1619: Original Sin and Forgotten Redemption
I am the son of a Civil War enthusiast. My father was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on November 27th in the year of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He died in 1995 but I have a recollection of him proudly saying that he was born in a building with a cannonball lodged in the wall, a remnant of the great siege of 1863 for which the town is renowned. The year of his birth and formative years during the ensuing economic depression framed my father’s outlook and his hobby, throughout a life plagued by tragedy and poor health, was history. I have carted some 40 boxes of books with me from Jackson, MS to Houston, Texas and then to Oxford, Mississippi as proof.
Three eras interested my father the most: The Civil War, Medieval Europe and World War II. Obviously, the former interest is rooted in the place of his birth, a river city where his Scotch-Canadian grandfather, Malcolm Sawers, worked on a riverboat. My father tried to enlist for the Pacific theatre at age 17 but by November 1944 the war was winding down and at 5’7”, 115 pounds, the enlistment officer, who also knew my widowed grandmother and understood that she needed my father at home and alive, told the small teenager to go home and take care of his mother and younger brother.
That is the history as I dimly recall my father’s telling of it. Told to me by a man who lost his father at age 11 and was of meager financial means until his middle aged years.
Known to his family as “Jimmy”, my father was one of these southern gentlemen who framed the Civil War in romantic terms. Gone with the Wind was a favorite movie. His admiration for General Lee was immense and the valiantry and successful tactics of the far less numerous Confederate forces, facing insurmountable odds, was frequently lauded. Aged 46 and already in bad health when I was born, throwing the ball or doing anything most boys would find fun were not options for my father. Instead, trips to the Vicksburg National Battlefield were a favorite pastime. He was an intelligent man and he instilled in me an appreciation for long, detail-rich conversation.
James Roland is buried, with his father of the same name, his grandfather Malcolm, his mother and two brothers who died in childhood, at Cedar Hill Cemetery that abuts the national park.
I adored my father, what little time I had with him. I realize, nonetheless, that his attitudes were racist. He did not have a silver spoon in his mouth at birth but I know he never fully acknowledged that a black boy born on the same day and with similar circumstances would have had a far harder time digging himself out of poverty and realizing his full potential. I doubt he ever realized that a man born on the same day, living in the same place and possibly having the same attributes would have been subject to immense cruelty simply on the basis of his black skin. I never heard of and cannot imagine him actively engaging in any violent or even unjust actions against black people but he did not embrace them as equals and his passive racism, like so many others of his generation, is a sin he took to his grave.
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The October 2019 edition of the New York Times Magazine commemorates the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves to North America in 1619. Its introductory article, written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, provides a pointed chronology of the cruelty experienced by black Americans from oppressive, racist whites. As the key writer, Ms. Jones earned a Pulitzer for this work and spearheads the “1619 Project” as an effort to infuse public education in the US with the stark history of racism.
Ms. Jones directly sets the theme in her title: “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.”
Ms. Jones’ begins her article by describing how black Americans had been systematically denied opportunities to better themselves despite their skill sets and despite their patriotic contributions in the military. Seeing this discrimination, a younger Jones questioned why her father was so proud to fly the Stars and Stripes outside their house. She then provides her father’s answer: “He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.”
Ms. Jones then states that the cotton industry, requiring enslaved men and women from Africa, put this country on the map as a global economic power. Past the end of the Civil War, Jones shows where hope emerged in the aftermath of each historical hurdle only to be dashed by the reemergence of racist laws and violent backlashes from the white population. In the interim between the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights era, much of white America embraced Jim Crow and even the US Federal government turned a blind eye until brave women and men, mostly of black skin, turned the tide in the 1950s and 60s.
If reminding us about the facts of racism and slavery were the goal, then there could be no objection.
Unfortunately, Ms. Jones goes far beyond historical summary. Her thesis is that the United States of America has an irrevocably evil foundation, a nation she and her colleagues believe to have begun with the arrival of African slaves in 1619 rather than the date we celebrate, July 4th, 1776. She argues that our forebears were guilty of the worst human depravity ever to have transpired at that time: “one fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before.” Following this, Ms. Jones claims that these beliefs persist to this day and that our nation continues to cast its black citizens in a negative light: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity.”
Ms. Jones leaves no part of our history unscathed: “We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens.”
