The story of Obama’s speech is told by Ada Ferrer in the final pages of her new book, Cuba: An American History. For Ferrer, Obama’s visit to Cuba and his remarks there were a perfect example of a dynamic she describes throughout the book: Cuba and the United States hold up a mirror to one another. The history of the two countries has been intertwined. Cubans and Americans see themselves through each other’s eyes.
Looking into this mirror, Ferrer explained in a recent webinar about her book, allows us to see history “askew.” In other words, it has the effect of challenging the familiar stories Cubans and US Americans believe about their countries, enabling them to see the familiar from new angles. Obama’s speech, and the mirror that Ferrer writes of, underscore the profound connection between nations that, for the past few decades, have seen themselves, and have been seen by others, as antagonists.
To see history askew is likewise the goal of Nikole Hannah-Jones in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Understanding the pivotal—indeed, central—role that African enslavement has played in the making of the United States necessarily transforms how we regard the treasured myths of our country’s founding in 1776.
Unlike Ferrer, Hannah-Jones doesn’t explicitly use the metaphor of the mirror; still, I suspect she would like it. In her preface to The 1619 Project, she suggests that the experiences of Black people have always been a kind of mirror the United States could hold up to itself, so as to reveal a much less perfect union. Non-Black citizens of this country might not like what they saw if they were able to look at the United States through the eyes of Black Americans.
Black people, Hannah-Jones writes, “are the stark reminders of some of [the United States’s] most damning truths.” One of these truths is that “eight in ten Black people would not be in the United States were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom.” US Americans try to hide histories of slavery because it “shames us.” When Black people have used the rhetoric of freedom and rights that appears in the founding documents of the United States, it has been, at least in part, “to reveal this nation’s grave hypocrisies.”