Lessons from the history of American slavery.
Jamelle Bouie has always depended on the kindness of historians. |
So when a new segment of the ongoing data project SlaveVoyages became available, it was natural for him to write about the brilliant people who put it together. The latest addition is a data set that "documents the 'coastwise' traffic to New Orleans during the antebellum years of 1820 to 1860, when it was the largest slave-trading market in the country," as Jamelle writes in his Sunday Review cover story. |
There is a lot this data can tell us about the political economy of the slave system as it developed over its centuries-long course, but Jamelle also wants to ask, along with the historians he writes about, "How exactly do we relate to data that allows someone — anyone — to identify a specific enslaved person? How do we wield these powerful tools for quantitative analysis without abstracting the human reality away from the story?" |
As Jamelle's editor, I wanted to drill down still further, so I asked him to do a Q. and A. with me. And let me tell you something: I'm glad I'm not the person who had to answer these questions. |
You write a lot about works of history in your column. What made you want to talk to living historians here? |
There is obviously a great deal you can learn by reading history. But I think it's also very fruitful to talk to historians, the same way it is fruitful, as a journalist, to talk to any expert. For me, actual conversations are a way to ask questions, clarify ideas and even come to new insights. For this essay in particular, I thought it was important to get on the record thoughts from some of the many scholars who have done important and pioneering work on these questions around data science and the archive. I also just like talking to historians. |
In your home state of Virginia and many others, teaching Black history in an, um, non-inspirational way has come under threat. One commenter on your piece noted that your article provided "Critical Race Reality." What is there to say about the movement to foreclose the teaching of history as it actually was? |
I don't think it is actually about the history as such. There are certainly people involved in the effort to root out "critical race theory" who are opposed to any teaching or history that doesn't flatter a nationalist narrative of forward progress, or that doesn't hold out the majority of Americans as somehow innocent of the nation's misdeeds. But I'm not sure that this in itself is what animates the movement in question. |
I think it has less to do with the content of the history and more with the implications of the history for how we understand ourselves and others. By asking students to inhabit a different mind-set for the sake of understanding the past, history can be a tool for extending our capacity for empathy and understanding. And that empathy can shape the ways we relate to each other in the present. Years of lessons about slavery and civil rights might have primed some number of young people to have an instinctive sympathy with victims of injustice in the present, a sympathy that could lead them to act. |
I think some of this is what happened during the George Floyd protests of 2020 — which saw millions of people, many of them young and white, march in solidarity with Black activists and protesters — and I think the "critical race theory" panic is a rearguard action of sorts against the ideas and cultural forces that produced that solidarity. It's less about education as education, and more about education as a tool for social reproduction, and the fear that the next generation will hold very different ideas about the nature of this country and its hierarchies. |
I sometimes say about your work that it shows how much the 19th century has determined what is happening in the 21st. How true do you think that is? What do you say to the many people who argue that we just need to leave all this behind us? |
Obviously the past has a powerful influence on the present. But I do not think that it determines the present. When I look at the 19th century, for example, I see Americans struggling with some of the same forces that shape our lives now. I think it's useful to learn about those struggles and see how earlier citizens dealt with some of the problems of this country. That the circumstances are very different means that you can't make a one to one comparison or analogy. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to learn. |
As for the people who think we need to leave all of this behind us, I'll refer them to Karl Marx, writing in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." "Men make their own history," he wrote, "but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past." |
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