Remember the so-called "1776 Commission"? Started in September 2020, during the final throes of trump's ill-fated re-election campaign, it was a group of largely Black conservative writers who convened to counter the 1619 Project, a series of articles put together by new york times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. In this episode, the brothers discuss the foolishness and the ongoing danger of the 1776 Commission. They point out that the Black intellectuals selected by trump to make up the 1776 Commission exemplify a kind of bourgeois Black misleadership that has long sought to serve the antiblack structure by suppressing Black resistance and trying to lead Black people to obey the slaveholding empire of amerikkka.
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BLACK THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Not Enough for Freedom: The 1619 Project Helps Liberals, the 1776 Commission Serves Fascists, and Black Folk Still Ain't Free
In 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones curated a powerful series of articles and school curriculum called the 1619 Project. The main argument of the series was that, from the first moment when enslaved Africans were imported to the u.s. colony of Virginia in 1619, "No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed." In other words, the u.s. is built on a foundation of slavery that continues to influence everything about the u.s.a. to this very day.
Taken together, these writings counter the standard story that amerikkka was built by Great white Men who, regardless of their faults, are to be held up as heroes because they put forward the ideals of liberty and justice for all. Some of the titles of the essays from the 1619 Project can give you a sense of how different this counter-narrative is from the way most schools teach u.s. history:
- "Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true."
- "For centuries, black music has been the sound of artistic freedom. No wonder everybody’s always stealing it."
- "Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our prison system."
- "A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America"
The 1619 Project, earned Jones a Pulitzer prize and a lot of followers, particularly in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and the still-unpunished police murder of Breonna Taylor.
Overall, the 1619 Project is pointing in a helpful direction. As we Black folks fight to even imagine a world in which Black lives matter and cannot be taken wantonly without severe repercussions, it is imperative that we build from an acknowledgement of this basic fact: The u.s. as we know it would not exist without the enslavement of Black people. The more conscious among us know that this isn't just a thing of the past: The u.s. continues to find alternate ways of enslaving Black people in order to keep itself going. This is the most basic of facts. And our work as Black activists isn't just based on wanting to help people who just randomly happen to be in need and happen to be Black, but specifically on the fact that the condition of us Black people is a direct result of historic and ongoing injustice. In serving our Black communities, we fight against that injustice because it was wrong to us and our ancestors from the very beginning. We love each other, and we hate our oppression.
So, while the 1619 Project is to be praised for getting this counter-narrative out there, it does so at a certain cost to Black freedom struggle. That's because it frames this basic counter-narrative in particular ways that get even moderate liberals to agree with Black radicals that the united states was founded on slavery. And that's just not enough.
One shortcoming of the 1619 Project's narrative is that it should have started earlier, at least in 1492, even if it was talking only about slavery, but especially if it was also acknowledging the constant companion of racial slavery: genocide. The genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the americas is connected to the enslavement of Black people in a whole lot of ways:
- Indigenous americans were genocided for embracing us when we escaped plantations and resisting oppression with us,
- Black americans were recruited to the military and paramilitaries that stole land from Indigenous americans,
- The decline in enslavement of Indigenous americans was accompanied by the rise in enslavement of Black americans,
- Indigenous Africans stolen from the continent became Black americans and many Indigenous Africans were genocided on the continent in the process of capturing us for the slave trade, and
- The forces of enslavement and genocide at the heart of the 1619 Project's narrative were all at work long before 1619, even in what we today call the united states.
In other words, enslaved and genocided have a common interest in resisting amerikkka, and the 1619 Project missed an opportunity to emphasize that fact.
Another thing is, of course, the 1619 Project's narrative is not even a new narrative. The idea that amerikkka is founded on genocide and slavery comes straight out of Black thought, at least as old as David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Black thought is the collective understanding that Black people have developed based on our radically marginalized experiences over the last 500 years. It is the constantly evolving body of knowledge that we've had to gain just in order to survive, and it is how we teach our children and grandchildren to survive and resist being duped, re-enslaved, genocided, and crushed in an antiblack world. And one of the basic facts it grows from is what Frantz Fanon would have called "the fact of blackness." The reality of our lived experience as Black people teaches anyone who isn't in denial a common set of facts that we acknowledge, or die from not acknowledging -- and we often die whether we acknowledge it or not.
