I have taught a course on globalization and urbanization at San Francisco State for ten years. Each semester, I have to revise my syllabus substantially because global conditions have been changing dramatically since 2012.
In August of 2019, New York Times Magazine published The 1619 Project. I immediately incorporated it into the course that I started one week later, because it helps explain a great deal about our present world. The World-Systems theorists (Wallerstein 2004, King 1990) argue that globalization did not begin with the internet, but rather with the spice trade 500 years ago. Columbus did not ‘discover’ the Caribbean archipelago, but the voyages of Columbus, de Gama, and Magellan did facilitate globe-spanning exchanges of information, flora, fauna, microbes, and trade. The rise of the internet increased awareness of globalization, along with major free-trade negotiations in the 1990s. But to understand globalization in depth, we need a critical re-visit to the historical practices which shaped our globalized present moment.
Privateering, piracy, the spice trade, and the rise of mercantile corporations (1580s-1760s) are important historical practices that shaped globalization. But The 1619 Project helped explain the trans-Atlantic slave trade in a much more immediately relevant way. I had been using Douglass (1855), duBois (1903), and Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1945) to explain how a chronic labor shortage produced such a singularly brutal variant of slavery, and the racist discourse and prejudices needed to maintain that system. As a teacher of globalization, by first consideration is: Does this help explain the world we live in today? Studying slavery might be disturbing for my students, but so are many other aspects of globalization. NAFTA and the maquiladora cities on the US-Mexico border are linked to femicides, human trafficking, narcotics, and weapons-flows into Central America. The US promotion of “free” markets in Afghanistan increased commodified debt among poor Afghan, leading to the rise of child-bride marriages, and then the self-immolation of those child brides as their only exit from domestic enslavement. A hard, accurate look at globalization is a nerve-wracking experience in many ways.
The study of globalization is not all grim. But even some of the great successes are misunderstood. One of the greatest human achievements to date is the decision my parents to bear and raise almost eight billion humans today. The drop in death rates, improved medical care, and increased opportunities of humanity are made possible by the practice of intellectual property, a core feature of capitalist political economies. A clear-eyed look at capitalism requires that we recognize both its effectiveness, such as funding the development of antibiotics, and its brutality, most especially the practice of chattel slavery. Globalization involves both wonders and horrors, and accurate understanding requires facing all of it. Nor is this call for an unflinching analysis merely to increase scholarly understanding: planners always examine the present world with an eye towards how our policies and practices can be reformed and improved. Improvement and innovation are integral to the modern condition, but policy decisions have often been made without regard to the wealth of cautionary tales that can inform us. That is why we need to develop an unflinching view of our past achievements and failures.
Since its publication in August of 2019, the 1619 Project has come under increasing attack and censorship across the United States. Why? (A) because it makes bold claims about the centrality of African-Americans in the formation and fulfillment of American democracy, and (B) because it makes white students feel ashamed about the historic role of whites in creating both chattel slavery and the racist discourses that support it and persist to this day. Beyond my basic argument for ‘accurate critical history’ sketched above, I will now respond to these political justifications for censorship.
An Italian-American’s view on American identity
Unavoidably, I notice some parallels between a Roman Republic sliding inadvertently into Empire and what I see in American politics today. Another fine Italian, Niccolo Machiavelli, gave valuable insight into the importance of maintaining political credibility. Other countries today might be nation-states, but the American federal republic is held together only by shared belief in its ideals and Constitution. Historically, it has interesting parallels with the Roman Republic’s motto, Senatus Popolusque Romanus. In the modern era, the most similar country to the USA was the USSR: also not a nation-state; also a poly-ethnic federation; also held together by shared beliefs. Rome slid into empire. The USSR simply disintegrated when its political credibility unraveled. These historical lessons reveal how the failure of a compelling political ideal as an existential threat to the continued survival of the USA. Here, I am in agreement with some very conservative thinkers that we need to take this threat extremely seriously.
However, a strategy of censorship is a non-starter; we saw that backfire in the Soviet bloc in the 20th century, and we see it cripple China’s ability to be a truly global country today. A strategy of angry condemnation and condescension is also prone to backfire, as it hints that there must be some truth in the arguments that are triggering such animosity. Fundamentally, the question finds its way around these ideologically-rigid positions is: Does this story help explain our present world more accurately? Does it help me understand?
