‘The “true founding” claim was the core element of the Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones…’

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html

‘The “true founding” claim was the core element of the Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones…’

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html

This article is bullshit, just like everything else WSWS has written about Project 1619. The NYT stopped referring to 1619 as the start of slavery in the USA because there is significant debate over whether the Africans brought to Jamestown were indentured servants or slaves. For example, Nell Painter, an African-American historian who is retired from Princeton, maintains that they were indentured servants as does Nikhil Pal Singh, an NYU professor who is about as far from WSWS as you can get.

In my view, they were not indentured servants since they only ended up in Jamestown as a result of being seized from a Spanish slave ship. This wasn't a case of Jamestown colonists going over to Africa to con some peasants into signing a 5-year contract for a great job as servants in Jamestown. Right?

As for the rest of the article, it is filled with nonsense like this. Racial hatred? What the fuck? Do these people base their analysis on Karl Marx or Stanley Kramer movies?

These deletions are not mere wording changes. The “true founding” claim was the core element of the Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks.

The operative question of racial slavery as opposed to indentured servitude, in the research that I have done, is twofold.

'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd; for shame, put on

your gown;

Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram

Is topping your white ewe. Arise, arise;

Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,

Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you:

Arise, I say. -Act I Scene I

The WSWS's shit-slippery telescoping of the complex issues surrounding the 1619 Project into some adolescent outcry against eternal "racial hatred" is, as one would expect, and Louis Proyect demonstrates, a load of disingenuous, ill-intentioned nonsense. Michael Meeropol does a terrific job of anatomizing the complexities of race and capitalism. 

Without too much duplication (one hopes), I would like to make a few high-level summary points:

1) Racism, however emotional, is at bottom a conceptual structure and a entails a continual process of structuring that evolves historically and continues to reproduce itself wherever it appears.

2) If racism were not useful to capitalism, it could disappear--initially through a process of "white people" beginning not to listen to its insidious voices, and then through the disappearance of the voices themselves.

3) In order for 2 to happen, a process of reeducation and cultural change aimed specifically at race would be necessary. Cuba--and insanely jingoistic Russia, which rolls in its racist imperial heritage like a dog in fish guts--show that racism and masculinism can easily survive purported socialist revolutions and "reseed" themselves if not addressed specifically. The fact that racism itself developed historically is no argument against this.

4) In the United States, racism is the biggest single bulwark, after consumerism, against the questioning of capitalism.  Do you "white people" want to be like those "shithole" people?  The neoliberal ideology that has developed recently around a handful of phrases from the Floundering Bothers is greatly weakened if there is no n* threat to keep the minimally privileged awake at night.  A Yellow Peril makes a poor substitute. 

Masculinism proves itself through racial murder in addition to rape and abuse of women and weak men in general, and is the passive-follower little brother of racism, though it can infect all races, and thus undermine the critique of racism. Settlerism--a vehicle for racism and masculinism and a further distracting ideology that functions to obfuscate capitalism--is impossible without a racial "other" to colonize and kill in pursuit of manly "liberty."

5) The process of development of racism under capitalism IMO reflects--to use a now highly unfashionable terminology--a process of bricollage, the adoption and adaptation of previously existing cultural and ideological materials to suit new circumstances. 

The driving engine of class struggle, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to a latticework or syntax of intersecting ideological topoi. It is not at root a matter of semiotics but of observable and quantifiable material reality, but it can't move forward without the concealment, distraction, and access to the manipulation of the mass psyche made possible by multiple intersecting ideologies that can seem to move together independent of class struggle and to some extent independent of each other. 

This independence is crucial to the functional effectiveness of these ideologies--to be convinced of racist ideology, you must first see and feel as an integral mental object the inferiority of blacks and other racial groups--as well, of course of queers and women in general.  This must have the force of revelation, of plain-daylight self-evidence, and must inoculate the convinced racist against placing anything before race--for example, social equality. 

So racism is in reality a separate evil, intricately intertwined with the class system, but capable of surviving outside it. To achieve a classless society, we must eradicate this intellectual and emotional pathology like any other virus or obstacle to socialist reconstruction--as a problem in its own right, not a mere function of class struggle. 

6) The indentured servant entered into a compact but was precisely not a "free" laborer selling her labor power on the open market. The amount of coercion, reinforced by mental and physical cruelty, was vast. In reality, indentured servitude at its worst was almost chattel slavery and differed sharply from capitalist wage slavery or anything we would now understand as a "legitimate" contractual arrangement--however fraudulent our modern ideology around work contracts and "free" labor may be (or how terrible the unrestricted atrocities of "free labor," as seen for example in Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England, certainly were and are). 

Richard Hofstadter (quoted, I admit it, in Wikipedia) pointed out, "Although efforts were made to regulate or check their activities, and they diminished in importance in the eighteenth century, it remains true that a certain small part of the white colonial population of America was brought by force, and a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation on the part of the spirits [recruiting agents]."

There appears to have been a very significant difference, but the distance from indenture to slavery was perhaps far smaller than people nowadays may think.

It looks like Nikole Hanna Jones has deleted all of her tweets, on Twitter. I follow her, and at this time nothing is there.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 11:53 AM, Andrew Stewart wrote:

 

Iago opens OTHELLO with a jaw-droppingly racist rant that has little variation from what Dixiecrats said about inter-ethnic marriage:

 

'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd; for shame, put on

your gown;

Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram

Is topping your white ewe. Arise, arise;

Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,

Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you:

Arise, I say. -Act I Scene I

Right there you have Iago equating a Black man with a farm animal, a ram or male Sheep. That’s not very different from what we get from Breitbart today. 

Andrew Stewart's information re indenture and chattel slavery in the broader European picture seems terrifically apposite and worth studying in detail.  With all due respect, however, this particular passage seems to reflect the historian's "easter-egg hunt," hermetic, or tin-eared approach to the interpretation of literary texts, which perhaps ill serves the main thrust of Stewart's post.

Iago equates not only Othello but Desdemona herself with a farm animal--a white ewe.  Indeed, by using this metaphor, Iago includes her father, Brabantio, himself in the category of farm animals, since only a ram can beget a ewe, although it may be that he is only meant to represent the man who owns the woman and the animals.  

In fact, Iago equates Iago's blackness with that of the Devil and that is what lends force to the comparison.  Equations of the color black to the Devil occur elsewhere in Shakespeare. eg "the Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon" in MacBeth.  What is missing in Shakespeare's discourse is any developed conception of "white people"--in its fully developed racist ideological form, a product of the United States and one that cannot be understood in the absence of fully developed US black chattel slavery and its racist aftermath following the civil war. 

There is a play back and forth on Othello's color that has nothing immediately to do with the particular social pathology on display in Breitbart and currently vying for dictatorial power in the US.  

"Renaissance racism" is another topic, but what this passage actually conveys is an aspect of medieval christian iconography that no doubt eventually found its way into the iconography of the Ku Klux clan, but did so through a process of adaptation and repurposing. To see it full-fledged in this speech is like eg seeing the romano-hellenistic architectural motifs of Petra as proof that the Nabateans were greco-roman, which--except for certain aspects of their architecture--they were not. So, at most proto-racism.  Any other conclusion from this passage is IMO circular reasoning that begs the question.