The website of New York magazine posted an intriguing piece not long ago by columnist Andrew Sullivan, “
The more common liberal, academic and intellectual understanding is that, in Sullivan’s words, the nation was “founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery.”
The difference is in critical race theory, which holds there are power structures, such as the rule of law, which are based wholly on white privilege and supremacy and serve no greater purpose than to marginalize non-whites. As Sullivan interprets it, “Liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and ... a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice.”
These are reductionist and revolutionary ideas – so you can see how critical race theory went up like dry kindling on a hot day in academia, first in law schools in the 1980s, then spreading into all the social sciences, which lack hard borders. Now it is off to see the world in The New York Times, and Sullivan was having none of it.
“I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them,” he complained. “And yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory ... as its sole interpretative mechanism.”
The Times is highlighting a division on the left, between the proponents of the theory, such as some of its journalists who decided to conduct a history project, and socialists and historians who believe class and economic analyses must be a key.
The broader truth is that an understanding of both race and class are necessary equipment of the American historian. Racist and proto-capitalist assumptions undergird the nation’s making, but they are not one and the same.
Victoria Bynum, an emerita professor of history at Texas State University, took to the World Socialist Web Site Dec. 22 to discuss the flaws of the 1619 Project. Racism was the obvious rationale for American slavery, she writes, but it was “first and foremost a closed labor system ... Between 1855 and 1860, prominent pro-slavery author George Fitzhugh had no difficulty urging the United States to merge its systems of class and race by enslaving lower-class whites as well as people of color.” Fitzhugh also decried capitalism.
The project’s claim that the founders declared their independence primarily to ensure the continuation of slavery simply “is not true,” states a letter to the Times magazine published Dec. 29. “If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”
The signatories are James McPherson and Sean Wilentz, respectively emeritus professor and professor of American history, at Princeton University; Gordon Wood, emeritus professor of history at Brown University; and two more historians, including Bynum. Attached is a response from the magazine’s editor in chief, who refuses to correct the material and argues, tendentiously, that history is relative and always subject to interpretation by “new voices.”
The Times has its own hubris to contend with, which it cannot do. And yet, if it weren’t for this flap, which an acquaintance reports has set Historian Twitter ablaze, we might never have known about Victoria Bynum’s scholarship, let alone the strange Fitzhugh.
