0091 | September 30, 2019
1619:
Beyond The New York Times Project
The hosts, along with new contributor Sarah Bond, discuss their impressions of the 1619 project. Does it go far enough in reckoning with our past?
| C.T. WEBB: 00:19 | [music] Good afternoon, good morning or good evening and welcome to The American Age podcast. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age and I am speaking to you from southern California. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 00:27 | Hi, this is Steven G. Fullwood. I am the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project. I am coming to you guys from Harlem and it is comfortable here. |
| S. RODNEY: 00:38 | Nice one. This is Seph Rodney. I am a senior editor at Hyperallergic and the recent author of The Personalization of the Museum Visit and I’m speaking to you from the south Bronx. |
| S. BOND: 00:52 | I’m Sarah Bond. I’m associate professor of history at the University of Iowa and I’m coming to you from Iowa City, Iowa. |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:01 | And so we wrapped up our nominal conversation about– oh, this is to remind our listeners – thank you for the correction, Seph, with the hand signal – that we practice a form of what we like to call intellectual intimacy, which is giving each other the space and time to figure out things out loud and together. Apparently, I’m a little rattled. We’ve been having a lot of back and forth before the podcast. So last week, we wrapped up our nominal conversation on climate change. The conversation went in a few different directions, which I think is fine. So we’re going to talk about 1619. So the year specifically and what followed it but also more particularly The New York Times project that is, as they say, an effort to kind of recalibrate our national story around the institution of slavery and its history. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to kind of do our general impressions, sort of first what we thought of the magazine piece and it’s conception and it’s execution, the topic in general, and then we’ll move into some of the themes that the magazine brought out or the way it organized itself and we’ll move on from there. So I’d like to give Sarah the first word since she’s our newest contributor. So Sarah, please, take it away. |
| S. BOND: 02:29 | Sure. I guess I should start by kind of setting the scene a little bit historically before we start because I think 1619 is a really incredible date. And obviously, this is coming about because we’re at the 400th anniversary of what we think happened in August of 1619. I think they normally celebrate it on August 20th but we don’t actually know the precise date. But I am a Virginian and I had gone to Jamestown many times. The 1619 project really focuses on the date that an anglican or kind of quasi trading, quasi pirate ship lands at the area that is now Fort Monroe. And this ship called The White Lion apparently had 20 enslaved individuals. We only know a few of their names. For instance, Isabel, I think was one of them. But we know that 20 of them landed there and then were traded for food and supplies to the settlers in the colony there that was overseen by the Virginia Company. And so I really enjoyed reading about the history of this having seen the marker that was placed up under Obama right there where Fort Monroe is today, where the ship actually, we think, landed. |
| S. BOND: 04:03 | I do just want to have interject that there’s been a lot of pushback on the project in part not only from people who haven’t liked it but from historians who have said that it is important to have dates that we remember like 1619 but that, in reality, in 1569, enslaved Africans had been brought to Florida to be used, that Juan Castiglione had actually bought an enslaved African man named Juan Garrido with him to Florida. So what we’re talking about with the 1619 I think is important but I do want to say that this is a very anglicized date. We’re focusing on when the British people began to bring Africans as enslaved chattel and not the first Africans ever to be brought to the continent of North America. And I think that it’s important to see that this is angli-centered a bit. Yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB: 05:09 | So that makes sense. I appreciate the clarification. I think that any definitive date or time as you eluded to is going to be problematic but we– it’s like your birthday. Well, was this the day– well, actually it started when your mom met your dad and when they actually got together and he impregnated her. If you’re a historian invested in the investigation of those issues, then yeah. That’s your role. Let’s complicate this. Let’s look that this is a much more varied picture. But trying to tell a national story, that’s a good date. 1619, that’s good. That’s a good place to start. Let’s start the conversation from there. Let’s give it a zero point out of which we can begin to discuss it. |
| S. BOND: 06:03 | I totally agree. I just want to point out that that means that we then kind of erase a lot of the history of Africans prior to 1619 and also we erase other types of slavery from indigenous peoples that pre-existed. So I totally agree that we need powerful dates and that this is an important narrative but also we then can’t use that to erase other forms of slavery and servitude that had existed in the Americas prior to 1619. |
