I write this as a secondary school teacher who has watched uneasily as the culture wars playing out in school boards and statehouses nationwide foster a false dichotomy between 1619 and 1776 as “foundings” of the United States. For at least 50 years, scholars have embraced what Edmund Morgan termed “the central paradox of American history”: the rise of liberty in this country can be fully understood only alongside the rise of slavery. To insist, as the state of Texas does, that we teach our students to see slavery and racism as “deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States” is to reject what is, at this point, sound historical consensus. Morgan abjured the notion that we should see our founding as one thing and one thing only, an admonition that cuts both ways: even while he insisted “that one fifth of the American population at the time of the Revolution is too many people to be treated as an exception,” he cautioned against dismissing narratives of liberty and equality in favor of the argument “that slavery and oppression were the dominant features of American history.” It seems fair to read HB 3979’s prohibition against “requiring an understanding of the 1619 Project” as a sign that the activists behind such laws believe our teaching has swung too far in the latter direction. Implicit in this belief is a misguided assumption that because a teacher introduces a concept or thesis into a course, she obliges her students to accept it as a singular truth.
The 1619 Project—conceived by the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones—inspired much-needed public discourse about the long reach of slavery and its pernicious legitimizing ideologies, popularizing a critical stance that I believe should inform our teaching. I hesitate, though, to characterize the arrival of the first unfree Africans in Point Comfort, Virginia, as a moment of original sin that ossified our nation’s character and fate. If we look back over the span of four hundred years, the forced migration of those 20 or so Angolans is surely a defining moment. But there is a rich, ongoing scholarly debate about the fluidity among categories of unfree labor during the 17th century. Nell Irvin Painter has argued that “how we think about the term ‘enslaved’ matters.” If we overlook the fact that the first Black Virginians were indentured in this country alongside poor white Europeans, then we skip past the process by which colonial authorities constructed the social and legal apparatuses of racialized slavery; if we do not understand how those systems came to be, then we are unlikely to perceive their lasting impact. I want my students to appreciate that the choices historians make about periodization affect our ability to discern contingency and change over time. If we scale time differently—if we focus, say, on the period between 1619 and the mid-1600s (when racialized categories for bonded labor emerged) or 1676 (when Bacon’s Rebellion accelerated the process of giving those categories legal power)—then we see that another world might have been possible.
