history, purity, ambiguity, freedom

I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and I’ve always felt lucky that was the place where I learned American history. So many of the locations I read about in textbooks were places I could just go see myself and, perhaps because of that proximity, I never lacked access to people who loved history and wanted to talk about it. Historical stories never felt abstract to me. I’ve been to Jamestown and colonial Williamsburg more times than I can count, to Jefferson’s Monticello, to Washington’s Mount Vernon, to Madison’s Montpelier. Every kid in Virginia probably has.

My parents also enrolled me in the city school district whose students were mostly black and that employed a diverse teaching staff, and so I was mostly spared the worst Lost Cause narratives about the South, slavery, and the Civil War that you sometimes hear in the former capital of the Confederacy. I was never taught that the Civil War was really about state’s rights and I only ever heard the phrase “the war of Northern aggression” from anyone I knew as part of jokes about ignorance and ahistorical thinking. I did learn about how the interests of powerful Southern slaveholders shaped the ways the American political and economic system was built. Black History Month was arguably one of the most important times of the year, integrated into the curriculum of every class and subject, including art and band. We were certainly served some fairy tales about genteel Southern slaveholders, but not that many, at least not that I remember.

There were other ways, too, that history felt immediate in Richmond. In 1996, when I was 14, the city became embroiled in a bitter fight over where to erect a memorial statue of the tennis player and activist Arthur Ashe, who grew up playing on Richmond’s segregated courts. City officials wanted to site the statue on Monument Avenue, a tree-filled, park-like boulevard whose wide grassy median was supposedly the place where the city hails its “Virginia heroes;” theoretically, a natural place for Arthur Ashe, a true Virginia hero. In reality, all of the statues on the street celebrated Confederate veterans. The proposal to let Ashe share their commemorative space went over with the white Confederate nostalgists of Richmond (a large number of people, even though I’d been able to stay mostly insulated from them) about as well as the most cynical among us would expect.

For example: the president of a group called the Heritage Preservation Association suggested that the statue be placed in Byrd Park, where Ashe had won a tournament as an adult but been banned from playing on as a child under segregation. He argued that solution “would pay the proper tribute to a great athlete without violating the historic sensibilities of Richmond’s Confederate-American population” — as if “Confederate American” is not an oxymoron and as if the “historic sensibilities” that a celebration of Ashe would violate were not obviously racist. The statue eventually did go up on Monument Avenue, but the fight over it was formative in my understanding of the way competing narratives about race still exert power in the United States, the emotions they still evince in people. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine from middle and high school about how we learned about race, and he brought up the argument over the Ashe statue also.

Even when the city wasn’t fighting over public celebrations of the Confederacy (those battles happened repeatedly in Richmond after the Ashe statue, and continue to be fought), it was commonplace to drive down Monument Avenue, a few blocks from the house where I lived as a kid, and see the Sons of Confederate Veterans gather, in costume, waving flags, around the statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. I knew which houses in my neighborhood flew Confederate flags.

And it was impossible to learn about the history of the civil rights movement in Virginia, or about massive resistance to desegregation in Virginia’s schools, without reading the names of people whose families we knew in Richmond, without seeing the direct lines from those stories to the city and people we knew, the schools we attended.

So I’ve always felt relatively comfortable that my education on the history of slavery and its lingering toxic aftereffects in this country has been robust, at least for a lay American white person, which of course should not be the standard. That my experience should not be the standard was evident when I saw the cover of last week’s New York Times Magazine, inaugurating the newspaper’s 1619 Project — a photo of the seafront in Port Comfort, Virginia, where the first 20 enslaved Africans were sold to colonists in 1619 — and when I heard the opening seconds of the Times’ new companion podcast series, the sound of the water lapping there. I was struck that I have never been to Port Comfort and in fact wasn’t sure I could locate it on a map of my home state. I looked it up; it’s in Hampton; I’m still pretty sure I’ve never been there. So many field trips, but never one to the place where slavery in this country began.

