My work is hosting said author, for a presentation/ town hall.
I’m looking forward to that call this week. Will be interesting to hear directly from her. It’s one of a series of meetings/ presentations, but it caught my eye.
Academics didn’t even need to take the complicated and detailed approach to 1619 to try and address the problem with history lessons we have. They could’ve just started with why isn’t Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre taught in school, all schools? At the very least, for black children, it really disrupts the lie that we are told almost every day of our lives, that black people can’t, won’t and don’t create anything, can’t achieve something… are worth less. The problem with academics is they seem to lose sight of why these things are important to black people.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to acknowledge the limitation of capitalism alongside American history. It’s done all the time during the study of economics. I mean economics is a social science. You’re not going to be able to even study economics without including scientific methods, history and of course economic systems like capitalism while doing so. Just because someone might believe capitalism is a better system than other systems does not mean they don’t have criticism about it.
I hope you get to enjoy it. I was pleasantly surprised with how firm, not there for anyone’s comfort but open she was about her work and that was well before any of her academic tenure issues came to light.
Oh, definitely, though the problem isn’t limited to academics. I’d say that academics have been more, not less, aware of and vocal about the things you discuss. It’s just that no one cares. Really, academics long ago ceased to be important influences on American intellectual development. We became too insular, writing only for each other, using language that only a scattering of people who had spent years in graduate school could even understand, much less appreciate. And academics impact mostly the college level. The real place where the rubber meets the road is K-12, and what gets taught there is mostly the result of local school boards, which in turn are influenced mostly by what the board members want to believe, not by academics.
In fact, the uproar over 1619 is partly the result of people pushing back against the idea that academics–which the right have condemned en masse as anti-American anyhow–might influence what is taught in schools. People in graduate history programs were discussing every single thing we are now talking about, in detail, thirty and forty years ago; I remember, as I was in history grad school twice, in the early eighties and the early nineties. The thing was, no one outside of that circle gave a damn.
K-12 teachers get degrees in Education, mostly. Social Studies teachers take a few classes, usually survey type classes, in order to pass tests like Praxis II, to get certified. Praxis II, which I took a few years ago to see how it lined up with what we were teaching our prospective K-12 teachers, is/was mostly a bunch of freakin’ trivia. Most of an Education degree understandably centers around things like pedagogy and educational process, as well as the intricacies of certification. The last thing on the agenda for most programs is re-writing the American historical narrative. It should be, but it isn’t. People getting degrees in history often do get exposed to much more accurate and nuanced narratives, but many of them go on to things like law school or general business careers. Few end up teaching history. Even if they do end up in K-12, the way school boards work the chances are good a teacher will have little leeway in how they approach certain topics.
As to the content, I don’t think the problem is so much that children are taught that people of color are worthless. It is more the absence of any narratives that front and center anyone but white people, plus the insidious framing of race in “color blind” or “race neutral” ways, that wipe away centuries of trauma and oppression and replace it with an artificial and utterly false vison of an equal-opportunity society where everyone is on the same level, disrupted only by those few bad people we call racists. So many of my students come to college having been indoctrinated that even talking about society in racial terms is bad, that racism is a purely personal failing, and that anyone who focuses a conversation about race is Not With the Program. This is not a failure of academics, as much as the result of deliberate misinformation perpetrated by people who benefit from perpetuating the status quo.
Well, yes. What I’m talking about is something a bit different. The most active and insightful historical approaches to race in this country always included strong critiques of the role property and capitalism played and continue to play in shaping the culture of white supremacy. And even relatively conservative commentators acknowledged the flaws in unregulated capitalism. You are very correct–you cannot critique racism without critiquing the political economy, as King was trying to do when he was murdered. My point is that critics of more accurate and inclusive narratives about race and power used the sometimes doctrinaire Marxist of some otherwise exceptionally gifted academics to condemn everything they did; thus, critique of structural racism lost traction as many people who might have been inclined to listen focused only on the anti-capitalism parts of the message, which during the Cold War was not a winning look sadly enough.
And when I talk about critique of capitalism, I’m not talking so much about someone like John Stuart Mill, whose excellent evisceration of laissez faire came from the perspective of someone who was otherwise deeply committed to the concept of personal liberty and private property. I’m talking about the powerful Marxist critiques from academics like Eugene Genovese, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, and others like them, amazing academics who have been fighting the good fight for decades. Much of their message though has been obscured for many because their critics focused only on their “anti-American” anti-capitalist approaches. Well, and race and gender in Davis’ case of course,
This is absolutely a major problem. Color blind and race neutral and kids being too young to learn about racism… all of that is discussed with how white children will perceive it, how comfortable white children will be with the material. It’s not really an if here. Black people are told throughout our lives that we’re not worth anything unless white society allows us to be worth something.
