Everything you know is wrong VI

Normally, I am supportive of almost anything that encourages a deeper look at history: it is my favorite subject, and I firmly believe everyone can learn from it. In the case of the New York Times 1619 project, I’m willing to make an exception. The effort commemorates the initial shipment of slaves to the colony of Virginia. It is a slick, interactive, multimedia presentation. The Times seems to be telling us “everything you know is wrong.” Let’s see.

The problem starts with its stated purpose. To whit: “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” It is very useful to study the contributions of different groups to the American story, especially when the groups in question have been historically marginalized. But “reframing” history and asserting a different foundation are another story, literally a manufactured one.

What’s the harm, you might ask, and surely the Times will provide some balance in the work? Not so much. For example, one article posits that the American prison system is so violent because it is a direct descendant of the plantation system. Maybe the author was unfamiliar with the Stanford prison experiment, which showed quite clearly that prison environments breed violence. Perhaps the author has never heard of Chinese prisons, or Turkish prisons, or Mexican prisons, which are even more violent and have no link to American slavery.

This is what happens when you look at history through a soda straw: you might really believe the little circle you see is the whole truth, but you might also be totally missing the point.

Of course, slavery played an important role in the story of America’s founding. It is not for nothing that the phrase “(s)lavery is America’s original sin” has been bandied about since the nation’s founding. But was slavery unique here, and does American history need to be “re-framed” around it?

Let’s start with 1619. The Times gets the date wrong, as slavery in America began when the Spanish imported the first slaves to what is today South Carolina in 1526. The Anglo-centric version of history is grist for another blog post, another day, but you would think the nation’s ‘paper of record’ would have a little more, say, diverse view.

Slavery neither began in America nor ended here: in fact it continues to this day. Slavery began long before recorded history, when one family tribe fought another and had to determine what to do with the defeated survivors: kill them, set them free and fight them again, or enslave them. Slavery was such an endemic condition of history that even the Bible treats it as given, while suggesting it is unjust and should be abolished. Slavery happened whenever the strong confronted the weak. St. Patrick was a Roman slave of the Celts. The feared Janissary warriors were Christian slaves of the Ottoman Sultan. And so it goes.

Slavery was not unique to Africa, but Africa was certainly the continent most affected by slavery. Arab slave traders in 8th century focused on Africa since Muslims were prohibited from taking other Muslims as slaves; demand only accelerated when the Europeans colonized Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Yet the reason Africa was such a target for slave traders was that slavery was already endemic within Africa! Africans enslaved each other, and then traded their slaves to outsiders. The notion that Middle Ages Europeans wandered about the African continent catching locals as slaves is transparently silly. Arabs and Europeans provided the gold, and Africans provided the slaves.

In the New World, where did most of the slaves go? Of the eleven million slaves who survived the transatlantic passage, less than 400,000 (<4%) went to North America, 35% went to Brazil (the most frequent destination) with the Caribbean being the other large collective destination.

Was American slavery more brutal? All slavery was inherently dehumanizing and brutal, so we are talking about the subtle differences in inhumanity. Still, the reasons the American South didn’t need to import as many slaves was the natural rate of increase. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the slave population in the Confederacy had exploded six-fold to almost four million slaves, approximately one-third of the total population! This increase was due to obvious factors: more births, fewer deaths, and a longer life-span, since cotton plantation life (as horrible as it was) was nothing compared the Carib sugar plantations or the mines of South America. Sugar plantation and mine owners estimated their slaves were good for seven years of labor, at which point they died from chronic mistreatment. Americans in the south actually encouraged slaves to have children (even as they broke the families up for sale) and found uses for the youngest and oldest slaves. Both systems were horrible.

Was slavery uniquely essential to the US economy? Hardly. While the “molasses-to-rum-to-slaves” trade route is well-documented (remember the musical 1776?), and slavery was the basis of the southern plantation economy, it was not nearly as important to the overall US economy as slavery was to Brazil or Spanish colonial Cuba. Still, the 1619 project states “(i)n order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” And this howler: “Perhaps you’re reading this at work, . . . (where) you report to someone, and . . . Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed . . . . It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.” Phew! Missing a few centuries of Medieval economic development there.

Is there anything that makes American slavery unique? Well, the most unique aspect of American slavery is our continuing fascination with it. About every other decade there is a renewed interest in the “peculiar institution.” No other former slave-holding nation spends more time or effort reconsidering the experience.

A second unique aspect is that while American slaves were considered property, they counted for purposes of political enumeration. Most people are rightly horrified at the Article I language in the US Constitution that dictates slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person. Few stop to think that this was exactly three-fifths more of an acknowledgment of a slave’s humanity than they received anywhere else. This provision was indeed a cynical political ploy to gain more representation for slave-holding states, but the fact remains–they counted.

By far the most unique aspect of slavery in America is this fact: America was the only country which fought a war to end the practice. Most nations outlawed the practice and let it gradually die. Haiti had a rebellion to forestall the re-imposition of slavery by France. Only in America, which was in Lincoln’s phrase “half slave, half free” did the sides battle it out. While the war was ostensibly about saving the Union (in the north) and state’s rights (in the south), the underlying cause was always clear: the Union was threatened by the challenge of slavery, and the ONLY state’s right in question was slavery. In the end, the cause of abolition made clear the real issue, and the pro-slavery side was decisively defeated.

The Times’ 1619 project is a thinly-veiled attempt to engage the fraught nature of US race relations today by polemicizing history. Racial tensions are indeed high these days, but the Times’ effort provides too much heat and too little light. We won’t solve the racial issues of today by inventing a new truth about the past. Perhaps the NYT should do a 2019 Project on itself, where only eight percent of the staff (and five percent of the leadership) are African-American.