I was struck, but not surprised. The history of Richmond I grew up absorbing is full of remnants of the Civil War, Reconstruction, civil rights. The city’s brutal history as epicenter of the slave trade, not so much. The city’s 19th-century burial ground for enslaved and free black Americans was until recently buried under a parking lot, and plans for a larger historic site for the grounds and an adjacent jail site known as “the Devil’s Half Acre” have stalled so long that some activists in Richmond have resorted to posting their own memorial signage around the city, guerilla-style. The citizens of Richmond have emotional, fraught conversations about race all the time, but the fact that we’ve been walking over the bones of enslaved people is still perhaps too terrible for many powerful people to willingly examine — especially since Shockoe Bottom, the site of one of the country’s biggest markets for enslaved people in the 1800s, is now the site of much of the city’s upscale redevelopment.

That idea gestures at one of the animating impulses of the 1619 Project, which was the brainchild of the Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, the MacArthur Genius Grant winner who is, among other things, almost single-handedly responsible for resurrecting a national conversation about school segregation in the United States that had gone dormant. The project, its editor’s note explains, aims “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year” — in other words, to try to see clearly how the horrors we’re so infrequently willing to confront still shape the things we talk about a lot: our economy, our health care system and diets, housing and traffic, criminal justice, pop culture.

The project’s other core supposition, which Hannah-Jones lays out in an incredible introductory essay (seriously, read the whole magazine, but if you can only read one part, read this one) is that black Americans are the people who have fought the hardest to force the United States to live up to its founding ideals. “It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy,” she writes.

It’s not shocking that such a framing has caused a lot of people, especially white conservatives, to freak out. It is interesting, however, to think about why exactly this framing has enraged so many people. The most widely-quoted criticisms of the project have been bombastic and ridiculous — Newt Gingrich, for example, compared the New York Times to the state-run Soviet news outlet Pravda for daring to run a project that in some ways directly contradicts the worldview of the President of the United States, a disconnect that nicely encapsulates how vapid the attacks have been.

But I think the logic of the 1619 Project and the underlying logic of some of its loudest, dumbest critics can illuminate a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the way I and many other Americans learn about U.S. history, and the way those views of history are playing out right now in many other ways, far beyond even the scope of the Times’ project, and even maybe far beyond the United States.

Take another of Gingrich’s criticisms of the project, which he laid out last week on “Fox and Friends”: “Certainly if you're an African American, slavery is at the center of what you see as the American experience,” he said. “But for most Americans, most of the time, there were a lot of other things going on.”

The separation of the black American experience from the experience of “most Americans” is very telling and, even as I found Gingrich’s apoplectic response to the project truly silly, I think it’s worth taking seriously because of how pervasive and damaging that view is.

When I read Gingrich’s statement, I immediately thought of a 2014 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center about how civil rights is taught in American public schools. The broad answer to that question is: abysmally. But the report’s state-by-state breakdown of curriculum reveals something fascinating: of the mere 11 states that got an “A” or even a “B” on the report, seven are former Confederate states. In his introduction to the report, historian Henry Louis Gates notes that this concentration “only [reinforces] the dangerous misperception that black history is regional or only necessary where large pockets of African Americans reside.” The people who decide what kids learn, like Newt Gingrich, think black history is only relevant to black kids. That explains the education I got, but it also suggests that if I’d grown up in most other districts, the lessons that define my understanding of American history could well have been considered irrelevant to me.

That binary — there’s American history, and then there’s niche history, like the history of slavery and civil rights — is at the heart of nearly all of the criticisms of the 1619 Project I’ve seen.

It is, of course, also an idea the project attacks directly.

One of the arguments that runs through many of the essays in the magazine is that, in order to square the ideals of the new republic with the fact that so many of the new republic’s most powerful people would not give up their enslaved laborers, the new American power brokers had to construct an ideology that made black Americans completely separate.

