Americans don’t think enough about slavery? Seriously? As a frequent visitor to your country, I’d argue that you think of little else.
There has been a great fuss about the 1619 Project, an initiative led by the New York Times aimed at making slavery the basis of America’s collective memory. 1619 was the year that the first kidnapped Africans were sold in Virginia, beginning a sordid story that was to last two-and-a-half centuries.
All nations have their shameful episodes, and it is right to face up to them. But where on Earth does the New York Times get the impression that slavery is being overlooked? It dominates high school history lessons. It is the ultimate cause of the race-fixation in universities. Hollywood obsesses over it.
Think of the movies that have come out over the past decade: Django Unchained, 12 Years a Slave, Free State of Jones. None of these films are patronizing; none commits the “white savior” heresy. To see how attitudes have changed, compare the 2016 film The Birth of a Nation, about a doomed slave rising, with the 1915 film whose title it deliberately recalled. The earlier movie, a silent epic which employed revolutionary cinematographic techniques, portrayed black men (often played by white actors) as leering oafs, and so lionized the Ku Klux Klan that its release led directly to that malign organization’s revival. Watch those two movies, separated by a hundred years, and then tell me that there has not been a revolution in how the United States remembers the peculiar institution.
It is true, of course, that slavery is an unpleasant subject. No one likes to dwell on the horrors it involved: casual torture, sexual abuse, and the sundering of families. In the decades that followed abolition, white Americans understandably preferred to talk about more cheerful aspects of the story, such as the struggle for abolition and the outcome of the Civil War.
But that was then. These days, slavery is held up as the Republic’s “Original Sin,” and its taint is carried by every white American. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it at the launch of the 1619 Project, “This anniversary is why we even exist as a country.”
Politics, as Andrew Breitbart used to say, is downstream of culture. Look at the kids who have been most influenced by contemporary teaching and movies. Young white Americans have become the first group in the history of polling to display pro-outgroup bias — that is, to sympathize more with other ethnicities over their own. A research project carried out last year showed that white liberals are well to the left of non-whites on immigration, and more likely to think that racial disparity is a problem that demands state intervention.
Why? Because of a notion that contradicts modern values, but that chimes with human intuitions — namely, collective guilt. Standing behind every form of affirmative action is the idea that, because Group A exploited Group B at some moment in the past, there is now an inherited debt that binds people who were not alive at that time. This is, on the surface, a deeply illiberal concept. Collective punishments are banned under the Geneva Convention.
Yet on some deep genetic level, we are programmed to think tribally. The morality of the Old Testament, in which whole nations are raised or razed, speaks to an older part of our brains. Never mind the details. Never mind that, say, an Italian-American is less likely to have recent slave-owning ancestors than an African-American. Never mind that, if you go back far enough, we are all descended from both slavers and slaves. Never mind that there was nothing unusual about American slavery — abolition came later than most of Europe, earlier than most of Arabia and Africa, and roughly in the middle for the Americas. As long as you start from the assumption that everything is about race, you will find ways to reason away each objection.
Yet the 1619 Project’s premise is false. Slavery is not “why we even exist as a country”. The United States exists because of the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. True, those ideals took a long time to be realized. But it was the founding documents that created the moral framework which allowed those shortcomings to be identified and, in time, corrected. When Frederick Douglass asked “What to the slave is the fourth of July?” he wasn’t appealing to abstract justice, but to the specific values enshrined by the Founders. When Martin Luther King appealed to America to live up to its promise, he was invoking precisely the American ideals now being derided.
America is built on the premise that individuals are equal before the law and responsible for their own actions. Replace that concept with collective identity, and America ceases to be America. It is that simple.
