Nikole Hannah-Jones Was Right
Yes, North Carolina conservatives should not have denied her tenure. But above that, she's actually right about the founders of this country
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist responsible for the paper’s “1619 Project” series on slavery and the founding of the United States, was just denied tenure by the University of North Carolina, after conservative higher-ups intervened to prevent the History faculty from granting her that status. This has been met with pretty consistent criticism- even many conservatives who don’t like Ms. Hannah-Jones very much have joined in it.
But it’s worth saying something broader about this fracas than the (correct) point that state officials should not be mucking with academic freedom. Nikole Hannah-Jones was actually completely right on the merits of her “1619 Project”, and the people trying to force her to “correct” or repudiate her work are wrong.
The basic premise of the “1619 Project” is that slavery was the fundamental premise of the founding of this country, despite what you learned in history class in school. That’s why she says the real founding date of the country was 1619, when slaves were first brought here, rather than 1776, when independence was declared.
The case for this is actually very straightforward. Let’s start with just the fact that so many of the founding fathers were slaveholders. George Washington, the brilliant general who won the revolutionary war, and first President of the United States, owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence and also became President, not only owned slaves but raped at least one of them and conceived children with her. James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights and another early President, owned slaves as well.
We tell ourselves various stories about this. We say things like “it was really just the way of life back then” and “they may have owned slaves, but they also wrote things against slavery”. If you stop to think about these things for 10 seconds, they are obviously transparent excuses for what was going on.
There were abolitionists in 1776. Indeed, the framers deleted an anti-slavery passage from a draft of the Declaration of Independence. But beyond even abolitionism, there were rich and powerful Americans who did not own slaves. Of the 47 people depicted in the famous painting of the Declaration of Independence, 13 did not own any slaves. 30 delegates to the constitutional convention were not slaveholders. It was quite possible to be rich and powerful in newly-independent America and not participate in slavery.
If you owned slaves, it was because you liked owning slaves. Owning slaves was fun. It allowed you to do no work and part with little money, get rich faster, and stay rich. It meant a staff of people took care of your beck and call. And yes, it allowed you access to young women who were forced to submit to your sexual advances- we have no statistics on the number of rapes of slaves, but it had to be an astronomical total, just based on the contemporaneous reports of mixed-race offspring and modern DNA data. Other slaveholders may or may not have been less brazen about it than Thomas Jefferson, but there’s no reason to think these guys did not enjoy the fruits of owning, and raping, sexual slaves.
This basic point- that owning slaves was fun- seems completely absent from our historical texts. Indeed, a Google search for the phrase, made at the time I am writing this, returned not a single result! Here’s another hint that these guys loved owning slaves- they didn’t free them. Yes, Washington and Jefferson freed slaves in their wills! This somehow gets portrayed as a moral act by historians- look at how kind they were! I find this moral calculus difficult to imagine: “I get all the benefits of owning slaves, a deeply immoral practice, but screw my children, they have to make it on their own!” This is something analogous to a bank robber cutting his children out of an inheritance- nobody would say that this act said anything good about the bank robber.
Obviously, if owning slaves wasn’t fun, these guys would have just freed their slaves. Thomas Jefferson did free two male slaves during his lifetime, which may just prove that they were not useful to him sexually as Sally Hemings was. At any rate, I don’t think we should take seriously the public anti-slavery statements of a rich politician who could have freed all his slaves and didn’t, anymore than we should listen to Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich on the importance of marital fidelity.
But if the tales we tell about the personal views of the framers are absurd, the tales we tell about their politics are outrageous. One of the things that Hannah-Jones wrote that truly pissed off the mostly white American historical establishment was that the American framers were fighting for slavery. Yet it is perfectly clear that a British victory would have been better for Black people. 20,000 Blacks actually joined the British Army and fought against the American revolutionaries. These people understood perfectly clear what the stakes were. Slavery would be abolished in Britain thirty years before the US got around to it.
Moreover, slavery was a fundamental dealbreaker in the drafting of the United States’ founding documents. Not only was the anti-slavery clause removed from the Declaration of Independence, but when the framers sat down to write a Constitution, it was made perfectly clear that slavery would need to receive explicit protection or several states would not ratify. Most notably, the Fugitive Slave Clause requires that escaped slaves be delivered back to their owners. Also, the international slave trade was guaranteed as a Constitutional right until 31 years after the founding of the country. (Note this was ratified in the original Constitution, which means the right to buy and sell slaves on the international market was constitutionally protected BEFORE freedom of speech was.) Slave states were granted the right to count slaves as 3/5ths of person even though the slaves could not vote, thereby creating the Slave Power (which ensured that slavery would not be banned- we finally banned it only after kicking several slave states out of the union temporarily as part of the Civil War). There were also other clauses of the Constitution, such as the Senate’s composition and the Electoral College, which were subtly designed to help slave states maintain slavery.
The key point with all of this is that slavery was a precondition of the creation of the United States, in the same way that the Communist ideology was a precondition of the creation of the Soviet Union. No slavery, no new nation.
This is painful for people to contemplate, which is why Hannah-Jones faced such backlash for saying what she said. People naturally want to believe that their country is a force for good. Nobody wants to believe that their country was founded by genocidal, racist maniacs who thought the only uses for Black people were as unpaid laborers with no agency and for nonconsensual sex, anymore than anyone wants to believe that the country was founded by people who wanted to kill any Indian who did not submit to the will of the white man. We want to believe that the country was founded by good people. We want to believe that the Constitution was written for noble ends. The 1619 Project, by telling the truth about the founding of the country, creates a cognitive dissonance that those who want to extol the supposedly wondrous nature of American democracy go to great lengths to suppress.
But, just as Galileo’s ideas were inconvenient to intellectual authorities but still true, so are Hannah-Jones’ ideas. They don’t, in fact, indict everything that comes after 1619, or 1776- the story we can tell about America is that it has gotten a lot better since then. And that’s a great story to tell, with real heroes who moved this country forward. Indeed, many countries can tell this story about themselves- certainly the history of Europe, for instance, is steeped in bloodshed and oppression, but people can talk of modern Europe as the triumph over that sort of barbarism. So it is with this country as well.
But it’s not the story people WANT to believe about us. They want to believe we are different. That we figured out the notions of freedom and liberty and equality long before other nations, and was created (perhaps even with divine intervention) as a beacon of those ideals. Nikole Hannah-Jones made the mistake of telling the truth, to a nation that did not want to hear the truth.