“If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution,” Hannah-Jones writes, “and the ‘we’ in ‘We the People’ was not a lie.” That ideology, born to justify slavery — that black Americans were different, incompatible with and unrelated to white citizenship — persisted well after slavery was abolished, in the way that ideas often outlast the institutions they build, and set the stage for much of what happened in the aftermath of the Civil War. Gingrich’s objection is basically an inadvertent proof that the ideology is still alive and well.

I also see this over-simplistic and segregationist binary in the calls for “unity” that have accompanied both criticisms of the Times and that I’ve heard, more broadly, over and over since Donald Trump was elected president.

In her essay, Hannah-Jones tells a remarkable story about Abraham Lincoln I hadn’t heard before. In 1862, a year into the Civil War, Lincoln invited a group of respected free black men to the White House as he weighed the idea of emancipating the secessionist states’ enslaved people. But instead of discussing with them how those people — many of whom were already fighting and dying on the Union’s behalf — would be welcomed into free society, Lincoln proposed a plan to fund the shipment of freed black Americans (whose ancestors, Hannah-Jones notes, came from families that had been here longer than Lincoln’s) to other countries. Lincoln believed that black people were a “troublesome presence,” Hannah-Jones recounts, a hurdle to American healing that could only be leapt over if they were removed.

It’s both amazing and unsurprising that a project that points out the degrees to which black Americans, by fact of their sheer existence, have been considered “obstacles to national unity” should immediately be labeled “divisive” by white critics. The idea that illuminating how much of the country has been built on the forced labor provided by slavery and the pathologies that outlived it must necessarily divide Americans relies on a wildly simplistic notion of what American unity must look like.

In Vox, Zack Beauchamp has a useful analysis of the backlash to the 1619 Project that focuss on what he calls “the cult of American innocence:” “a notion that no matter how important the role slavery played in the country’s creation and history, it cannot be used to define America; that the United States’ founders must be pure and their ideals untarnished.”

This idea can be seen most clearly through conservative commentator Erick Erickson’s meltdown over the Times’ project, in which he suggests that if American society is built on slavery, then the whole project of the United States is tainted and must be overthrown. It can’t be tainted, though, he goes on, using explicitly Christian logic, because the United States atoned for the sin of slavery through all the bloodshed of the Civil War.

Erickson is being histrionic, but that idea — that the sin of slavery has been wiped clean, that it can no longer possibly poison American ideals — is central to much of modern American conservatism. “Unity” means insisting that everything is good, pure, that wrongs have been righted and forgiven and shouldn’t be talked about anymore.

Take its conception of equality. In his analysis of the 1619 Project’s backlash, the Boston Review’s David Walsh points out that a major conservative objection is to the Times’ editorial thesis is that “racial hierarchy is inimical to true freedom.” But, Walsh points out, one of the cornerstones of modern conservatism is that true freedom might rightly lead to inequality. Walsh quotes a debate that ran in the National Review in the 1960s, in which conservative theorist Frank Meyer argued that “freedom and equality are opposites.”

“The freer men are the freer they are to demonstrate their inequality,” Meyer wrote.

Reading that, I was reminded of a simplistic distinction I learned in school about the difference between capitalistic and Communist notions of equality: Americans believe in “equality of opportunity,” while Communists believe in “equality of outcomes.” I don’t agree with Meyer’s conception of freedom at all, but there is certainly a logic to it – so long as America really does provide equality of opportunity.

But what the Times’ project demonstrates, over and over again, is that slavery didn’t wipe the slate clean — that’s clear in the history of housing and school segregation, in health disparities, even in the story of who is more harmed by the influx of sugar into our diets.

The older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve learned about the world, the more I believe that more equality of opportunity, in a truly meaningful sense, leads to greater equality of outcomes, that these two ideas aren’t separated as easily as I once thought. Slavery and its aftermath have prevented us from having equality of opportunity, which undermines Meyer’s whole thesis.

So, no, we have not absolved our nation’s original sin. But does that make founding American principles of freedom tainted, unworthy, impure? I don’t think so, and I don’t think anyone at the New York Times does either.

