The temptation with this book is to wade into the controversy it has stirred and try to knock down or reinforce those tangential arguments that have sprung up from its seeds. A salient example is whether or not the Dunsmore Proclamation -- issued by the British governor of Virginia and promising freedom to slaves who would escape their masters and fight as British soldiers -- was or was not a casus belli for Patriots. That is, did the prospect of Black slaves literally shaking off their chains provide the jolt that blasted into war with Britain the American colonists figuratively shaking off theirs?
Much as I'd love to get into this, this cat is going to pass on the catnip. Such niche controversies are irresistible to historians, the public intellectuals who feed off of them, and so on waaay down the idea chain to the bottom-feeding politicians who have cult minds to feed. But, no matter their relative importance, they tend to take on lives of their own and in doing so not only overshadow, but -- worse -- substitute for the thing itself: the far-ranging "project" that this book represents.
It feels very much like the controversy around the Dunsmore Proclamation -- which appears right away in the book, in its first essay ("Democracy" by Nikole Hannah-Jones) -- got people sidetracked to the point that they didn't read the whole book. It became the gravity-sucking black hole for the 1619 project as a whole, such that judgment rendered on Dunsmore became judgment rendered on 1619.
This produces a toxic effect well known in the book review world, especially when the book impinges on the political sphere: the loudest judges of a book are most often those who haven't read the book.
A book must be judged as a whole. If a book is on trial, the only jury of peers possible is comprised of those who have read the entire thing. I understand that this is something of a technical point, but it is a cardinal one. It is why public libraries, when considering a challenge to a book that it owns, insist that the challenger check off the box on the challenge form that says "I read the whole book." If that box is not checked, the challenge goes nowhere, and rightfully so.
(The worst offenders against this rule are probably politicians. In my own state of Tennessee they've recently been doing it a lot. Pulling isolated passages out of a book to shock the unwary public is a fool's game that's been getting so much play in TN that the playing field is now a sea of mud. Good for slinging maybe; not so much for clear thinking.)
In the case of The 1619 Project, all of the controversial hoopla obscures the solid weight of the series of essays that comprise it, each one given a chapter and focusing on subjects such as capitalism, citizenship, self-defense, punishment, inheritance, music, healthcare, and progress. The content of the essays generally mixes history with current, statistics-driven economics, criminal justice, and sociology. Taken together, the essays present a family portrait of American Exceptionalism: You Can't Say This Shit About Anybody Else in the Whole Wide World. If I were asked what makes the USA exceptional, I would answer, "Read this book and find out."
So many Americans don't want to look at that entire family portrait. They want to pull the Dunsmore Proclamation out and fuss about it. In so doing they are like Holocaust Deniers who focus on a mere sliver of fact and refuse to consider the entire mountain of evidence.
There is much more to be said about this important book and about how it should prompt a serious discussion of race-based reparations, but how -- for political reasons -- it probably won't. It all makes me lament that I'm not a secondary school American history teacher. I would focus on the core ideals that make for American citizenship. In doing so I would explore how those ideals have been realized -- or not. I would emphasize not the Civil War, but Reconstruction, and show how this was an opportunity to re-start the American Project, how it succeeded up to a point, only ultimately to fail, abandoned by white America. And then again how the Civil Rights movement returned the civic struggle to where it had been cut off, succeeded up to a point, but, oh no, is it failing again? Did it ever really have a chance to get to the heart of these civic matters, which is the lives of people impacted by the economic and cultural forces of capitalism, punishment, inheritance, and healthcare? So where are we, students -- today -- with American Exceptionalism?
It is those questions -- the questions of now -- that The 1619 Project forces us to consider. With its depth and breadth, its comprehensiveness meets the challenge of the time. If only its comprehensiveness will be allowed to be shown. This is very much a live question in "the land of the free," where political forces actively combine to suppress the circulation of the book's ideas, primarily in the context of secondary education, but -- even -- also in publicly-funded higher education.
One possible reason for the white-hate of hysterical blindness is that the book ends -- in a chapter entitled "Justice" -- with a call for reparations. I would guess that the percentage of white Americans supporting reparations today is about the same as the percentage of white Americans who favored emancipation and racial equality in the 1830's: in other words, the single digits. No matter. That will change. More and more white Americans will ground their understanding of American Exceptionalism on the realization that American-style racism is not generic "racism" but a particular disease with particular manifestations that must be fought with specific remedies, that American-style capitalism requires (has always required) governmental intervention if it is to be made humane, and that the "blue line flag" is an out-and-out representation of American police-state, race-war fascism.
But first The 1619 Project's ideas must get out there. And it is to stifle and slander its ideas that have become top priorities of conservative America, which more and more often avowedly and explicitly embraces the anti-democracy that resides at its conservative heart.
American democracy is still a Future Project. The 1619 Project will help get us there. It is only a start, particularly concerning reparations -- an exceedingly complex and challenging political issue that, after all, only occupies the final chapter of the book. I only wish I could live long enough to see the Solomonic leader emerge who can solve that issue successfully, but I doubt I can hold on until 2119.
