational commitments over you know my parents their parents and their parents before them were committed similarly with these issues in the 19th century we have tales of intergenerational struggle and possibility the same issues come up for anyone who comes to this country particularly from other countries i think what drove you or your family to come to the u.s those ideals are definitely within the ideals of 1776 and yet we also have this example of when things did not match up to those ideals and as john said you know you know african americans have been here for a long time and i would take a lot of the language that he used to talk with a non-uh uh with someone who is a recent migrant here as well all right well thank you so much for a wonderful exchange of ideas professor john mcwhorter and uh professor leslie harris um we're gonna throw things back to our hosts and i hope you both have a great day thank you thank you you

Channel: The Philanthropy Roundtable

Views: 239,695

Rating: 4.6230412 out of 5

Keywords: 1619 vs. 1776: When Was America Founded?, 1619 vs 1776, America, United States History, US History, U.S., Leslie Harris, John McWhorter

Id: Nm6EGgil1_A

Length: 59min 11sec (3551 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020