Book: The 1619 Project

Nikole Hanna-Jones' new book came out today, and like clockwork, Amazon delivered my copy.  I've seen the author several times on cable TV, and she seems to be extremely smart and reasonable.  The book is being vilified by the FoxNewsCrazies (FNC) because it dates the beginning of America's problem with race not to the 1776 founding of the nation, but to the 1619 date of importing the first slaves to America -- a full year before the Mayflower.  By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, stating "all men are created equal," we already had 157 years experience with subjugating enslaved people to a sub-human category.

Anyway, it should be an interesting read.

Over on Amazon today, somebody calling himself M. Cohen already wrote:

Why have these revisionist takes on American history come out only after the democrats needed to divide America to boost voter turnout leading up to the last election? This is opportunistic and racist divisive rhetoric that pushes a new racist narrative rather than actually illuminating the evils of slavery. America is the one country on earth that abolished the industry of slavery in her midst. The author should discuss why slavery still exists on the African continent, perpetrated by Africans on Africans and stop lying about the past to line her own pockets.

First startling fact: 80% of the black population of the USA is descended from slaves.

Thomas Jefferson wrote:

...a [slave] woman who brings [forth] a child every two years is more profitable than the best man on the farm.

Even if the children are your own.  Yes, he enslaved his own children by Sally Hemings.

Although the situation was a little more complicated than that.  Jefferson was legally prohibited from marrying Sally, even though (by all accounts) she looked white, being 3/4 white.  Jefferson undoubtedly loved her, as he kept her as his "companion" for the remainder of his life after his first wife died.  He had, like, nine children by Sally, and I could find no evidence he sold any of them.  The children continued to live and work at Monticello for the remainder of their lives -- though legally they were prohibited from inheriting any part of it.

Ten percent of the Union army in the Civil War was made up of free blacks.

78% of free black men living in the non-CSA states enlisted in the Union cause.

In 1662 the colony of Virginia changed their laws, laws brought over from Mother England, regarding inheritance.

Previously inheritance came down through the father.

The new law changed that to coming down through the mother.

Why was this done?  So the children of slave women, impregnated by their owners, would come into the world as slaves, with no claim to their master's estate.  Apparently this situation was common enough to need a new law.

In so doing, Virginia (not unknowingly) changed the law from HUMAN precedent, to what has long been the precedent for ANIMAL breeders: the farmer who owns the sow, owns the piglets -- not the farmer who provides the sire.

If you think about it, the rule/convention that "one drop" of black blood in your ancestry makes you "black" -- but the flip side, that "one drop of white blood" should make you "white," but doesn't.... That says all you need to say about systemic racism.

Slavery of course is as old as civilization, but most instances prior to the importation of Africans were situational. Criminals, debtors, war captives and vagrant children were put to work by their masters / lienholders / victors until their debt was paid off. Or they grew up. In most cases of slavery in history, the term of service was limited.

When Africans started being imported into the Americas and Caribbean, the enslavers quickly realized a limited term would not be feasible. What would you do with the Africans afterward, send them back to Africa? Therefore, for possibly the first time in history slavery became not only a lifelong occupation, but one passed down to the children whether they wanted to or not. People, for the first time, were "born enslaved."

One state, I forget which one, passed a law declaring all native Americans to be black. The rationale was that a lot of escaped slaves were living with native tribes, and having kids with them. So rather than trying to sort out who was who, the whites just wanted to round up all the natives and call them slaves. Much easier that way.

What percentage of present-day blacks have some white relatives in their history?  I suspect the vast majority do, though I could find no figures online.  According to Hannah-Jones, in the 1850 census 11% of the blacks were classified as "mullato."  One report says that Southern blacks are 83% black (17% white) while blacks outside the south are 80/20.  I suspect those figures are wildly off.

Reports say that 4% of people who identify as white have some black relatives.  Again I suspect this figure is underreported by an order of magnitude.

One difficulty is that race is not easily defineable in our DNA.  There is no such thing as "black DNA" or "white DNA."  We are so closely related that our genes are nearly identical. One almost has to look at a family tree to determine the color of the roots, and a good many African-Americans don't have reliable family trees.