I am curious how many of your black students say that.
They’re doing the same thing now. The Cold War was just a convenient event for white supremacist and those enjoying privileges in a society built on top of racism to keep going with many of the earlier claims they made.
1619 is a project that really hit a lot of nerves because, for once, we not only have a project focused on history, it’s actually one written by and also force black voices. It’s not told from the white experience. Even almost everything we have that is acceptable to white American around Martin Luther King Jr. is told by those voices and for those voices which is why it leaves so much out and most the adults and children around here think we had a march and speech from a bunch of docile men and boom, magic happened.
I think you are correct that the impact of how things are taught is to create feelings of worthlessness among people of color. That of course is not the overt message, but yes, it is one of the things that makes “race neutral” and “color blind” ideas so dangerous. To many people looking at the curriculum of schools, though, all they see is the surface message, not the deeper meanings.
Sadly, we have very few Black students, for a variety of reasons. But interestingly, in public, among the white majority, the students of color that I have had in my classes often have adopted the positions of the white majority. I suspect this is to avoid feeling even more isolated, by becoming a focus of negative attention in an environment already skewed against them, but I of course do not pretend to know what is going on in anyone’s heart of hearts. I have had limited success in getting students of all backgrounds to engage with their identities–racial, gender, sexual, national, ethnic, and more–but it is slow and often tense work.
Definitely. Look at the claims against AOC or Omar, calling them “communists” and all. It’s ludicrous, but the dog whistles still work.
That’s called code-switching. They don’t have a choice but to say certain things so they can get jobs and A’s and maybe not be disciplined constantly by adults who control their lives. That’s not how it is spoken in circles where you don’t have to code switch. I mean… the filters have died off and a lot of people are shocked to know how we feel and what we will say when not forced to code-switch.
It scares people how not at all uncertain minorities feel about these things, and yeah we get moderated heavily, scolded heavily, toned police up the ass because white men, especially, are shocked that underneath it all, we’re not cowed… we just adopted behaviors to survive.
I think this really is a problem with linking some of the 1619 stuff to marxist ideas… Not that everyone involved in that stuff is into that, or even a significant number, but I think that tying attacks on structural racism to attacks on the fundamentals of capitalism is not ideal. I think it’s creating enemies where you don’t need to.
Certainly the structural racism we see today “grew up” in a capitalist environment (or mercantilist, I guess?), but I don’t think that the answer is socialism. I’d also say that enslaving people kind of doesn’t fit within the “rules” of capitalism, in that it’s not a free exchange of labor. A fully socialist system, that treated Black people as sub-humans as they were treated at the time, would just have easily resulted in the same kind of atrocities.
Allowing attacks on structural racism to become attacks on capitalism is not productive for anyone, I don’t think.
Slaves were not people. They were private property. That’s the reality of how America labeled those people then. The very idea of private property is baked into capitalism. You can’t really separate slavery from capitalism. American slaves were not just a large part of specific industry, they were documented as literal wealth. We have story after story about those poor white slave owners losing their wealth and suddenly not having labor and hundreds of sneaky ways white supremacist try to re-label what slaves actually were to make white people feel more comfortable with history. In CA they actually called them family… family, in a text book 2021… asking children if the slave should leave his family who fed and clothed him or die for freedom.
American history is black history, is the history slavery, is the history of capitalism, is the history of womens’ rights, is the history of genocide against the Native Americans, is the history of land ownership, is the history of several massacres, is the history of building and destroying. They’re linked whether people are comfortable with that or not. It’s time to stop being worried about how comfortable everyone is talking about these things and to talk about them because it is what is. We cannot go back and make history pretty so it’s better suited to our favorite songs.
Brava!
But of course you can.
As you say, slaves were not considered humans. They were considered property, like livestock.
But they have livestock in socialist economies.
If society decides that certain people aren’t in fact people, then that’s going to be a problem, independent of the economic system, I think.
That misses the point that once the entrenched economic system is dependent on a moral wrong (slavery) to continue, there’s an incredible economic resistance to any challenge to right that wrong.
Without question. I think there was a quote by Sinclair along the lines of, “It’s hard to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
You seem to think that you can take capitalism out of a society so you can talk about everything else, like a slice and dice approach works. I think that’s akin to trying to talk about the history of women and minorities but then demand no one talk about politics while doing so. It’s not possible to do.
It is time to stop trying to control the conversation around history and start listening to other voices, unique and diverse voices. White society had a chance, hundreds of years, to tell history truthfully… blew it. This same group continues to blow it and continues to demand to control conversations around it.
Step one.