The bigger critique of the 1619 Project, however, concerns how it opens the Black thought narrative to those who would affirm amerikkka. In the hands of liberal-progressives like Jones and the new york times, this central narrative gets watered down into a quasi-patriotic narrative that says, in so many words, "america is basically a good idea but has a long way to go to fulfill its ideals." Through the 1619 Project's narrative, liberals are shortchanging the Black thought narrative of the danger it poses to oppressors, enslavers, and genociders. There is, after all, a danger in just allowing Black thought to speak freely, because if it were ever truly listened to, it would tell a narrative of amerikkka that might result in a fundamental transformation not merely of the united states or the amerikkkas but the entire world system we have come to know over the last 500 years.
Liberal-progressives have basically co-opted this central element of Black thought and contorted it to serve a u.s. patriotic narrative that positions the Black oppressed of amerikkka as the long-suffering saviors of amerikkka. A narrative that should cut across the borders of nation-states set up by european enslavers and unite oppressed people instead becomes a U.S.-centric narrative that says that slavery is "at the heart" of u.s. history and must in some way be atoned for like an "original sin" of this nation.
In 1975, u.s. historian Edmund Morgan helped nudge this version of the narrative into the mainstream of u.s. historians when he referred to "the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom." In his book American Slavery, American Freedom, he argued that the founders of the United States fought for their own freedom from european colonial powers AND for their right to enslave and genocide Black and Indigenous peoples. In other words, they wrote "all men are created equal" while raping and torturing enslaved people. And if they felt any sense of contradicting themselves -- well, eventually, somebody could just write an HBO drama or a Broadway musical to meditate on how these "founding fathers" were basically good people but were just so vexed that they couldn't see their way to not raping us, not torturing and enslaving us, and not murdering us.
Of course, Morgan's narrative was an advance over the mainstream white narratives of the u.s.a. that preceded it, but its shortcoming is also that of the 1619 Project: the u.s.a. professes freedom but relies on slavery because, at a deep psychic level, the white people comprising its ruling class simply don't recognize the people they enslave as human beings.
As Raoul Peck's recent documentary film series Exterminate All the Brutes reports, this is the case everywhere in the world that european settler-colonizers have stolen land and bodies over the last 500 years. The playbook of enslavers and genociders is remarkably similar the world over. And everywhere it is antiblack.
Moreover, at some level, genociders aren't even conscious of how similar they are. To some extent, they just do and say the same shit because they have a similar relationship to Black bodies wherever and whenever they are in the world. For instance, both white South Afrikan colonizers of the 17th century and white amerikkkan gentrifiers of the 21st century say shit like "Nobody was here when we arrived" and "Black and Indigenous people haven't contributed much to our culture" (see u.s. politician Rick Santorum's comments for a recent example of this). Using military, paramilitary, and police force, white people reserve a place for themselves in which they can keep up the illusion that they haven't done anything massively, murderously wrong in order to have all that they enjoy.
If Jones and Morgan used the psychoanalytic tools of Black thought, they could go further to gain clarity on why you cannot love Black freedom and love amerikkka. They refer to a so-called "paradox" of a supposedly "free" society based on Black slavery. But, to white people, it's not as a paradox or a contradiction that needs to be fixed at all. It is precisely all they ever wanted it to be. whiteness, everywhere in the world. is grounded in a kind of unaccountable psychic structure -- known in psychoanalytic discourse as a perverse sadistic structure -- that allows those positioned as white to physically harm and terrorize those positioned as Black and Indigenous without ever themselves being available to being harmed and terrorized. That's what happens when you have all these guns. The vast asymmetries of power between european genocider-slaveholders and the Indigenous and Black populations of the amerikkkas are what allow this space for genocider-slaverholders to imagine themselves as basically good people. This space, propped up by raw force and terror, is known as whiteness, and the white people who have embraced it flourish within this contradiction, within this massive sadistic psychic structure. And it has bound together europeans of vastly different cultures and worldviews for the better part of the last millennium -- and counting.
That's a long time. This suggests that the liberal effort of things like the 1619 Project to change amerikkka by telling white people that they are hypocrites will always face the most severe and violently antiblack backlash. Creating a world in which Black lives matter won't come about by merely acknowledging this contradiction as though people will see the error of their ways and allow us to change what they have built their family legacies and senses of self on. Fundamental change will require something that breaks through the walls built to protect the perverse sadistic psychic structure that is whiteness. Decisively resolving that contradiction identified by the 1619 Project and Morgan requires acknowledging amerikkka itself as the greatest enemy of freedom in the world. Hence, trying to make amerikkka "live up to its ideals" won't get us free because amerikkka's ideal IS freedom for white people, enslavement for Black people.
However excellent and exceptional Jones' 1619 Project and Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom are, neither will go all the way there. They will almost, but not quite say, what any ethical student of Black thought knows: Resolving this "american paradox" will require ending that which we recognize as amerikkka.
