He rejects it
Pompeo the other day saw fit to bash the 1619 Project.
“The New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’—so named for the year that the first slaves were transported to America—wants you to believe that our country was founded for human bondage,” Pompeo said in his speech in Philadelphia on Thursday. “They want you to believe that America’s institutions continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding.”
And Pompeo wants you to think they don’t.
But they do. Of course they do. Policing, the prison system, the court systems (bail, plea deals, 3 strikes laws, harsh sentencing, capital punishment), schools, medical institutions, and on and on. Of course they do. We never rooted out the reflections of the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding and continuance of it for more than two centuries. Of course our institutions still reflect that.
“They want you to believe that Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed. The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology,” he added. “This is a dark vision of America’s birth. I reject it. It’s a disturbed reading of history. It is a slander on our great people.”
He rejects it, does he. Easy for him. Of course it’s a dark vision of America’s birth, but that’s because it’s what happened. We as a people have been sweeping it under the rug all along and we really need to stop doing that. The white portion of America committed crimes against humanity in relation to the brown portion of America and it has still never paid reparations, never done anything like enough to compensate for the generations of harm. Instead we continue to treat brown people as either cheap labor for jobs like chicken processing (one of the worst jobs on earth) or criminals who must be stripped of all rights and locked in boxes for years. Pompeo is dead right that that’s a dark vision but it’s fucking well what happened and is still happening.
“The Secretary drew a sharp distinction between the view of the 1619 Project—that America was founded on repression—and his own view that America, uniquely, was founded on a then-new conception of universal unalienable human rights,” a State Department spokeswoman told Foreign Policy by email.
Ok but what about the repression part? The new conception of human rights was indeed a good thing, but most of the people men who came up with it didn’t even apply it in their own (cough) households. Most of them had slaves; none of them thought those rights applied to women. Pompeo’s “sharp distinction” works only if you think slaves and displaced indigenous people and women don’t matter.
“Secretary Pompeo is fully committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce representative of America’s devotion to the principle of equal opportunity. This commitment to diversity and inclusion reflects the Department’s professional ethos.”
Excuse me? Workforce? What about citizenry? Does Pompeo see us as just labor? He’s not the Secretary of Labor, he’s the Secretary of State (more’s the pity), why the hell is he referring to us as a workforce?
“Pompeo made it very clear where he stands and reaffirmed the purpose of the commission by denigrating the movement for equal justice and the call for racial reckoning and healing in America,” said one State Department official. “Everyone that I have spoken with is horrified and disgusted by the commission, his press conference, and [the] attack on 1619,” said the official.
…
“Everyone who works for Trump is under instructions to ramp up the culture war,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Foreign Policy in an interview. “I think Secretary Pompeo has been a loyal servant of Donald Trump for his entire tenure and he is following instructions.”
So I guess the instructions are to say that white people are the best and brown people deserved what they got.
And Pompeo wants you to believe that America’s institutions do not continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at its founding. He is buying into one hell of an argument there; one he can only lose. Because for him to be right, a whole lot of history books will have to be burned or buried in landfill and replaced with fairy stories.
He is indeed off with the fairies if he maintains a position like that. Without slavery, no cotton trade; and with no cotton trade, no southern plantations, no ante-bellum prosperity for the southern states, and most importantly, no Civil War.
For a goodly part of America’s history, one important social division was slave vs free. Another was black vs white, and those first two categories overlapped with the last two for one great long time. Black and white still matter as categories.
As Secretary of State, Pompeo should be fine. He and Putin can get together and agree that Ivan was not so Terrible after all, Stalin was kindly Uncle Joe, and the Lubyanka was a shockingly misunderstood holiday resort, as were the gulags.
One goddamn counterfactual after another.
And then the aftermath of slavery – the defeat of Reconstruction, the passage of Jim Crow laws that kept the former slaves in new forms of bondage for another century, the red lining that systematically prevented the descendants of slaves from amassing equity by buying a house and that confined them to unofficially segregated schools, the funding of schools through property taxes so that schools in red-lined neighborhoods were always underfunded, and on and on.
That all said and acknowledged, the 1619 Project’s problems are tragic, because it is most critical to avoid misstatement, overreach, and exaggeration when presenting people with information they won’t like. Otherwise, you risk tripping over motivated reasoning and giving them a justification for disbelief.
True.
The constitutional framers can be both slave-owning monsters and brilliant visionaries at the same time, because they were! How is that so hard to reconcile?
Also the aftermath of the ACW should be a cautionary tale to those “woke” folk about the “right side of history”; the Confederacy was on the “right side of history” for a hundred years. The “right side of history” is determined by the people that get to write it.
What commission?
BKiSA, I’ve noticed for a long time that people can’t understand that. Someone couldn’t have done something because “they’re a nice person”. They must not be ruthless businessmen because they have families that they love and that love them. We seem to expect people to be all good or all bad, and for it to show. Which is why the woke brigade can’t get that TERFs are not right-wingers. Why, anyone that isn’t progressive enough to know TWAW must be on the right!
It seems most people expect ruthless businessmen to be Ebenezer Scrooge, wrong in every particular, bad in every bone, and alone at the end of the day eating gruel in a cold mansion.
iknklast: Splitting.
From that source:
Frequently used by narcissistic personalities. Ya don’t say.
I know. It’s shocking. Were you shocked? I was shocked.
Shocked, I tell you.