Sunday, September 27, 2020
Sunday Reflection: Boards and blood
For the past few years, I've gotten lunch now and then at the Chipotle around the corner from my office. It's pretty much like every other Chipotle, of course-- plastic tables, menu board, burritos. I like it.
It's located on Nicollet Mall, a street at the heart of downtown Minneapolis. This summer has been rough for that part of downtown. After two waves of violence and destruction-- the first after the death of George Floyd and a second, last month, that stemmed from an incident that turned out not to be police violence-- many of the businesses have closed for good, others appear headed that way, and all of them are boarded up.
That includes my Chipotle; the doors are pictured in the photo above. You can tell it is Chipotle as you walk by because someone has written "Chipotle" in red marker on the right door. Something about that is especially sad, and I'm not sure how people know that the store is actually open.
For someone from Detroit, where swaths of the city over time were boarded up decades ago, and still are, this is especially sad to see.
Too often, though, people tell this story with the boarding-up as the starting point. And that's both odd and wrong.
The starting point here is 1619.
I see that President Trump, out of his dislike for the 1619 project, wants to promote the teaching of "pro-American" history. It's a terrible idea. If you don't believe me, look at the photo above. That comes from not ever, ever, ever, really having an honest reckoning in this country with our racial history. Are we going to make that mistake again and avoid the truth?
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The 1619 Project is a perhaps well-intentioned notion that went wildly off the rails. Even as the NYT is stealthily erasing its most egregious misrepresentations, the project remains a solution in search of a problem. As a person with twenty-plus years experience teaching American history in college classrooms, I can honestly report NEVER having come across a teacher who was not loudly emphasizing the role of slavery and the story of African Americans as an indispensable window into the larger American mosaic.
The straw man argument that somehow the 1619 Project serves as a needed corrective to the whitewashed racist propaganda of the Dunning School is at least six decades out of date. There are very few Americans alive today who did not go through school with a curriculum fundamentally reshaped by the likes of Kenneth Stampp, Eugene Genovese, W. E. B. DuBois, John Hope Franklin, Eric Foner, David Brion Davis, David Blight et al. In fact, there are no living historians from some other alternative school to list. The specious strawman is entirely a fiction.
As for an honest reckoning, I have been looking for that "conversation" for years. Happy to have it anywhere any time with any one. It is elusive. I have spent my life studying American history--triumphs and tragedies. I love our story. I love our heroes. Frankly, I almost always find the 1619 Project crowd is not at all receptive to an honest reckoning. Let us NOT avoid the truth.
I regret that this president decided to champion 1776. He is painfully shallow in his knowledge of American history, and he is an inarticulate spokesman for the product of measured historical investigation. For many reasons, his support will encourage knaves to twist the truth into traps for fools. The showdown between Donald Trump and Nikole Hannah-Jones, sadly, ominously, catastrophically, serves as a fitting representation for the quality of historical debate in the public square at this moment.
The straw man argument that somehow the 1619 Project serves as a needed corrective to the whitewashed racist propaganda of the Dunning School is at least six decades out of date. There are very few Americans alive today who did not go through school with a curriculum fundamentally reshaped by the likes of Kenneth Stampp, Eugene Genovese, W. E. B. DuBois, John Hope Franklin, Eric Foner, David Brion Davis, David Blight et al. In fact, there are no living historians from some other alternative school to list. The specious strawman is entirely a fiction.
As for an honest reckoning, I have been looking for that "conversation" for years. Happy to have it anywhere any time with any one. It is elusive. I have spent my life studying American history--triumphs and tragedies. I love our story. I love our heroes. Frankly, I almost always find the 1619 Project crowd is not at all receptive to an honest reckoning. Let us NOT avoid the truth.
I regret that this president decided to champion 1776. He is painfully shallow in his knowledge of American history, and he is an inarticulate spokesman for the product of measured historical investigation. For many reasons, his support will encourage knaves to twist the truth into traps for fools. The showdown between Donald Trump and Nikole Hannah-Jones, sadly, ominously, catastrophically, serves as a fitting representation for the quality of historical debate in the public square at this moment.
My post wasn't actually about the 1619 project-- and I regret to say that I didn't really read much of what came out as part of that (it's been a pretty busy year). The answer is often both, and we can and should both remember those who created good things and see the whole that includes the bad. "Heroes" is a dangerous approach to history, since close examination reveals very few people to be all good or all bad.
So sorry to misunderstand your post. I certainly join with you in your desire for an honest reckoning and a sincere pursuit of the truth. In terms of my love for heroes, perhaps you misunderstand me. I find heroes all around me: my dad, your dad, your mom, my mom, RBG, Scalia, MLK, GW, AL, John Lewis, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash. Good Americans. Good role models. Encouraging in their imperfections. Inspiring in their triumphs. Worthy of study and oftentimes emulation.
That's a pretty good list (though I'm not sure John Wayne is on mine, but that is partly because of his estate's legal wrangling with IPLawGuy over Acme Boots).
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