| C.T. WEBB: 06:40 | Point taken. Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 06:42 | No. I think both of you are making a really, really good point but I think it speaks to the fact that we haven’t had this conversation before nationally. It’s only happened within communities or within fields about a particular date. I agree with you. Starting at one date is good but not– but I agree with Sarah because when I first read the cover, the very last line is, “On the 400th anniversary of this painful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” And I’m just like, “You could’ve left that out. You really could’ve left that out because you’re telling–” Because the invisibility issue when it comes to telling American history is a part of the romance of telling American history in general. So who tells the story? I agree that there were– the presence of Africans in this country was well before 1619. This is when the laws were established, essentially. This is when these things were happening in the 17th century. So it’s frustrating but I took it as at least people are starting– they’re using this platform to tell these kinds of stories to a wide range of people from the paper record. So I’m okay with that part of it but I think that they could’ve paid a little more attention to, “We chose this date to blah, blah, blah. And to emphasize that there are other kinds of ways of telling this story as well but we chose to tell it this way.” |
| C.T. WEBB: 08:03 | Yeah. I think those are both great points. Yeah. I completely agree. |
| S. RODNEY: 08:08 | So my initial take on the 1619 project– and I’m already setting aside the podcast which I haven’t listened to yet and the overleaf in The New York Times. I’m just dealing with the magazine and I have to say that one of the– two things initially jumped out at me when I looked at the magazine. One is that phrase, Steven, it’s finally time to tell our story truthfully, really resonated with me actually because– and I double underlined our on my notes because I’m wondering who we is. Because the our refers to a particular group of people. So who’s the we in that? And that’s a question that probably will get elaborated in further conversations here. The other thing that really stood out to me was that– it’s a quote from Nikole Hannah-Jones essay which opens the magazine. She says, “This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin.” She’s talking about slavery. “But it’s more than that. It is the country’ s very origin.” I had moments when I read her essay– and I think I read the one after that maybe. Maybe it was the piece by Klint– well, I’m not sure. |
| S. RODNEY: 09:45 | But I want to say this, I had a moment when I was reading her essay when it felt like a veil kind of lifted and I kind of saw and felt for just a moment what the– and reality isn’t quite the right word. But I saw something that felt like for a moment I saw-beyond, behind, below- the ideology of American exceptionalism that I grew up with. And I saw something else and I remember thinking in that moment, “That’s amazing. That for a brief second I could see, okay, this is what life was like or this is the sort of antecedents that shape the current social-political reality that we have.” And I saw for a moment this notion that you could actually own another human being as being fundamental to that. You could own another human being. |
| C.T. WEBB: 10:50 | So Seph, it is absolutely that. The pamphlets or the pamphleteers that were super absolutely instrumental in shaping the American imagination or sort of crafting the idea of what it meant to be an American explicitly used African slavery as the foil to liberty. Meaning that “white” by the invention of white people, that white people were the ones that were willing to sacrifice for freedom and that is why they deserved it. And that Africans were not willing to sacrifice for their freedom and that’s why they were chattel. They were explicitly making these arguments. So it really is the germ out of which the American idea of liberty grew. Slavery is inseparable from the creation of that myth. And for me, personally, it is a– it fucks me up. I’m not sure what to do with that because I believe in Jeffersonian rhetoric. As much as a despise Jefferson as a person, I believe in Jeffersonian rhetoric and I don’t– I’m looking forward to this conversation. A big part of The American Age as an effort is meant to come to terms with that because I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to put that. I’m not sure what to do with it. |
| S. RODNEY: 12:23 | And who the we is that wants to come to terms with that. And I just want to say this too just so the listeners have a sense of what we’re going to deal with. So if the fundamental, the germ out of which grew the American ideal or the American state is that, what 1619 is doing is actually trying to elaborate and to explain how and in what ways different sectors of our culture and our society grow from that root. So it’s about food, it’s about music, it’s about educational policy. In fact, Sarah had mentioned before that she figured out what the sort of themes [crosstalk]– the themes that are generated by and around this project or by the writing in this project. So maybe, Sarah, you could just tell us what those themes are. |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:27 | Well, I think she was– you were also going to say something. You were going to jump in before. I saw your hand. You were so polite to– |
| S. BOND: 13:34 | I just wanted to piggyback a little bit on your idea of Jeffersonian rhetoric because I think a big theme that is underlined under the entirety of this is the hypocrisy of white people. Because in the initial essay, we get the scene set in 1776 in Philly where Thomas Jefferson is sitting there writing the declaration of independence and who does he have behind him? Is Robert Hemings, who Robert Hemings is, of course, the half-brother of his wife because Martha Jefferson’s father had been raping and sleeping with one of the slaves on his plantation that would eventually go to Monticello. And then Thomas Jefferson would have a coercive relationship with Sally Hemings, who was another part of the Hemings family. And so I think a big theme is that Thomas Jefferson is writing words about liberty and equality and this goes back to Seph’s point about who is the we. When Jefferson is saying we, he means white dudes that are not enslaved. He is not talking about Robert Hemings behind him. So the definition of we is very important here. |
