‘1619,’ the Book

The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” is now a book, with reams of new material and a useful apparatus of scholarly endnotes. At The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada compares the book with the previous magazine versions in order to excavate the project’s “dynamic and contested historiography.” This philological approach is revealing, especially of various authors’ responses to some of the criticisms of the project. For instance, the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond had, in the magazine, attributed increased cotton productivity to record-keeping and management techniques allegedly originating on plantations. Critics pointed out that some of these techniques had emerged much earlier, and in any event that other factors better explained the rise in productivity. So in the book, Desmond qualifies the original claim: “Historians and economists have attributed this surge in productivity to several factors — for example, Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode found that improved cotton varieties enabled hands to pick more cotton per day — but advanced techniques that improved upon ways to manage land and labor surely played their part as well.” Lozada is not satisfied:

Note what is happening: A different explanation is introduced for an important point of fact, but the overall narrative remains — because “surely” it still holds. Readers should always be open to new historical interpretations, but when revising history, “surely” does not reassure.

There is at least one set of changes Lozada fails to note. In the magazine version of his powerful essay describing his work as a lawyer representing men like “Matthew,” who had been sentenced to life in Angola at the age of 16, Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the human-rights organization Equal justice Initiative, appears to give credence to the theory that the 13th Amendment’s convict-labor loophole was part of a strategy to extend racialized slavery past 1865. “The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery,” Stevenson writes, “but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes. After emancipation, Black people, once seen as less than fully human ‘slaves,’ were seen as less than fully human ‘criminals.’” “Thirteentherism” was vociferously criticized by the Howard historian Daryl Scott, both in an essay for Liberties called “The Scandal of Thirteentherism” and in a conversation with me for the Review. Scott did not contest Stevenson’s larger assertion, which draws on Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, that Southern states exploited Black convict labor (although he emphasizes the enormous difference in scale between slavery and postbellum convict labor, which “captured less than 1 percent” of the Black population). There’s no reason, Scott says, to think that the language of the 13th Amendment is what allowed them to do so.

Stevenson has not eliminated reference to the 13th Amendment, but he has added new language tending to soften the implication that the amendment was designed to promote slavery by other means, including this sentence, immediately after the introduction of the text of the 13th Amendment (replacing the sentence beginning “After emancipation” in the original): The 13th “could not abolish the true evil of American slavery, which was the belief that Black people are less evolved, less human, less capable, less deserving, less trustworthy than white people.” Other language new to the book version includes the assertion that racial disparities in incarceration cannot be understood “without understanding the legacy of slavery and the harsh, racialized instinct for punishment our history has created.” The net effect of these additions is to emphasize slavery’s horrific cultural legacies while diminishing the implication that the 13th Amendment contained a legal mechanism for the entrenchment of racist domination.

Florida Man Attacks Academic Freedom

Our Emma Pettit reports on a farcical situation (yet another one!) at the University of Florida, whose leadership are tangling themselves up in knots to strike the word “critical” from the title of a doctoral concentration called “Critical Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Education.” The goal is presumably to avoid triggering the sensitivities of the Florida legislature and of Gov. Ron DeSantis, for whom “critical race theory” has become “a fixation.” Apparently, the university is concerned that lawmakers will scan curricular documents in search of their pet anathemas. Chris Busey, a faculty member associated with the imperiled program, has filed a grievance. He was told, he said, by Chris J. Hass, associate provost for academic and faculty affairs, “that using the words ‘critical’ and ‘race’ together was an issue, and that they should consider renaming the concentration and/or delay putting it forward until the legislative session has ended.” Hass, to be fair, seems to have been searching for a way to preserve the concentration by avoiding the ire of the legislature. But sometimes, as Holden Thorp wrote in the Review the last time the University of Florida forgot what academic freedom is, it’s better to stand up for what you believe in.

Write to me, at [email protected].

Yours,
Len Gutkin

Source: https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/chronicle-review/2021-12-06