Fresno professor considers Trump, the 1619 Project, and America’s ‘rainbow of humanity’
On June 1, President Biden gave a speech commemorating the 1921 Tulsa (Greenwood) Race Massacre. This incident was chronicled by Tim Madigan in his book The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The burning refers to the total elimination of Black Wall Street, the central business district. Thirty-five square blocks of this district were leveled, and the death count neared 300 Black souls.
A claim made by the Trump handlers was that no one within his administration knew of this incident when they scheduled and held a fundraising rally in Tulsa on June 20, 2020. This claim revealed the importance of the continued culture wars examined by the edited book, 1619 Project. This book earned the author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer. The controversial thesis of the book is that since the title date, slavery has been central to the American experience.
In a counterpoint, Donald Trump, after losing the election, presented his 1776 Project in January. In a 45-page clarion that included the U.S. Constitution, the document read, “States and school districts should reject any curriculum which promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles. . . .”
This statement encapsulates Trump’s and certain conservatives’ resistance to the progressive trend recently to remove Confederate statues from public spaces. These divisive monuments celebrated secession and treason practiced by 11 Southern states. Both projects mentioned above seek to explain why Trump and many others believe, in Trump’s words, “It is sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”
How some Americans viewed that ripped nation was established by a proliferation of writings by Southern historians that the “lost cause” of the South was noble and honorable, and that states’ rights, not slavery, was their just cause. Note that all Confederate paper currency had idyllic pictures of happy slaves. It was not in “God We Trust,” but in their slaves.
However, in 1947, John Hope Franklin published From Slavery to Freedom. This scholarly work, revised many times, is still used in high school and college curricula. The book contains elements of both the 1619 Project and 1776 project. Interestingly, Franklin was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Dr. Franklin was referenced by President Biden in his speech.
After Biden began his term, he ordered the White House website to take down Trump’s link to the 1776 project. The question is why Trump and so many white Americans born in the North or like Trump, in New York, think that monuments that represent treason are “our statues”? And since Trump’s project attached a copy of the U.S. Constitution, one wonders how some teachers would either omit or skirt around the specific articles in that document that protected slavery and the slave trade and counted African slaves for political purposes. In contrast, Biden’s support of the 1619 Project came from his desire that “justice . . . hope and history” thrive.
The culture wars over historical memory are centered in how individuals within social classes and groups see themselves. American identity has certainly changed over the decades because of the Great Depression and F.D.R.’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal of integration, and its consummation with Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and integrationist civil rights agenda. Many white Americans retreated into hating the social welfare state established by these three presidents, all of whom were Democrats. The white hate of the welfare state is contradictory and ironic since no conservatives that I know, and I know plenty, have ever returned their “socialist” Social Security checks, stopped using “socialist” Medicare or Medicaid, or refused their “socialist” farm subsidies. Trump handed out millions of dollars in these helpful “socialist” hand-outs.
Last, as Biden concluded his speech on the Tulsa Race Massacre, he alluded to the changing American identity of cross-cultural inclusion. He discussed how the capitalist market reflects this in television commercials that feature a plethora of white and black marital unions and promote all types of consumer commodities. America is no longer a 1776 pipe dream of “whiteness” but a colorful rainbow of humanity.