The Black thought narrative is a critique that cuts to the roots of what amerikkka is and means. In other words, the narrative as Black thought articulates it is radical -- meaning, it literally goes to the root. (Remember, the word "radical" comes from the Latin word "radix" meaning "root.")
That is why, in this moment, liberal-progressives like Jones are called up from the bullpen to helm a narrative that would otherwise be a radical narrative, and would otherwise radicalize those who have nothing to lose. Liberal-progressives, many of them from the non-profit industrial complex, are NOT using co-opted narratives like the 1619 Project to steer the oppressed toward a revolution led by the Black poor from below that could end the world we have come to know over the last 500 years. Liberal-progressives gain the trust of radicals by articulating a similar-sounding narrative, and then they quickly adjust the narrative just enough with ideas about making amerikkka "live up to its ideals" to keep the Black thought narrative from taking over. In such ways, street radicals are converted into people who seek to make amerikkka "better." Problem is, genocide cannot be made "better." It has to be ended.
Look, it's great to acknowledge how the 1619 Project is more helpful than the dominant narrative of the u.s.a., but we should be very careful about it. The case of the 1619 Project shows that, before our very eyes, Black thought in the hands of liberal-progressives can quickly go from being a radical threat to the ongoing genocide that amerikkka is to a helpmate to the lofty amerikkkan ideals of freedom for "all" -- even as the genocide of Black, Indigenous, and poor people continues.
There are many good things about the 1619 Project's narrative, but overall, it signifies a repackaging and watering down of Black thought as old as the first maroons who revolted against their enslavement and fought alongside Indigenous people. The present historical moment has forced many people who have previously ignored or rejected Black thought to answer to it. And in such a moment, a narrative like the 1619 Project's narrative provides something that progressives like Jones can line up promote. To not get in on the Black thought narrative of amerikkka would be to risk irrelevance. That's the kind of political moment we are in right now. Make no mistake, however. The 1619 Project's narrative still seeks to preserve amerikkka as an ideal that just hasn't gone far enough. The idea that we should really be fighting to carry amerikkkan ideals further should make Black people and those who love our freedom struggle very uneasy.
But even the 1619 Project does some labor toward centering the perspectives of the least powerful instead of the genociders and enslavers whose narratives are almost always taught in schools. That is better than what we have, and it is certainly better than the 1776 Report.
Some might dismiss the creation of the 1776 Commission as Trump's (failed) last-ditch effort to win re-election. But the report didn't fall flat just because Trump lost re-election. It landed safely in a power structure that has long attempted to bludgeon Black people into silence in order to maintain control over how the amerikkkan story is told. Trump and his fascist and conservative allies sought to empower right-wing Black intellectuals -- like John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, who are largely marginal and irrelevant in Black conversations -- in their ongoing project to tell us that we need to speak nicer about a society that dehumanizes us in just about every way that it can. These servile intellectuals have been given a mission to commandeer Black history in service of a "patriotic education" that serves white supremacy. In other words, in trump's effort to save the white supremacist narrative of u.s. history, he had to make an intervention in Black studies, a field which, like Black cities and Black countries, he ordinarily looks down his nose at. That's why he needed Black intellectual proxies to be his handmaids.
It should go without saying that trump cannot make such an intervention through publication of well-researched texts. (He barely reads.) The only way he can intervene in Black thought is by using force to batter down the contradictions, or at least those who would expose those contradictions. And even without Trump in office, the foot soldiers and shock troops of the antiblack structure have already received their marching orders and are still very much at the work of silencing Black and Indigenous voices -- trying to de-fund Black studies and ethnic studies and attack those who study and apply it. It all goes to prove, once again, that whiteness, and the right wing tendency that forms its vanguard, has long seen Black thought as so great a threat to amerikkka that they are not above recruiting Black helpers to shut down Black thought.
In this episode, recorded shortly after Trump announced the 1776 Commission, the brothers discuss the larger effort to suppress Black knowledge and Black thought and how the 1776 Report fits into that effort. Even though the commission became largely irrelevant once Trump lost the presidency, the 1776 Report is still floating around down there as an archived presidential commission report, ready to be revived by thirsty white supremacists who don't mind sadistically forcing a "patriotic history" on Black and Indigenous people in order to silence our righteous resistance to genocide and slavery. The Black intellectuals on the 1776 Commission represent an ongoing problem internal to our communities: the problem of Black intellectual misleadership appointed by white people and white interests to force Black people to conform our understanding of our own history to that which will allow our enslavers and genociders to keep doing what they want.
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