Barbara J. Fields Comments on the Racecraft of the 1619 Project
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Barbara J. Fields, celebrated historian, co-author of Racecraft, and the only historian with a doctorate to appear in Ken Burns’ The Civil War, has only made a few public comments about The 1619 Project, but those comments are damning. In a recent interview, she said,
When I talk to my students about 1619 — and I did even before the 1619 Project, but I had to do it more pointedly after the 1619 Project because of all the nonsense that that engendered, I start with how can you begin in 1619 and ignore 1607? Because starting in 1607 when white people were indentured servants in Virginia who could be bought — they were chattels who could be bought and sold, who could be won and lost in card games and so on — starting there lets you see that the decision to use Africans as slaves came in that context. It didn’t become racial, wasn’t even defined that way in the laws of Virginia until much later on. When do you first even have a slave code in Virginia? Not till the 1660s.
This is a misconception that I think has become very widespread. It’s likely to become more widespread because the New York Times has made such a mascot of [the 1619 Project]. Historicizing that process means that you have to understand everybody who was part of it. It wasn’t just people from Africa, it wasn’t just people from Europe, it wasn’t just indigenous Americans. You have to understand all of those, and you have to understand why it was necessary to have people forced to work for somebody else.
Why do you need to do that? If you have a place where anybody who wants land can get land, anybody who wants to grow whatever the crop is can grow it, why do you end up having indentured servitude and slavery? And I put this question to my students, and they flounder around about it because they have all sorts of notions of what comes naturally to human beings. I tell them ultimately there are only three ways you can get somebody else to work for you for your benefit: You can persuade them to do it, you can pay them to do it, or you can force them to do it. It is very difficult to pay people enough to want to do that if what they want is to farm their own land and there’s nothing to stop them from doing that and nothing to stop them from appropriating the proceeds. As soon as you historicize it that way, slavery becomes part of a historical process that doesn’t have anything to do with race as Americans like to understand it. I tell my students people from Africa didn’t become black people until they came here, but for that matter Europeans were not Europeans until they came here.
At A reply to the American Historical Review’s defense of the 1619 Project, she said,
I could hardly miss the hype of The 1619 Project, particularly since I am a print subscriber to the NYT. Although I have saved the issue (knowing that some of my students will have seen it, most likely online, and will have been seduced by its tendentious and ignorant history), I’m afraid I have not troubled to read the issue all the way through. The pre-launch publicity warned me of racecraft in the offing. And once I had the issue in hand, the first few bars disinclined me to waste my time on the rest of the operetta. Not that I would have expected anything more of the Times. Ask their writers to take the time to read Edmund Morgan or David Brion Davis or Eugene Genovese or Eric Williams or any of the explosion of rich literature about slavery in the United States and the hemisphere published over the past century? What an idea! And the packaged history they have assembled fits well with neo-liberal politics.
Related:
Sorry, 1619 Project — The first legal slaveowner in the American colonies was black
Why I Love Frederick Douglass and the 1619 Project Tried to Erase Him
The Dedicated Ignorance of Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project
