It’s a refrain you hear all the time now: America is a racist society. But the presumption goes further than that. All of American history, say some, can be explained by race; it’s the primary theme of our national narrative, and it provides an indispensable framework for understanding present politics.
This simplistic point of view increasingly dominates the thought process of many on the identitarian left; it pervades the Democratic Party and constitutes what I previously called the Great Distraction (4/15/23 TPP), because it draws energy and attention away from more pressing concerns. It also has a counterpart on the hard right.
For extreme Republicans, the comparable racial explanation of why things have evolved as they have is the theory of the Great Replacement. In brief, it posits that racial minorities are coming for everything the White majority have worked for and acquired, as well as their place in society. Indeed, Whites will be intentionally “replaced” as part of a liberal conspiracy.
The advantage of these respective visions for those adhering to them is that they offer easily understood interpretations of past and present, and provide emotional causes to demonstrate about and rally around. Further, they replace demanding programmatic substance with simple sloganeering. Catchphrases will do: it’s Team Blue’s multiracial, multicultural America against Team Red’s White-supremacist America.
The right-wing diagnosis is easy to dismiss; it’s based on the delusional musings of the MAGA misinformation machine. The racial thesis of the left is another matter; it has support of portions of academia and much of the ruling establishment, and carries the imprimatur of institutional respectability.
Witness this comment by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow (5/3/21), which went unchallenged at the time: “Historically … there is no question that the country [the U.S.] was founded by racists and white supremacists.” While that statement contains an element of truth — the Northern colonies accepted Southern slavery as the price of national unification — it’s a gross oversimplification. The founders were not consciously racist or bent on establishing White supremacy; they simply accepted the world as it was - - a world in which economic exploitation by the privileged of the underprivileged (whether White, Black or Native American) was considered the normal state of things.
Blow went on to make the assertion that much of America’s early wealth was “built on the backs of enslaved Africans.” That’s true as far as it goes; that is, it’s largely accurate for the South, but not so elsewhere. New England was built by free labor for the most part, and what were then called the “middle colonies” (Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Delaware) by White indentured servitude.
Half or more of those who came to America prior to the Revolution were indentured servants or redemptioners, White Europeans (mostly English, Irish, Scots and Germans), consigned for a number of years to masters to pay for their voyages, or involuntarily shipped abroad to work off penalties imposed by the British penal system. They included captives from England’s expansionist wars. For instance, “meere Irish” (or “wild Irish”) who were driven out of Ireland and could be purchased cheaply from ship captains, were considered a good bargain. These bondsmen, half of whom did not live out their contracts, provided most of the colonial workforce; even in the South, they outnumbered Black slaves until the early 1700s.
The indentured of the pre-national period were followed by what you might call the wage slaves of the 19th and early 20th centuries — particularly the post-Famine Irish, and the Eastern and Southern Europeans of the industrial period. Most were poor, most were exploited, and each group came with its own history and traditions.
Present-day racial politics obstinately insists there are only two races in this country: Whites and “people of color,” the former taking advantage of the latter. In fact, there is no White race; there are multiple White races — to the extent pure races can actually be differentiated, an iffy proposition at best.
Based on language groupings, if you’re Polish, Czech, Russian or Ukrainian, you’re a member of the Slavic “race.” If you’re Irish, highland Scottish or Welsh, you’re Celtic. If you’re German, Dutch, Austrian, Scandinavian or English, you’re Germanic. If you’re Italian, French, Portuguese or Spanish, you’re Italic.
Those differences came home to me growing up working class in western Massachusetts in the 1950s, where White tribalism was commonplace. The resident ethnic groups had no great love for one another. Disparaging racial pejoratives were universal, and separate neighborhoods were the rule. The various ethnicities were too busy fighting one another and the dominant WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) aristocracy to focus much on imposing White supremacy on their nonwhite neighbors.
One commonality did unite ethnic Whites, however. When it came to politics, they mostly banded together to vote Democratic, initially as partisans of FDR, and later JFK. In short, they knew what was important; class trumped race or ethnicity.
You wouldn’t know any of this, of course, by observing the current Black-White racial polarity, much of which stems from “The 1619 Project“ (2019) developed by New York Times reporter Nicole Hannah-Jones and others under the sponsorship of the Times Sunday magazine. This ambitious journalistic undertaking, intended to commemorate the arrival of chattel slavery in colonial America, seeks to stimulate a reframing of our history by placing slavery and the Black experience at the center of the national story.
The operating assumption is that, since 1619, American history has been all about race and nothing but race; it’s a history revolving around the establishment and maintenance of White supremacy, including the nation’s very founding revolution (fought purely to preserve the institution of slavery), for which there must be atonement (via reparations, etc.) by today’s Americans.
Although numerous prominent historians, Sean Wilentz and James M. McPherson among them, have enumerated the project’s many factual errors and ideological biases, it has nevertheless won a Pulitzer Prize (2020) and found its way into school curriculums. In present-day America, it’s an apparent expression of the zeitgeist.
The “1619 Project,” which is basically a political tract, wants an acceptance of the proposition that the history we’ve learned up to now is really racist mythology. To replace it, the project’s authors would advance an alternative mythology. Given the demise of historical studies at the college level these days (in favor of STEM studies), they may be successful.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2023
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us