Race is a social construct, not a matter of genes at all.

richard09 wrote:

Race is a social construct, not a matter of genes at all.

True to an extent, but not wholly.  There is the matter of skin pigmentation, and shape of the nose, and texture of the hair, and certain blood differences like incidence of sickle cell.

But the "truth" of this statement is even more pernicious.  It's that old "one drop" rule where a person who is half white is still considered non-white, or even three-quarters or seven-eighths.  At that point, yes it was nothing but a racist social construct designed to keep offspring of slaves as chattel, regardless of their bloodline.

Nowadays of course the MAGA bubbas have a whole new fear: "You will not replace us." With white males in a distinct minority, if everyone votes, white males will no longer be able to rig the systems in their (our?) favor.

I have long advocated for more interracial marriages.  The only way for this country to get past its segregationist past is to become a true melting pot.

Patrick Henry, who penned the famous revolutionary phrase "Give me liberty, or give me death!" was a slave owner.

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By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States.

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The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation.

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It was impossible to debate taxes without also debating how to tax the enslaved. Should enslaved Black workers be taxed as people, or property, or not at all?  The three-fifths clause provided a potential solution, but Southern enslavers quickly realized that that would require them to pay more than Northerners who didn't enslave people.  Southerners wanted their human property to count TOWARD their congressional representation, but not AGAINST their tax bill.

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In 1860, two-in-three men with estates valued at $100,000 or more lived in the South, and three-fifths of the country's wealthiest men were enslavers.

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If the Confederacy had been a separate nation when the Civil War began, it would have ranked among the richest in the world. The monetary value of the enslaved population in 1860 was equal to about seven times the total value of all the currency in circulation in the country, three times the value of the entire livestock population, twelve times the value of the entire U.S. cotton crop, and forty-eight times the total expenditures of the U.S. federal government that year.

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Today, the richest 10 percent of Americans own over 75 percent of the country's wealth, with the top 1 percent owning well over a third.  Many of the political systems, legal arrangements, cultural beliefs, and economic structures that uphold and promote this level of inequality trace their roots back to slavery and its aftermath.

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If Washington often feels broken, that's because it was built that way.  [In] creating political structures that weakened the role of the federal government's ability to regulate slavery, the framers hobbled Washington's ability to pass legislation on a host of other matters.  In most other democracies, parties govern, pass policies, and get voted in or out.  Things HAPPEN at the federal level.

Movie: 12 Years a Slave

Since I’m reading all this antebellum history, I thought I’d better track down this movie, which I’d never seen. I think it gets most of the details wrong.

Slaves were property, and expensive property at that.  I doubt slave owners inflicted such routine punishment on them, or treated them with such vile cruelty.  They were afterall property not people.  The movie shows every slave owner and every slave boss as a sniveling moron whose only motivation is denigrating and injuring the slaves in their possession.

Well, slave owners were businessmen.  Smart, competitive businessmen who used their property -- land, crops and slaves -- to enhance their fortune.  It would not make sense for them to care enough about a slave to think of demeaning them, or to whip them for insolence.  They didn't need to be broken like horses.  They already had no rights or humanity.

If a slave didn't work hard enough, or wasn't obedient enough, it wouldn't make sense to humiliate them or inflict injury.  They'd simply be traded to someone else or disposed of.

At least, that's what I'm getting from "The 1619 Project."

Slave owning was a business -- not a personal perversion.

I'd always heard the "well regulated militia" referred to in the Second Amendment was to repel Indian attacks.

According to Carol Anderson, one of the contributors to "The 1619 Project," that's wrong. The militias were specifically levied to put down slave revolts.  It makes sense that slave uprisings would be a lot more prevalent in the antebellum South, which had long since (1830) sent the native tribes to reservations in Oklahoma.

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[There is] a legacy of laws originally created to make it easier for white people to defend themselves against the black people they enslaved, who were defined as "dangerous" because they wanted desperately to be free.  But when they won their freedom, black people did not also win the right to defend themselves.  That has remained elusive to this day.  In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported on the racial implications of Stand Your Ground laws: the criminal justice system is ten times more likely to rule a homicide justifiable if the shooter is white and the victim is black than the other way around. In fact, the report notes that when a white person kills an African-American, it is 281 percent more likely to be ruled a "justifiable homicide" than a white-on-white killing.