| C.T. WEBB: 14:56 | Yeah. The thing is though, this is not– and this is where I would start to try and recover and defend aspects of the American idea if not the American institution as a practice. This is pro forma for human history. Rights are always rights of the elites. They’re always the right of a select, limited, fully circumscribed, typically male body politic. And so that’s the norm. So to break that norm is to literally break the history of civilization. The invention of writing is to count people and property. And all of civilization is undergirded by writing. You don’t have writing, you don’t have complicated societies. So it’s the moment of inception of large scale community of strangers that you use chattel to– these were the sources of capital for these early civilizations. American continued that, perfected it, and fully dehumanized it. So I don’t want to let us off the hook at all but that there is still some potential and possibility in what you’re identifying as hypocrisy, which it clearly is. It clearly is that but I would want to defend– and if you picked me on a different day, maybe I would have a hard time doing it. But I would want to defend a culture that could produce a magazine like 1619. Pick any other civilization in history and produce a document that its elites enable the undermining of its own mythology. |
| C.T. WEBB: 16:56 | I want to defend that. If I can find a purchase to be hopeful about the American experiment, it’s there. It’s that we are talking about these things and we are trying to come to terms with it even though we may ultimately fail. It may be too poisoned. We may not be able to do anything about it. I’m sorry. Go ahead. Steven, you look like you want to say something. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:20 | I just have to come in with the Dave Chappelle joke from Sticks and Stones and that what he says is– he simulates this scene with George Washington writing the American Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal aside. Go get me a sandwich, nigga, or I’ll kill you. Return. Liberty and justice for all. And so I just wanted to put that in there for the we part of it. And I think that was from his recent stand-up which people are having issues with but I do not have one. But I think we really need to– I’m very much interested in how these conversations really get to different kinds of people. So who’s reading this? I was curious about who’s reading this, who’s the audience. I think that I’m the audience because I have an interest in these things and I like having access to them because I want to talk with other people about them, about these issues around economic development of the US, how whiteness was really kind of created in the crucible over black body, this idea of how that whiteness was something– yeah. So I’m interested in that and I want to talk with people who may not normally talk about these things in their way. People might have ideas. So I was happy that this exist but not as the definitive anything. And I don’t know how much it actually goes against undergirding the US project per se. I think that I’m still thinking about what that means because sometimes cultures produce things that seem to be radical but they’re really not. So I kind of want to toss it off to you Seph and kind of ask you– because you’re like me. I think I have maybe two or three articles yet to read and I’ve been reading them on the train and it’s been interesting. I’ve talked to some people and they’re like, “You’re reading this?” I’m like, “Oh yeah, I’m reading this but I’m not finished yet.” |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:20 | We’re not Sarah, who read the whole thing, four podcasts, three or four episodes of podcast. I said, “Damn Sarah. Shit.” |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:29 | I listened to the podcast. Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:30 | Handle your business, girl. Shoot. I was like, “Sarah, give us a moment.” |
| S. RODNEY: 19:37 | She’s gangster, though. She’s gangster. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:39 | No. I really loved that. I was like– |
| S. BOND: 19:42 | I have a lot of white guilt. Yeah. I have a lot of white guilt. So I felt like I had to read all of it. Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:47 | That’s what I knew. And then you had to have really smart– good. Good. All right. But thanks a lot for that. But yeah. So Seph, what did you think as you were going through the article? Just your general impression of it, other than the thing that you just mentioned. |
