Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, sought to tell the true story of America’s founding – a story that centers around the year enslaved people were first brought to the colonies in 1619, and it has been met with intense attacks from American conservatives and the Republican party since its inception.
In 2019, four hundred years after enslaved people first arrived in the American colonies, the New York Times launched the 1619 Project as a series of stories by writers, scholars, and poets that emphasize the ways in which America’s founding and early American institutions of slavery still continue to harm Black Americans today. The initiative was wildly successful, earning Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Later that year the project was re-released as a book and quickly shot to the top of The New York Times’ best sellers list.
Unsurprisingly, in response to the success of the 1619 Project conservative politicians such as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Glenn Youngkin have campaigned on a platform that emphasizes teaching a revisionist history in our schools that erases the true story of American history that includes the lived experiences of people of color.
As the national conversation rages regarding critical race theory and the 1619 Project, conservative leaders have consistently fought against an education for our nation’s students that helps them understand that America was built by enslaved persons. This is ethnocide: the active erasure of a people’s history and culture.
In 2020, the 1776 Commission was created to justify conservative revisionist history and serve as a direct rebuke of Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project. It is a perfect example of using language to uphold ethnocide and redirect the national conversation to one of patriotism and national pride. The Commission was made up of various conservative scholars, former politicians, and professors aiming to implement a “patriotic education.”
On January 18, 2021, the commission released the 1776 Report, intending to establish a guideline for how the administration envisioned public school curriculum. After reading through the commission report, I found a lot of the language to be an explicit acceptance or diversion from confronting ethnocide in America.
Three examples from the text highlight the types of arguments that conservatives and opponents of critical race theory use when arguing for a more limited school curriculum.
“Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil. It was the Western world’s repudiation of slavery, only just beginning to build at the time of the American Revolution, which marked a dramatic sea change in moral sensibilities” (pg. 10).
In this section, the report contends that slavery is the “most common charge leveled against our founders.” Aside from the issue that slavery is brought up in the most casual, nonchalant way possible, the authors intend to shift the blame of slavery to whoever started the concept of slavery (the Eastern world is implied in the text).
By setting the premise that America should not be held accountable for slavery but instead should be commended for the Western world’s “repudiation” of slavery, the 1776 report makes the argument that Americans fundamentally should not acknowledge the harms that American slavery put upon enslaved persons. The goal of this argument is to reject the premise that there is even a conversation to begin with; but how can America claim this “repudiation” when the founding documents embedded slavery into the fabric of this new nation?
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Additionally, the report also argues that white Americans or western civilization served as the primary impetus for ending slavery in the United States instead of the actions of the enslaved who fought against their enslavement since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.
Not only will Trump and his supporters deny the legitimacy of arguments surrounding the traumatic events of American slavery and civil rights violations, they will articulate a concept of patriotism, national identity, freedom, and a limiting concept of love that erases the impact and legacy of slavery from the narrative.
“The primary duty of schools is to teach students the basic skills needed to function in society, such as reading, writing, and mathematics… our founders also recognized a second and essential task: educators must convey a sense of enlightened patriotism that equips each generation with a knowledge of America’s founding principles, a deep reverence for their liberties, and a profound love of their country” (pg. 17).
The concept of love expressed in the commission report is not about love, but rather a form of submission. By arguing that a “profound love of country” means that one should not voice their concerns with American issues, it deters the public from challenging societal authority figures. This is the opposite of what a true love for one’s country should mean: fighting for what’s right and including everyone in that conversation.
Lastly, opponents of the 1619 Project argue that there is systemic oppression, but that the oppression is against white Americans and not persons of color. They argue that the continuous conversation about civil rights stemming from the civil rights movement of the 1960s results in systemic oppression against those in power, which are presumably white Americans. This perspective is used to justify their objections to affirmative action and other initiatives that promote racial equality.
“But the heady spirit of the original Civil Rights Movement, whose leaders forcefully quoted the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the rhetoric of the founders and of Lincoln, proved to be short-lived. The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders… The justification for reversing the promise of color-blind civil rights was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities. Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court” (pg. 15).
By arguing that affirmative action is “preferential treatment” and will inevitably lead to the systemic oppression of “those in power,” the 1776 Report is attempting to say the quiet part out loud: affirmative action will create a slippery slope that ends with white people somehow at the bottom. This is the epitome of the master-slave dialectic, where the master has “all the authority, yet none of the responsibility.”
The master-slave dialectic was created by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to describe the type of dialectic or relationship that can exist between two unequal parties. Essentially, since the “master” has all of the power, he does not want to be responsible for actions that could reduce his power, so he will make the “slave” responsible for all failures. But since he wants to grow his power, he will take ownership of all successes, both his and the slave’s. The master aspires to have all of the power and none of the responsibility, and he wants the slave to have none of the power and all of the responsibility.
Barrett Holmes Pitner uses this theory in The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America to describe the racial divisions within American society starting with the transatlantic slave trade to the present.
Since ethnocidal chattel slavery was a foundational aspect of American society, and many of our founding era leaders owned enslaved people, the master-slave dialectic has become a normal feature of American discourse and life. It should surprise no one that conservatives are using this dialectic to denounce the 1619 Project and spread “patriotic” propaganda.
Trump’s 1776 Commission seeks to define what a “patriotic education” is and control what is deemed acceptable for students to learn in schools, as well as deny students the right to learn about the history of slavery in the United States. By shifting the responsibility of slavery to “other western nations,” the American right seeks to benefit off the work of the enslaved who built this country, while also declining to take any moral responsibility for the institution of slavery, controlling what is and is not acceptable to discuss. It is an agenda focused on power at the expense of truth. The 1776 Commission's clear goal is to absolve America from the responsibility of slavery while ensuring that white America remains the dominant force in society. This is the master-slave dialectic at its core, and Republicans are using it to shape their agenda at all levels of government.
For America to become an equitable and just society, we must break free from the master-slave dialectic that has been the norm since our nation’s inception.
The German verb aufheben can provide a way to break out of the master-slave dialectic because it describes the potential of an equitable relationship. Aufheben has been translated by German scholars to mean (among other things) abolish. The Crime Without A Name argues that it can also be translated as to “preserve” or “transcend.” At first, these definitions are hard to combine: how can something be abolished while also being preserved? Well, aufheben states that an equitable conversation does all three. Certain aspects of both sides get abolished, and certain aspects get preserved because the goal is to use the best parts of either side to transcend their limitations and create something new.
The 1776 Report is a continuation of an oppressive discourse, dating back to our nation’s founding. The 1619 report attempts to have an equitable discourse by making Americans more aware of America’s roots of racial oppression and division.
Being responsible for our collective history is not a form of oppression, in fact it is an expression of freedom and a prerequisite for a truly patriotic society.