Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 1: "The 1776 Project"

Every year since 2004, I've posted daily entries for the month of April as a counter-observance of Confederate Heritage Month. This is a commemoration promoted by white supremacist groups and supported by a number of states, including my native Mississippi.

The Mississippi news site The Commercial Dispatch (Columbus-Starkville)posted this editorial earlier this year criticizing the grotesque practice, Our View: More relics of a regrettable era 01/19/2021:

... Confederate Heritage Day is a relic of a regrettable era, celebrating Mississippi at its absolute worst. Gov. Tate Reeves, like his predecessors, says in the annual proclamation that Confederate Heritage Month is time to reflect on our Confederate Heritage. We wonder, though, what Confederate heritage almost four-in-10 Mississippians, the black population, have to reflect on.

It’s embarrassing. Gov. [Tate] Reeves [also known to his critics as Gov. Tater Tot] knows that. It’s no accident that of all the state proclamations he has issued, Confederate Heritage Month is the only one that isn’t posted on the Governor’s official website and is not announced by a press release. He does it in secret because he’s ashamed to do it in public. [my emphasis]

This was one aspect of the larger white supremacist narrative in the post-Civil War period. It included a deeply dishonest, pseudohistorical account of slavery and the Civil War, widely known as the Lost Cause view. Figures associated with the Confederate, pro-slavery cause were adapted as icons of white supremacy.

The Trump-Pence Administration embraced the Lost Cause white supremacist view of US history and intended to promote it to be taught in schools via something they called The 1776 Project, an effort mercifully cut short in that particular form by the end of that administration. The administration posted the official ideological manifesto of the project just a couple of days before Joe Biden's Inauguration as President. The new administration quickly removed it. (It's archived here by the National Archives.)

Historian Jeff Ostler noted at the time it was first issued:

(Though the appendix provides full text of the D of I, which does mention "merciless Indian savages." Quite the city on a hill, aren't we?)

— Jeff Ostler (@Jeff__Ostler) January 18, 2021

The Conclusion of the report reads like it was culled from a book with a title like, Dorky Speeches Given by Local Politicians at VFW Meetings.

Colleen Murphy, a specialist in transitional justice efforts, applies that framework to our post-Trump, post-Capitol-insurrection era in How Nations Heal Boston Review 01/21/2021.

In his 2001 study States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, psychologist Stanley Cohen identifies three forms of denial of injustice can take. The first is literal denial, where basic facts are disputed. Consider Trump’s 2020 Presidential Executive Order 13950 and a follow-up Memo from the Executive Branch Office of Management and Budget to heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. Both engage in literal denial by suggesting that discussion of any racism or evil actions in our past is “propaganda.” (The memo makes this suggestion explicit.) More specifically, EO 13950 characterizes as mere ideology the claim that America “is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.” It stipulates as false that anyone on the basis of their race could oppress or benefit from racialized segregation or slavery, contending that such ideas are grounded in a “destructive ideology” and “misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world.”

The second form Cohen discusses is interpretive denial, where an act or state of affairs that is wrong is re-described so as to downplay wrongfulness. A striking example is Senator Tom Cotton’s recently characterization of slavery as a “necessary evil.” Cotton’s words capture a common view among conservatives, downplaying the gravity of the wrong of slavery and implicitly seeking to justify, rather than repudiate, that part of our nation’s history. Likewise, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” generated pushback that went beyond scholarly disputes to call into question the legitimacy of centering Black lives and experiences and centuries of slavery. This extreme form of repudiation is different in kind from the criticism about specific conclusions or pieces of evidence to which any research project is rightly subject; it reflects a form of interpretive denial regarding the significance and centrality of white supremacy and racial injustice in the United States. [my emphasis]

Colleen Flaherty looks at how The 1776 Project fits into the historical conservative ideological project in A Push for ‘Patriotic Education’ Inside Higher Ed 01/20/2021:

In an 11th-hour White House report, the administration that coined the term “alternative facts” says it's academics who have hijacked the truth about U.S. history.

Historians, in turn, generally agree that the report -- released by the Presidential Advisory 1776 Commission -- is garbage. The document lacks citations, fails to mention Native Americans entirely, traffics heavily in American “values” at the expense of objective truths and bemoans the “radicalization of American politics” from the 1960s onward.

Less clear to historians is how much of an impact the report will have on already divided and fact-challenged culture.

David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, said that academic historians, “even those with conservative instincts, will discredit this report whenever asked. We value research, facts, evidence, and then interpretation and debate above ideology. At least most of us do.”

Beyond academe, Blight said he was hopeful that the report “will have very little lasting power.” But even as President Trump is about to leave office, he said, “Trumpism is not going away,” and the report gives his supporters a “documentary calling card" in form of an official White House publication.

Ultimately, he said, the report’s real-world impact depends on “what Fox News and other right-wing media does with it. It is cleaned-up Trumpist lies put out for public use.” [my emphasis]

A copy of The 1776 Report as issued by the Trump White House is available from The 1776 Project.