| S. RODNEY: 20:02 | Well, just that there is a good deal of historical insight and I like the way they– the essays that I’ve read, particularly the one that started the issue, the one by Nikole Hannah-Jones and a few others really carefully unpick the sort of underpinning of, say, plantation culture, of Wall Street, of particular economic systems, of habits and means and how municipal bonds ended up coming out of or being connected with a particular mode of control of the human bodies. I like that these historical minded essays also brought up against these other more poetic and lyrical gestures like the poem by Eve L. Ewing and the redacted version of George Washington’s first Fugitive Slave Act. [inaudible]. What the things does– I think what the magazine does is it takes me through a kind of deep analysis of a period or a set of practices and then it tosses me into this kind of lyrical place where I’m just thinking about how this affects a person’s psyche. What does this look– essentially, the magazine says, “Here’s what’s happened and then here’s what happened in this person’s psyche because of all of this.” I think that’s a really useful and intelligent way to lay out the story and I like that. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 22:03 | Okay. |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:05 | Yeah. Anything you guys felt like they should’ve done a better job on it? Sarah had the great point about– and I think I sat with it a little bit and you’re right. That is what follows a definitive date like that even if we’re going to grant it that there is an eraser. So what happens is you’re erasing kind of the things outside of that boundary. Anything else that you feel like hey could’ve done better with the project? Maybe this is a better question at the end after we talked about it a bit more. But anyway, Seph, you look like you’re about to say something. |
| S. RODNEY: 22:39 | Yeah. There are two places, actually, so far– again, I’ve only been through about halfway through. I’ve only been halfway through the magazine but two places where I’ve written no emphatically in the text. Maybe we can just– well, let’s just do one because I don’t want to take up too much of the oxygen in the room. The piece written by Barry Jenkins on page 46 where he talks about Gabriel Prosser, the 24-year-old literate blacksmith who organized one of the most extensively planned slave rebellions. He gets caught out because he told the wrong negroes and they told on him and they hanged him. And at the end of this piece by Jenkins– I’ll just read the last sentence. Yes. This last sentence, “For Gabriel Prosser, the blacksmith, leader of men and accepting no master’s name, had stepped into the troubled waters.” Sorry. Last two sentences. Last sentence is, “To the very last, he was whole. He was free.” I know he was not free and that is precisely what the problem is. And what this author is doing– and a lot of writers do this. A lot of writers do this, is they corner off, they etch out the space in the psyche and they say, “Well, he was free there. He was free in his ideas.” There are innumerable Hollywood movies who do this. In fact, I just saw Pan’s Labyrinth the other day and they did basically the same thing. They cracked it the story around which this girl was this princess from this mythical world and lah, lah, lah. And then she ends up dying, stabbed to death or shot to death by some fascist general. But in her mind, she goes back to her underground lair or kingdom and she becomes their princess again and lah, lah, lah. |
| S. RODNEY: 24:33 | I don’t like that move because what it does is I think it gives us an out that we don’t deserve. He was not fucking free. That’s why he died. |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:46 | Yeah. So I’m with you on that. I think that’s an absolutely fair reading and a fair point but that rhetorical move is precisely the thing out of which we craft aspirational and inspirational stories. Jesus died on the cross but he was really set free. No. In reality, he suffocated to death because your lungs can’t continue to breathe when you’re being hung by your hands. That’s actually what happened but billions of people have been moved by the story of his ultimate metaphysical freedom. And so whether it worked in that article or not, I certainly have some sympathy for that gesture to inspire people. |
| S. BOND: 25:36 | Right. Right. I think that it’s important to say that this circles back to what we talked about the ambiguities of liberty with Thomas Jefferson. You have to define what you mean by freedom and who it applies to. And so then it has meaning. And so if we don’t– when we make freedom kind of all-encompassing and don’t define it as corporal freedom or as ethical freedom or as freedom in terms of civil rights, then it becomes a catch-all term. So it can be inspirational but I think, to Seph’s point, that there could’ve been more precision in the language because you don’t always have to end on a high note. I think that often times writers do want to end on a uplifting note and there’s a lot of pressure to tie things up. And that’s not always possible when we’re writing but that is our natural proclivity. I think to want to have hope as the last things in Pandora’s box because that’s– well, that’s the last thing that was in Pandora’s box. |
| C.T. WEBB: 26:47 | Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s– yeah. I just have a– yes. Thumbs up. Yeah. I agree with all that. It’s true that it becomes incredibly limiting to have the term unlimited. It becomes essentially useless if you don’t have any kind of– if you don’t have any boundary around it. There’s no point to it. There’s no utility. It can’t be a useful tool if you’re leaving it undescribed in that way. So I think that’s absolutely fair. I think we’re having some audio issues but we’re also coming up on time. So is there anything that one of you wanted to add about sort of the project as we head into the themes next week? |
| S. RODNEY: 27:39 | Okay. So this is the thing I wanted to do which I alluded to earlier but I would like just to give our listeners a sense of what we think we’re going to be dealing with in the next few podcasts is the themes that Sarah came up with that generally organize the effort of the 1619 project. |
| C.T. WEBB: 27:56 | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. |
