Nikole Hannah-Jones Responds to Our 1619 and Slavery Issue

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, February 08, 2022

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones went on Twitter Monday night to respond to our issue looking at American slavery and the 1619 Project. Those familiar with how she typically responds to engagement with her work — engagement that typically appears only on Twitter, and not in any edited publication — will be unsurprised to see that she reacted with a lot of sneering and ad hominem argumentation and nothing of substance.

Naturally, her opening bid was to complain that we “couldn’t find any women, apparently, and only one Black person, apparently, to write about a slavery project created by a Black woman.” This sort of racial essentialism — in which the race and gender of the writer is more important than the writer’s facts or evidence — has been endemic to efforts by Hannah-Jones to dismiss critiques by the nation’s leading historians in areas of their own, but not her, expertise. Her response in 2019 to mentions of the work of James McPherson, for example, was “LOL. Right, because white historians have produced truly objective history.” That is the same McPherson, of Princeton, who wrote Battle Cry of Freedom, described by Ta-Nehisi Coates as “arguably among the greatest single-volume histories in all of American historiography.” Hannah-Jones had a similar reaction to an ad in National Review for an edition of the works of American Revolutionary–era historian Gordon Wood, known to most students of American history as — in David Hackett Fisher’s words — “almost an American institution. Of all the many teachers and writers of history in this Republic, few are held in such high esteem.” But Wood has sharply criticized the 1619 Project, so he, too, must be problematic.

 

My own contribution to the issue, on how American slavery fits within the global history of slavery, runs nearly 6,000 words and covers seven pages of the print magazine. Hannah-Jones could find nothing to say except to screenshot a single paragraph and grouse that it was “straight out of 1910.”

Nowhere does she attempt to argue that a single thing in that paragraph is wrong, and she — like you, dear reader — is free to peruse my list of sources. It really is not even clear what she finds objectionable. It is indisputably true that many slave societies, and even some Northern states such as New York and New Jersey, abolished slavery only gradually, either passing what were called “free womb” laws emancipating only children born after a particular date, or requiring freed slaves to serve some period of apprenticeship or compelled labor before becoming masters of their own fate. The “apprenticeship” systems typically failed, at least if they are judged by protecting the rights of freed slaves and setting them on a path beneficial to their economic self-sufficiency. It is likewise indisputably true that legal slavery in the American South was one of the few such systems that ended cold turkey (notwithstanding efforts by the post-war “black codes” to build something similar in its place), that Russian serfdom was another such system that ended the same way, and that the aftermath of slavery in both countries was (to put it mildly) less than ideal in raising slaves and serfs to the status of free and equal citizen-farmers. In other words: finding a path out of slavery was hard. There were different ways to do it, but all had their major drawbacks.

 

I accept the implicit concession here: She has no basis to dispute anything I wrote, which is why she did not dispute anything I wrote. Nor did she take issue with Charlie Cooke’s vivisection of the bogus gun history in the 1619 Project book, or Rick Brookhiser’s essay on the legacy of the American founding to the abolitionist and civil-rights movements, or Phil Magness’s latest installment of his ongoing critique of the 1619 Project for relying on the discredited “New History of Capitalism” (Hannah-Jones frequently insults Magness on Twitter, but has never yet addressed the substance of his arguments).

 

Instead, she saves most of her ire for Wilfred Reilly’s essay — ironically, given her dismissal of the rest of us on grounds of our skin color. But she manages to completely miss the point. Hannah-Jones looks at this passage:

 

It is also simply not true that slavery made the United States rich. Slavery made many slave masters rich indeed, and some of them invested their brutally gotten gains in American business and industry. One such profiteer, quite arguably, funded Yale University. But the real question for any quantitative social scientist must be: Did slavery — feudal peon agriculture centered on brutalized captive workers — generate more capital than any alternative use of the same area of land and the same number of workers? Here, the answer (again) is a clear-cut no. The slaveholding South was, frankly, a backwater.

 

Her response:

 

Imagine still, in the year of our Lord 2021, trying to argue that every major European power engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, transported 12 million humans across the ocean, remade the Americas, colonized an entire hemisphere over an institution that was not PROFITABLE.

 

Of course, nobody is arguing that slave trading was not profitable. Nobody is arguing that slaveholders did not profit from the institution — she’s attacking a passage in which Reilly said explicitly that “slavery made many slave masters rich indeed.” This sort of elementary failure to engage with the actual arguments is never a sign of serious history.

 

Worse, notice the bait-and-switch: Reilly is discussing the economic benefits of slavery, on a macroeconomic level, to the United States of America. Hannah-Jones responds by citing the total number of Africans imported as slaves to the entire Western Hemisphere, as if she does not expect her readers to spot the difference — even though roughly 96 percent of those Africans were taken to other countries. (This also raises the question whether she thinks more thoroughly slave-oriented societies such as Jamaica proved more enduringly prosperous than the northern United States). Careful scholarship, this is not. It’s consistent with making elementary errors of chronology.

 

As is her wont, Hannah-Jones will almost certainly react to what I’ve written here either by ignoring it or by gloating that the mere fact that someone responded to her proves that she is in our heads. But here’s the thing: She wants to have her work taken seriously as the product of a public intellectual who deserves a Pulitzer Prize and a university professorship, and whose historical writings deserve to be taught in schools. She has behind her the mighty institutional power of the New York Times. If she seeks to exercise the privilege of those positions, they come with certain responsibilities: to defend one’s work and engage with one’s critics in the way that scholars such as Wood and McPherson have done for decades. Readers can, and should, consider her refusal to do so as a mark against the credibility of the work to which she has devoted the past three years.