Hannah-Jones’ arguments are most compelling because they do help explain our present world. More importantly, she offers a radically new argument in favor of the political credibility of the United States. To understand this radical vision, we do have to admit a lot of brutal history. It is through that brutal history that we may find reasons to defend the United States against great adversity, even though it defended and enabled slavery at the foundation in 1789.
Hannah-Jones has to explain why her father, an African-American veteran who endured segregation, flew a pristine American flag at all times. He was not promoting a racist American past; he was demanding an egalitarian American future: the fulfillment of the promises of the Declaration and the Constitution. Likewise, Hannah-Jones had to explain why African-American leaders opposed Abraham Lincoln’s proposal to send African-Americans back to Africa. First; by 1863, African-Americans had lived in America for centuries; as long as Europeans. Like Anglo-Americans, their parents and grandparents are buried in American soil. [Which is food for thought for an Italian-American whose ancestors first came to America after 1890.] Second: the Middle Passage across the Atlantic had destroyed specific linkages to places in Africa, but had birthed a new people. In this respect, African-Americans are more thoroughly American than any Euro-American who can trace their ancestors back in the ‘old world’. Third: African-Americans were determined that the American republic must fulfill its promises of equal treatment under the law, and the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Through this lens we can clearly see how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work was so aggressively pro-American. His foes–especially J. Edgar Hoover–were profoundly anti-American in their threats, blackmail, unwarranted surveillance, attempted censorship, and ultimately lethal violence against King, and their opposition to any effort to secure equal rights. Profound criticism of American failures comes from a belief that America can actually succeed where it has been failing thus far. Thus, profound criticism inherently patriotic. In this sense, even the harshest critics–Malcolm X and James Baldwin–have given us arguments that can be summarized as: You can do better! Mistakes and failures are where you learn how to do better! The redemptive vision of an America that achieves its promises comes from African-Americans, and not from any white supremacist who argues for protection of the status-quo and censorship of anything ‘unpleasant’ about US history.
Selective Amnesia, Selective Remembering
In 2019 I attended Josephine Bolling McCall’s promotion of her book The Penalty for Success (thank you Tracy Haughton for organizing this!). The book is about the lynching of her father, a successful black businessman in Alabama. During her presentation, Josephine described a recent book-tour event in which a white man urged her to forget about all of that ugly history in order to look to a brighter future. That is perhaps the most generous explanation for justifying amnesia about past brutalities: to free us to build a better future together. It is probably an unreasonable request to a woman whose father was murdered with impunity; but perhaps for the rest of us a ‘fresh start’ would be more productive?
The obvious hypocrisy is that white-supremacists actually do want to remember some things in great detail. 50 years after the Civil War, the monuments they erected to commemorate even very minor events show an obvious effort to promote white slaveowners as the Americans worth remembering. In front of the St. Louis Arch, right on the banks of the Mississippi, I saw a granite monument commemorating Robert E. Lee’s two months of presence in St. Louis in teh 1840s as a civil engineer. Commemorating that obscure fact speaks volumes about the sustained effort to preserve a very specific, very biased historical awareness. In contrast: in 2022, most of my students are unaware that the Bush Administration set up the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in 2001, and that the ‘de-Baathification of the Iraqi military and civil service in 2003-2005 led directly to the formation of ISIS in 2012. If we can’t maintain collective recollection of major policy blunders from 20 years ago, then any awareness of where a slave-owning Confederate scratched his bum 175 years ago can only be interpreted as very selective historical promotion and glorification of that slaveowner, and a politically significant omission of the cruelty that they defended.
The non-obvious problem is: How to develop a positive view of and for white Americans? The white-supremacist project only offers a poisonous, malicious declaration that whites are superior through public policies of censorship and denigration of other people. While white-supremacists are celebrating their condescension towards all others, I am faced with a serious obstacle: I am trying to develop positive, constructive views of and for all of my students. But any positive portrayal of Anglos can be misconstrued as the hatred-fueled conservatism of a white nationalist. Right now, whites control the money, cops, guns, and media. That disproportionate control emerged from a history that white conservatives want us to forget in order to conserve a status-quo which is so cruelly unequal. Meanwhile, I have white students who want a better America in which there is justice and in which they will be peers, building a future together with all Americans as part of a plural whole. I want to motivate all of my students, and contribute to their formation as citizens who work for and fight for this country.
Banning The 1619 Project and any other works that question how we got here sends a strong message: the desire to shut down questioning. That desire is a totalitarian impulse, and it is self-blinding. In opposition to that dead end, I argue for liberty of thought and freedom to question.