To the authors of the 1619 Project, America is the Evil Empire. Its history is nothing but a series of crimes against people of color, made even more intolerable by hypocritical cant about equality and democracy. First, of course, was the expropriation of land from Native Americans; then came slavery, which still permeates our Constitution today. Then, after the Civil War, came the failure of Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. Following that, the New Deal was designed and implemented to create a welfare state that deliberately only helped white people. Segregation, even in the northern states, was reinforced through redlining and restrictive covenants, thereby robbing black* people of opportunities enjoyed widely by whites. Law enforcement and the criminal justice system discriminated against people of color and created what amounted to a new form of slavery through the penal system. Today, the government does its best to keep people of color from voting, and the police kill black people with impunity all over the country. It’s all part of the same ugly story, and it never gets any better. White people are criminals. They need to apologize, and pay up.
*I have decided to follow The Economist on the “Black” vs. “black” issue. I won’t use “Black” until it does.
To reactionaries, the world looks completely different. Slavery was a crime, yes, but that was over 150 years ago. In any event, their ancestors didn’t own any slaves, and they obviously don’t, either. They’ve worked their butts off all their lives, and never asked the government for any assistance. The system doesn’t value their skills much anymore, and they don’t live as well as their parents. They’ve never discriminated against people of color. Why can’t black people just suck it up and work as hard as they do just to survive, instead of calling them racists and trying to pick their pockets? They’re the real victims here, not the whiny black people.
This is the conflict that is tearing our country apart. In the middle, we have people like me who think that the 1619 Project is a seriously incomplete view of American history, and that the reactionaries are just full of crap. How do we get to a middle ground?
We can start by getting both sides to admit to the following inconvenient truths:
On the 1619 Project side:
- Slavery was hardly unique to the United States, and the progeny of those who gained economic benefits from it live all over the world, including in Africa.
- Millions of Americans, including plenty of people in the South, received no benefit whatsoever from slavery, whose economic impacts on the United States have been grossly overstated in some recent publications.
- Hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers died to free the slaves. Millions of people in the Union states suffered personal and economic losses as a result of the Civil War. If slavery was the country’s original sin, it has already been redeemed in blood.
- The system today is color-blind on its face, with the exception of affirmative action programs. The responsibility for creating wealth inequities rests primarily with our ancestors, not us, so guilt should not really be part of the equation.
- It is possible to believe in limited government, traditional values, and self-reliance without being a racist.
For the reactionaries:
- Slavery and Jim Crow were indeed a crime against humanity.
- The inequities built in to the New Deal welfare state were real, and had significant lingering effects that are still being felt to this day. These are not manifestations of the dead hand of a distant past. There are plenty of people alive today who were involved in them in one way or another.
- The effects of residential segregation are also being felt today in the form of reduced wealth and opportunities for people of color. The evidence for the wealth gap, which is due primarily to actions taken by our ancestors after the abolition of slavery, is overwhelming.
- While law enforcement and the criminal justice system may be color-blind on their face, in practice, they are not.
- There is plenty of evidence which suggests that racial discrimination is still an ongoing problem in employment and housing.
We cannot legislate racism out of existence, but if we can agree on a set of facts and resolve to address inequities in the system as social problems, not crimes committed by the current population, we can actually get to an acceptable Point B.