Open Thread

Third Reconstruction?

Many things to talk about today, among them this piece about the latest iteration of the 1619 Project, which at last proffers the ask we all knew was implicit in a rewriting of America’s founding — a “‘Third Reconstruction’ to address the unfulfilled promise of the second.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/19/1619-project-book-history/

“Kendi then introduces something else he says is left out of the story — that America requires a “Third Reconstruction” to address the unfulfilled promise of the second. Here the 1619 Project's project becomes explicitly political. Hannah-Jones fills in the details in the book's final chapter, “Justice,” where she identifies the racial wealth gap as the most serious challenge for Black Americans. “White Americans' centuries-long economic head start,” she writes, is what “most effectively maintains racial caste today.” To narrow that gap, the country must embark on “a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies.”

Among these are a slate of priorities such as “a livable wage; universal healthcare, childcare, and college; and student loan debt relief,” Hannah-Jones indicates. They also include cash reparations for Black Americans — specifically, for those who can document having identified as Black for at least 10 years prior to any reparations process and who can “trace at least one ancestor back to American slavery.” Also suggested is a commitment to enforce civil rights laws regarding housing, education and employment, as well as “targeted investments” in Black communities across the country.

And so the New York Times’s 1619 Project is now enlisted in the service of a policy agenda and political worldview. The book’s concluding chapter underscores that link. “It is one thing to say you do not support reparations because you did not know the history, that you did not understand how things done long ago helped create the conditions in which millions of Black Americans live today,” Hannah-Jones writes. “But you now have reached the end of this book, and nationalized amnesia can no longer provide the excuse. None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own.”

It would be comforting if history always came with a policy road map, a detailed agenda that quickly placed us on its right side. Still, the 1619 Project’s activist turn need not necessarily affect how one regards the American origin story it presents. As Hannah-Jones writes in the first line of the book’s final chapter, “Origin stories function, to a degree, as myths designed to create a shared sense of history and purpose.” In this book, the 1619 Project makes both its history and its purpose clear.”

The MAGA and 1619 agendas emerged as the country moved toward becoming plurality non-white and non-black. The youngest and most economically dynamic populations in America are its immigrant communities, who arrived after 1965 — after the end of the Jim Crow regime. The sudden sprint to settle the unfinished business of black and white America reflects a consciousness that a new population who is not on the hook for America’s original sins is rising. The effort to inculcate into them a sense of guilt by proxy is proceeding apace, but in my view, faces inherent obstacles and is grounded in extremely thin and unpersuasive appeals. But there are generational dynamics at work here as well, and how this all will play out remains unclear. It is the decisive question concerning America’s future.

Wesley Yang @wesyang

The group whose income rose the fastest between 2014-2019 were Hispanics; the group whose income rose the second fastest in that period were Asians (from a higher base). Both of these groups have interests that naturally diverge from both the MAGA and equity agendas.