Emily Sclafani teaches history at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx. Here is a taste of her piece at the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History titled “The Danger of a Single Origin Story.”
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 âfoundingsâ of the United States. For at least 50 years, scholars have embraced what Edmund Morgan termed âthe central paradox of American historyâ: 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 âdeviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United Statesâ 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 âthat one fifth of the American population at the time of the Revolution is too many people to be treated as an exception,â he cautioned against dismissing narratives of liberty and equality in favor of the argument âthat slavery and oppression were the dominant features of American history.â It seems fair to read HB 3979âs prohibition against ârequiring an understanding of the 1619 Projectâ 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 Projectâconceived by the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jonesâinspired 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 nationâs 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 âhow we think about the term âenslavedâ matters.â 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 differentlyâif we focus, say, on the period between 1619 and the mid-1600s (when racialized categories for bonded labor emerged) or 1676 (when Baconâs Rebellion accelerated the process of giving those categories legal power)âthen we see that another world might have been possible.
Itâs revelatory for students to learn that early in our nationâs history, Black colonists drew on talents they honed as participants in a broader Atlantic system to obtain freedom, accumulate property, and demand the full recognition of their rights as citizens. Reading historiansâ work on this subject was a formative experience in my own training. There, I found accounts of men like Anthony Johnson. Captured in Portuguese Angola, Johnson survived servitude in 1620s Virginia and went on to compete freely and successfully with his white neighbors. Johnsonâs story dissuaded me from equating early Black American history exclusively with the experience of enslavement and reminded me that historical progress is not always linear. Of course, itâs fair to ask whether focusing on such a narrow sliver of time distracts from the more salient fact that systems of inequality would ultimately and irreparably curtail Black opportunity, and it behooves us to remind our students that history is infinitely more complex than the anecdotal evidence of one manâs biography might suggest. The racist ideas that permeated the Atlantic world surely existed in the minds of white colonists long before they acquired the legal force that would rob Johnsonâs descendants of his hard-earned gains. But if we donât trust our students to handle nuanceâto talk through it and argue with the sources and with one anotherâthen they are far more likely to believe the political commentators who have misappropriated Johnsonâs biography as a part of a campaign to discredit efforts at historical accountability.
Read the entire piece here.