1619 and 1776 in 2021: Balancing Critique and Continuity in Collective Memory

Isaac Kimmel, University of Notre Dame

Using the examples of The 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine in 2019, and the Trump administration’s response, The 1776 Commission Report, this essay argues that critical awareness of the genesis of inherited normative values should neither undermine those values nor require discarding them. The 1619 Project brings to light the previously neglected role of enslaved Africans and their disenfranchised descendants in the development of modern America, and in so doing, critiques the principles that have underpinned America’s national identity and discourse. The 1776 Commission Report reacts by largely eliding the flaws of America’s canonical foundations, to the point of leaving out Native Americans entirely, and recasting the struggle for racial equality as one that concluded triumphantly with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. I argue that a critical self-evaluation of America’s past must engage with the figures who enacted it, whether canonized or anonymous, in a way that accounts for both their stated commitments and their concrete actions as real, particular persons. Doing this honestly requires awareness of our own positionality as contemporary Americans, including the legacy of concepts and normative ideals that we inherited from the historical figures we critique. The 1619 Project fails to recognize the powerful potential for reform in these ideals as they still exist, while The 1776 Commission Report’s defensiveness leads it to reduce such challenging figures as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thomas Jefferson to politically expedient caricatures. A holistic, honest reconstruction of American history should strive to maintain continuity with the established value rhetorics of democracy, while reshaping the narrative to accommodate the experiences of indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and other marginalized groups – two goals that are in tension, but need not be in conflict.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 195. Production of Social Problems