| S. BOND: 27:58 | Right. I think some of the organizing principles there are really important, and the first two I think you can see together which is economic might born from slavery, which was also after the introductory podcast. The next episode of the 1619 podcast is just on the economics of slavery but also just the economic residuals of slavery. And that’s a big theme along with industrial power. We also have themes like the electoral system and we’ll be definitely addressing food and popular music together. I think there’s a lot of themes like inequities in public health and education that are important as well as income inequality. And underlying almost all of this is the theme of violence. This idea that underneath that chattel slaves can be treated in a way that is subhuman. That violence is just under the surface of almost all of the themes that we’re going to look at. |
| C.T. WEBB: 29:05 | Right, right. That it was just under the surface as a theme but it was on full display in the system. The entire system worked on violence and– |
| S. RODNEY: 29:13 | So about that guys, maybe we can just end on this, because I’m curious about this and it’s not exactly seated in the 1619 project, but I think it comes out of the kinds of thinking that have gone into this project, which is lately people have said things like this particular law– no. That’s not a good example. This particular move by this political figure is a kind of violence. You’ve heard phrases like that, right? That when they told my child that they couldn’t come to school dressed in whatever, that that is a kind of violence. And I’m starting to feel like the ways that we talk about violence now have become so abstracted that they are starting to lose purchase. |
| C.T. WEBB: 30:05 | It’s a decadence. It’s a kind of decadence. These are positions that are not being subjected to actual violence because if you had been subjected to actual violence, you would not be making that analogy around that issue. Now, I’m not saying– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 30:25 | I don’t know about that. |
| C.T. WEBB: 30:26 | Steve, I’m not saying that rhetoric itself cannot be a weapon. If you’re sitting in a courtroom and someone says, “You’re guilty.” That’s rhetoric but that is a– there are men with guns and batons that are going to make sure you understand that that rhetoric is real. I feel like a lot of times that rhetoric is decoupled from the actual threat of violence as it gets used in popular culture. I’m completely with Seph. I’m with Seph on the suggestion. He wasn’t making a definitive– he wasn’t stating a definitive position. I don’t want to describe that to him but– |
| S. BOND: 31:00 | Yeah. I see this in the terminology surrounding rape as well. When we say the word rape, often times, we just kind of throw it around. Like people say, “I felt raped by this or I felt raped by that.” And I think that kind of lessens what rape means when we eventually talk about sexual violence against enslaved persons. I think it decreases the resonance and the power of the word rape to then be like, “I was raped by this person.” What you mean is economically or just that this person came on to you very strongly. So yeah. Again, I think it comes down to the potency of language and how we need to protect language as something that has power to communicate. |
| S. RODNEY: 31:49 | And I do think that that’s one of the sort of byproducts of the 1619 project, is it actually does that. It re-ambiguates language with a certain kind of potency. And that’s why I think I’ve been really– in places, it’s harrowing, it’s difficult but I’ve been awfully excited to read this, read the magazine. And I want to get to the podcast because it does that for me, it reinvigorates my sense of how language gest recruited to make us– to help us understand something. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:20 | We’re overtime but Steven, can we give you the last word. You want to jump in with a–? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:26 | Fine. This happened the last episode. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:29 | Because you’re so like– we start bickering and then you’re so polite and nice that you let us kind of do our thing and spin in this. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:38 | Well, I say maybe five, six minutes, there was a police car outside of my apartment building and it was just going off. And they for some reason– I turned off my mic just so that it wouldn’t bother anyone, unfortunately. But so last words, last words. I’m very excited about getting to the next few episodes to talk about these themes because I think they’re really powerful. And I definitely agree with the language thing, the preservation of language. So when I was thinking about the word violence and how we really think that violence is entertainment– not violence is entertainment but entertainment that uses violence as a way to kind of– I don’t know what it really does but I can see the lessening and I can see the sort of water-downed quality of what words mean. And words are always changing. We’re always inventing new words. And so the preservation of language to me seems to be a project that’s kind of not really– it’s helpful but it’s a losers game because of the ways in which language looks at and is invented on the spot and we need to maybe just continue to build on the project, on the creation of rather than the preservation of, even if it has more potency. I still have questions about that. So I’m not really completely aware of all of what I’m thinking right now but I’m excited about this idea of the reinvigoration of language to get people to understand things they may not understand or want to understand. |
| C.T. WEBB: 34:17 | Yeah. That’s a great close. So I appreciate that. Sarah, Steven, Seph, great conversation as always and I’ll speak to you guys next week. |
| S. RODNEY: 34:26 | Okay. Take care. |
| C.T. WEBB: 34:28 | Bye-bye. |
| S. RODNEY: 34:29 | Bye. [music] |
References
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