The fetishization of innocence and purity creeps me out in every context (just ask any of my friends who’ve been forced to listen to my rant about LaCroix sparkling water’s gross ads touting how “natural" and "INNOCENT” it is). Over the past few months, I’ve been dipping in and out of the British anthropologist Mary Douglas’ 1966 book “Purity and Danger.” The book is mostly about how standards of hygiene and sexual purity were created in various societies around the world and throughout history to reinforce various social forms of control, but I think her ideas are relevant here. In the introduction to the edition I’m reading, Douglas argues that “taboo protects the local consensus on how the world is organized. It shores up wavering certainty. It reduces intellectual and social disorder.” That’s useful, Douglas argues, because “ambiguous things can seem very threatening. Taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the category of the sacred.”

Focusing on purity, in other words, lets the people who have the power to decide what’s pure and what isn’t control their communities. It also allows them to reduce complexities into clear narratives of what’s right and what’s wrong that benefit them, ironing out everything else into something more comforting for the people in power.

The impulse to reduce narratives has been, I think, a hallmark of the Trump administration, well beyond this week’s furor over an issue of the New York Times Magazine. After the white supremacist march in Charlottesville in 2017, during the same press conference in which he declared that there were “very fine people on both sides,” Trump also asked a rhetorical question about where this re-evaluating of American history would end: “So this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson's coming down,” he said. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop? ... [Jefferson] was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue?"

I grew up learning and understanding that Thomas Jefferson was a hypocritical, slave-owning rapist. I also grew up frequently passing a mural with Jefferson’s thoughts about religious liberty painted onto its wall, thoughts I profoundly agree with, and I am grateful he introduced those ideas to my home. I think Jefferson could have been right about some things and deeply, horrifically wrong about others. I don’t find that ambiguity threatening. The ambiguity is only threatening if you’re trying to control something — in this case, the power to stop white power structures from being dismantled.

“Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did,” Hannah-Jones writes in her essay. She ends on a similar thought: “We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.”

So: the ambiguity, the contradiction, is the important point, the thing we need to understand to truly achieve freedom.

This isn’t just true in the United States. Last week, I read a really interesting piece by the Slate writer Joshua Keating that connected the American crisis on the border to the huge protests happening right now in Hong Kong and the tensions simmering in Kashmir.

“National governments all over the world are drawing hard lines,” Keating writes. India is threatening to crack down on a number of various border territories with majority Muslim populations that have histories of cross-border migration and various precedents of autonomy. China is tightening the vise on the freedoms many Hong Kong residents value deeply. In the United States, obviously, Trump seems to be obsessed with clearly demarcating our national borders and strictly regulating those who cross.

“These stories are all signs that national governments are waging a war against ambiguity—of citizenship, of territorial status—to enforce a rigid and uniform vision of statehood,” Keating writes. “Those who carry out and defend these policies believe they are enforcing order and protecting their societies from lawlessness, but they’re likely to result in a more chaotic and disordered world.”

That’s because, just as in the case of slavery and American ideals of freedom, the real world doesn’t divide neatly into clean, pure units. “Over the course of reporting on unrecognized countries, tribal nations, virtual states—places where the view of the world as being divided into neat, mutually exclusive units breaks down—I’ve come to realize that ambiguity has its uses,” Keating writes.

We have to work with the world as it is, not with a pretend world where lines between cultures and people and homelands are clear-cut. Northern Ireland, for one, has benefited from fluid lines around culture and governance, as has Taiwan, and the world has benefited from the stability that flexibility has created, Keating shows. The boundaries of nations and the people who live in them have never been that clear — particularly because we live in a world where there are muddling of those boundaries we can’t undo, like the invasion of the Americas by Europeans, who then forced hundreds of thousands of Africans across the ocean to build a place that is now all of our homes.

One of my favorite expressions of this ambiguity — and what it means for freedom— in the 1619 Project actually comes from Wesley Morris’ essay about popular music.