In his editor’s notes, Jake Silverstein states the intentions of the NYT even more plainly: ““The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history.” He and his colleagues feel that everything about our nation is tainted by racism and makes it clear that they believe this problem is still the prime directive of an actively racist system: “Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day.”
This is no effort by the NYT to heal the wounds of racism: They want to rip the stitches out and throw in some acid. With Christianity as his guiding light, Dr. King taught us that the body politic of the US suffered from deep but ultimately healable injuries. These were self-inflicted by the moral failings of our founders and perpetuated by subsequent generations of white Americans. But these failings are not unique to white skin. Rather, as a Christian, Dr. King understood that these failings are inherent to the human species as a whole.
In contrast to these teachings, Ms. Jones and the NYT likens racism in the US to an incurable, genetic defect. When he states that racial “hatred” is “endemic” in the US and continues to “plague it to this day”, Silverstein reinforces the “in the very DNA of this country” claim at the heart of the The 1619 Project. The net result of how Silverstein and Jones write is a predicate for concluding the worst about America, past and present, and Jones posits that Americans with black skin, uniformly, should be recognized as the “most American.” In the NYT economy of “Americanism”, individual facts and circumstances do not matter. Skin color is the prime currency and whites are racially inferior.
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A hopeful reading of Ms. Jones could find a ray of light in her concluding statements: “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag. 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.”
Perhaps instead of arguing for black supremacy in place of white, one could hope that Ms. Jones is suggesting that those of African lineage can now see their heritage as quintessentially American, as a story of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and embrace the founding principles of this nation even while remaining mindful of the moral failures of so many white Americans during the first centuries of our history.
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To be clear, the history of racism is crucial to understand but the editorialization of these facts by The New York Times negatively distorts the definition of what it is to be an American. The postmodern critique of objective truth and morality has infiltrated every corner of academia, of which the The 1619 Project is a downstream manifestation. Given how negatively these people view our country, and indeed the entirety of Western Civilization, why would Ms. Jones want black people to be “the most American of all?” What is going to be left of the US when the NYT finishes “reframing” our history?
It is not clear how Ms. Jones or Mr. Silverstein would answer these questions and that ambiguity should be a huge concern for any parent with children who may eventually see the NYT agenda materialize in their school curriculum. The The 1619 Project, with its broader connections to critical race theory and intersectionality, appears to propose an entirely new foundational narrative that overshoots the mark with its excessive criticism, editing the facts of history to suit woke ideology and produce similar effects on the left that white-washed notions of Uncle Sam and apple pie have on the right.
So where do we take this conversation at this point? In the current environment of illiberal “wokism”, any counterpoint to Ms. Jones is considered by definition an example of “white supremacy”, a term so loosely applied that it has basically lost its meaning. Yet, in defense of this nation’s moral foundations, one need not adopt a starry-eyed, naïve view that ignores facts of history. We can acknowledge where our forebears were in grave, horrible error without damning every strand of our nation’s mortal coil. Abject meanness, greed and the lust for power are intrinsic features of human nature and understanding how these flaws have shaped history is indispensable to counterbalancing their damaging effects. We should reject ideological narratives that distort history regardless of their place on the political spectrum. In the current informational environment, these corrosive modes of thought are emerging exponentially and should be clearly identified and confronted.
Love of country need not be blind but it is required in large measure if the citizens of the US are to once again embrace shared aspirations. We should all open our eyes to what the NYT and the far left is selling. OurMortalCoil disagrees with Ms. Jones and Mr. Silverstein: Redemption is possible and we should not forget the strides that have been made this past 50-60 years. We need to help the NYT and those like minded see this more clearly and the nation as a whole should aim to make race and skin color the least relevant components of our identity.
We must fully acknowledge but ultimately forgive the sins of the past. Our fathers were all flawed, just as they are now and always will be. To be certain, when it comes to race in this country, some of our fathers have sinned more than others. Yet even as we acknowledge this, unloading the burden of history redeems us, giving us the insight and strength required to face the substantial challenges of the present.
The most luminous figures in our history, particularly the one most Americans celebrate this holiday season, embodied this spiritual understanding. All Americans should remember this, independent of religious disposition or lack thereof. The guiding principles have never been wrong. We simply haven’t followed them well.
Posted 12/10/20- Malcolm Roland
Well said!