Long Time Coming by Michael Eric Dyson

Author:Michael Eric Dyson [Dyson, Michael Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250276766
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

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My dear sister Breonna, the conflict between “next” and “again” plays out on the battlefield of ideas too. The 1619 Project, led by New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, argued that the legacy of slavery is central to the nation’s founding and identity, and may indeed have furnished the thirteen colonies a rationale for taking up arms. That was a rare instance where the Black “next” claimed a louder and more official voice than the white “again.” But, predictably, the white “again”—with its arthritic defense of the status quo—rose up in what might be termed a white verbal riot. Distinguished white historians Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes criticized Jones and the 1619 Project, claiming in a letter to the Times that the project promoted “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Arkansas senator Tom Cotton introduced legislation to deny federal funds to teach the 1619 Project in the nation’s public schools. Cotton may not be the most reliable guide to the nation’s complicated racial history. On the one hand, he is critical of the 1619 Project for arguing that the colonies chose the Revolutionary War in part to protect slavery. On the other hand, Cotton admits that the Founding Fathers viewed the enslavement of millions of Black souls as “the necessary evil upon which the union was built.”

Of course, there have been white riots in which Black lives were lost and Black property burned to the ground. But there are quieter white riots that burn down Black progress in government, in academe, in think tanks, in corporate America, and in the media. Black ideas are viewed as bankrupt and Black arguments are seen as rooted in wishful thinking and racial vengeance against the white establishment. A country that gushes as it stands beneath an endless avalanche of history books about every imaginable aspect of the nation’s trek from fledgling colonial upstart to imperial superpower grows grim and mum, with notable exceptions, when it comes to soaking in historical cascades of the slave past.

Histories that spring from the white “again” have been forced to address race and slavery but don’t dig nearly as deep as those histories steeped in or inspired by the Black “next.” The Black “next” seems so radical, so antithetical to what we know, because it stands against what was silenced and hidden. It’s not that the Black “next” is new; it’s that it is newly revealed, uncovered, exposed. To consider the idea that keeping folk enslaved was at least on the minds of the architects of the American Revolution as they combated British tyranny is sacrilege to those who seek to maintain the status quo—those who seek to put forth a more “innocent” and “pure” version of the past, again and again.

The sort of history that seeks to cast the past as innocent and pure is constantly at war with the sort of mature and complicated history that will help us reckon with race in a satisfying fashion. That

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