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A study from the 1980s found that in Georgia, black defendants convicted of killing white people were almost twenty-two times more likely to be sentenced to death than people convicted of crimes against black victims.

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Formal slavery may have ended in 1865, but the social, legal, economic and political system built into the South to sustain slavery survived by evolving into new forms.  The Thirteenth Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that.  It made an exception for those convicted of crimes.  Angola (The Louisiana State Penitentiary) is an immense [prison], larger than the island of Manhattan, covering land once occupied by plantations where enslaved black people were forced to labor. [In 2011] sixty-two Louisiana prisoners [were] serving life in prison there for non-homicide offenses committed when they were children; 89 percent of the condemned were black. [They] had worked in the fields for years while imprisoned, under the supervision of horse-riding, shotgun-toting guards who forced them to pick crops, including cotton. [If] they had refused to pick cotton or failed to pick it fast enough, they were punished with time "in the hole," where food was restricted and inmates were sometimes tear-gassed.

After Reconstruction [1877], rejection of racial equality intensified with convict leasing, a scheme in which white policy makers invented offenses—congregating after dark, vagrancy, loitering—that could be used to arrest black people, who were then jailed and "leased" to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions. The death rate in some of these prison camps was close to 45 percent. Unlike slavery, in which enslavers at least had a financial interest in keeping enslaved people alive and functional, convict leasing stripped imprisoned people of any protection and made them completely replaceable and easily discarded.

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Our nation must acknowledge the four hundred years of injustice that haunt us. Truth-telling can be powerful. In many faith traditions, salvation and redemption can come only after confession and repentance. In Germany, there has been a meaningful reckoning with the history of the Holocaust; this sort of reflection and remembrance has largely been absent in America, where many people resist confronting the most disturbing and difficult parts of our past. A society recovering from a history of horrific human rights violations must make a commitment to truth and justice. As long as we deny the legacy of slavery and avoid this commitment, we will fail to overcome the racially biased, punitive systems of control that have become serious barriers to freedom in this country.

One paradox (if that's the word) of the slave trade, which I hadn't really thought about before, is that Christians thought it was of benefit to the Negroes to have them brought to Christ so their souls could be saved.

But the enslavers also didn't think they were fully human.... so why did they have souls that needed to be saved?

They knew they the slaves were human and that what they were doing was wrong. The sophistry was just to assuage their cognitive dissonance.

White Supremacy isn't about one race being better than another. It's about the white race having dominion over the others.

True, but the underlying rationale is that white is actually better. At least, for the intellectual racists. Bubba down on the farm probably doesn't care, I suppose.

During the early 19th Century there was a lot of interest in sending freed slaves (and their descendants) back to Africa, as in the American Colonization Society.  Even Abraham Lincoln was a big supporter of the idea. The nation of Liberia was founded in 1822 specifically as a place for Americanized Africans to settle, out of America and back into Africa. One of the arguments the pro-deportation side made was that these ex-slaves, having been "civilized" by learning English and becoming Christians and learning the ways of Western civilization, would act as agents within the continent of Africa to raise the savages out of their Stone Age existence.  Many people argued that even an enslaved black in America was better off than a free black in Africa, due to running water and books and manufacturing and medicine and railroad trains.  It was hoped by sending ALL of the Africans who had been imported against their will, and their descendants (even the ones born in the US and thus by the Constitution technically US citizens) "back" to Africa they would export civilization to the Dark Continent.

It was getting harder and harder to maintain the fiction that Africans were not fully human.  It was easier to believe that all they lacked was "civilization."

Americans and the British pointed to the great architecture, the great literature, the great works of art and music as evidence that Western civilization was the peak human achievement.


Myopia prevented them from recognizing other forms of achievement (Chinese and Indian cultures are much older), or even larger perspectives like the ability to live sustainably in harmony with nature, rather than in opposition to it.