Stop trying to control and dictate the conversation and listen to those who have not been listened to. Capitalism is not the weakest economic system out there. It does not need your undying protection at the cost of everything else in order to sustain it. Spend some of the defense mechanism on the people who have been harmed and literally killed largely because there is so much fear around an educated populace who actually knows our history might stop buying into some of the bullshit that is being sold today, and that would mean some people will not maintain control of all the wealth and power they’re used to having. A shift in wealth and power in a capitalistic society is not the death of capitalism, it’s just a shift.
It’s really hard to engage in a discussion if any active participation is deemed an attempt to control and dictate the conversation.
While I’m not sure if this is directed at me, if so, who is the target of the control? Who is not being listened to?
And if I were to listen to them, does that preclude disagreement with them? It seems like someone could listen intently to everything that someone else says, fully understand their position, and still disagree with their position.
The point isn’t a knee jerk defense of capitalism, as much as it’s pointing out that if you tie attempts to fix structural racism, to dismantling of capitalism, then you are less likely to succeed.
I do not believe that structural racism depends on capitalism, nor does capitalism depend on structural racism. I don’t believe you do either, right?
I think disentangling the relationship between capitalism and slavery is complicated, and probably requires some precise terminology to be of much use. Slavery has existed in many societies, the economies of which may not always align with what we consider to be “capitalism,” at least the modern Adam Smith-style version.
On the other hand, American slavery is of course deeply interwoven with the economic system of 18th and 19th century America.
The big problem, which i am by no means an expert at, is that much of Western intellectual academic progress came in the 50s-70s in France, which had adopted a Gaullist / nationalist approach and “re-appropriated” Marx and Marxist terminology but also using Marx as a kind of first-mover, the gospel with which to struggle, accept or oppose, especially the ideas about the mechanistic historical processes, in the process of developing postmodernism, and postmodernism is kind of the ground floor of most social criticism in the US today, so it has this weird “tinge” of Marxism/social criticism that has basically nothing to do with Das Capital.
But there’s no doubt that the role of capitalism and slavery cannot possibly be denied - the very preservation of money and productivity are entirely capitalist notions. Indeed empires less concerned with productivity were generally more tolerant of minority groups compared to the proto-industrial slavery that fueled the West’s over-rapid expansion. It’s also entirely clear that the role of capital in increasing the standard of living, rather than decreasing it, has little to do with capitalism and more to do with nationalism. Indeed by delinking capital from nation-states and exporting labor, the causal chain is broken and “workers” are once again willing to accept the excesses of capitalism because it’s happening overseas to other peoples that you don’t communicate or identify with.
You’re trying to remove a key component from a historical economic structure by removing the economic structure itself. I mean I have been listening to historians, academics, politicians… you name it, if someone had a megaphone in this country they would say from one side of their mouth hey slaves didn’t really contribute THAT much, things would’ve been fine without THEM, their contribution to the South was not SUCH a big deal while over here dominating history books with the woes of white land owners and how much the Civil War was NOT about slavery but state rights and on and on and on again to the point where the argument becomes the goal instead of the the study of history itself.
I believe the attempts to try and dissect history in ways that are more palatable to those in power is simply a means to continue to keep the status quo and not allow us to actually finally, finally after hundreds of years not acknowledging the truth of what happened, to actually say yes, yes these things happened.
America as it is today, as successful as it is today, was built on the back of slaves and the oppressed. That’s not capitalism or industry or political studies, that’s where we are today. It happened. And the refusal to acknowledge even the most basic moments in time, like the Tulsa Massacre is bogged down by the continuous need to want to treat American Slavery and Black History as if it is somehow separate from everything else. Every month should be Black History month. Music, wealth, neighborhoods, wars, space… we’re always there, always contributing, always having things being taken from us.
Like Gordon said, it’s interwoven with who and what we are as nation today, and if we keep letting the same voices dictate the discourses that have been controlling the conversation since the start, we will not improve.
So, you cannot take capitalism out of the equation that was American Slavery anymore than it is appropriate to keep carving out Black History like it’s less than, separate from… not important enough to be more than a speech and a march and some half-ass remarks about slavery in our textbooks.
I just wanted to chime in and say once again how much I appreciate your voice and contributions to this forum.
What if, instead of viewing it as a way to dissect history in a manner that is more palatable to those in power, you instead view it as attempting to rally allies to your cause? There’s nothing subservient in the act of convincing others.
This is all true, I don’t think anything I’ve said here suggests otherwise.
But you absolutely can address systemic racism without dismantling capitalism. Likewise, socialism is not the solution to systemic racism.
Is it useful e.g. to call 5th century Athens a “capitalist” society? Obviously they had money and trade and property, but so do mercantilist economies… This is what I mean about defining terms. How broadly are we defining capitalism, and if we define it too broadly, does the term lose value?
disclaimer: I am not an economist. I didn’t even take Econ 101 in college.