“Americans have made a political investment in the myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either ‘white’ or ‘black’ in character when aspects of many are at least both,” Morris writes. “The purity that separation struggles to maintain? This country’s music is an advertisement for 400 years of the opposite: centuries of ‘amalgamation’ and ‘miscegenation’ as they long ago called it, of all manner of interracial collaboration conducting with dismaying ranges of consent.”

It’s obvious from that last point that Morris isn’t endorsing all of the ways American racial traditions have been synthesized, because of course no one should.

But he makes a convincing case for why the historical experience of black Americans has led to a music that is “completely free,” and thus appealing to anyone who also longs for freedom: “This is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won’t stop but also can’t be stopped. Music by a people whose major innovations — jazz, funk, hip-hop — have always been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow, music that’s thought deeply about the allure of outer space and robotics, music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor, and carnality call out to everybody — to other black people, to kids in working class England and middle-class Indonesia.

“If freedom’s ringing,” Morris concludes, “who on Earth wouldn’t also want to rock the bell?”

I think that’s the essential ambiguity we need to embrace: our founding fathers promised freedom, which everybody wants, and then created a system in which the people who longed for freedom most and knew best how to express that longing were the people they enslaved. And then because they expressed that longing so profoundly, everybody wanted to take part in that expression — which then created its own new cycle of stealing and creating and longing and ambiguity.

“Our first most original art form arose from our original sin, and some white people have always been worried that the primacy of black music would be a kind of karmic punishment for that sin,” Morris writes. “The work has been to free this country from paranoia’s bondage, to truly embrace the amplitude of integration. I don’t know how we’re doing.” I think that’s true of a lot more than just music.

Tell me why you want to read

Have you read the 1619 Project yet? (I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this yet, but how cool was it to see a print magazine sell out all over the country in the Year of Our Dying Media 2019?)

But also, since we’re in the business this week of thinking about how much enslaved people have contributed to this country, despite the horrors this country subjected them to….

My friend Sarah Ortiz, who reads much more non-fiction than fiction generally, asked for “a compelling story that makes me not want to put the book down, perhaps telling to story of an underdog or otherwise oppressed protagonist who I root for even if things turn out sadly.”

I think that Sarah should read “The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead. This book is not obscure in any way — it was much lauded and awarded when it was published in the summer of 2016 — and many of you have probably already read it. For Sarah, who likes a good true story but wants to dip more into fiction, this book will be a good bridge into the world of novels that play with real life.

The protagonist of “The Underground Railroad” is certainly an oppressed underdog — Cora is a 15-year-old runaway enslaved girl being doggedly pursued by a bounty hunter named Ridgeway. The main conceit of the novel, and the thing that gives it a propulsive motion even when the story takes long pauses and meanders, is that Whitehead has transformed the figurative railroad into a literal train system running beneath the ground and stopping at various stations along the South. Each of the stops brings its own uncertainties, dangers, and sometimes seductive comforts, and just as the subway metaphorically evokes the real-life transport system, the imaginary stops Cora and her companions and her hunters make stand in for real-life American places, events, and ideas, without being too over-the-top about it.

That makes the novel sound a bit more high-brow than it feels when you’re reading it, though. Whitehead can drive a plot. There’s obviously the question of whether Cora and her friend Ceasar are going to make it. And there’s a central mystery of what happened to Cora’s mother, Mabel, whose disappearance drives Ridgeway’s obsession with Cora — Mabel is the only person he’s gone after but never caught.

Incidentally, Amazon is adapting the book into a television show, with all episodes directed by Barry Jenkins, who directed “Moonlight” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.” That’s a combination of talent that made me gasp when I heard about it, and I’m really excited. Whitehead has also just published a new novel, “The Nickel Boys,” about two boys sentenced to an abusive reform school in Jim Crow Florida. I haven’t read yet but am taking with me when I travel this week. I’ll let y’all know how it is.

Thank you for reading. As always, thanks for bearing with me as I figure this thing out, for the first-draftiness of it, and also for forgiving all the typos that I miss because I write quickly and with no editor. And also as always, if you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might, too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.