Wilentz is still arguing against @nhannahjones (and her editor), ie, against the Black woman who is behind the project and who is not a History prof. He is unwilling to concede that she might have a different (but legit) interpretation of history than he does.
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I also think he misreads her essay. He says she didn't argue that advances in freedom in the US have come from Black political mobilization. But she did. That is the primary takeaway that I gleaned the day it was posted online.pic.twitter.com/X4CGqZo9Bf
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And, as the new
@BostonReview piece points out, this has been a longstanding debate in US historiography. It's not even a 2-sided debate. The scholars I agree w/ would tend to argue that Black freedom dreams couldn't be contained by the US nation-state (a view not in 1619 Proj).Prikaži ovu nit -
Lemme begin my main point: as others have pointed out, among other problems, it's ridic for him to act as though historians traffic only in facts, not interpretations. And I got uncomfortable when he brought Black Reconstruction into the debate to make this point.
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These days, a lot of people are reading BR, and many would agree it's the greatest book of history ever written in the US. But Wilentz is mobilizing that popularity and its contemporary esteem against the very reason it's now popular--ie, because it rejected racist orthodoxy.
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How BR rejected racist orthodoxy is what's important here. Wilentz's two paragraphs about Du Bois argue that what Du Bois did with BR was to mobilize "facts" for the purpose of "historical accuracy." Here's the first one.pic.twitter.com/6xiW79BZR7
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It's OK, but I am getting nervous when he's talking about the Dunning School ignoring or suppressing facts. Those dudes "suppressed" the idea that Black people were capable of self-government. That was part of why Du Bois called their work "propaganda."
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If it's merely a question of facts, then the book's initial failure to catch on is inexplicable. Finally, the right facts became available! Facts, Wilentz seems to believe, should be impervious to politics (see David Levering Lewis's intro to BR on the politics of its reception).
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But then Wilentz starts to use Du Bois for his own purposes, which is to conflate Wilentz's overall INTERPRETATION with FACTS simply b/c Du Bois also used the word "facts." (Du Bois also pointed out that he had a theory of history...which Wilentz pretends he himself doesn't.)pic.twitter.com/sxVyAoQbcm
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I'd argue that Du Bois used the word "facts" often in a tendentious, argumentative, and ironic way--b/c he was fighting racism that masqueraded as unimpeachable fact. He was using the words of propagandists against the propaganda. Dunning wasn't "sloppy." He was an expert racist.
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But the more I thought about this, the more I realized that Wilentz either doesn't get what Du Bois did or is intentionally misrepresenting it. For this, I'm relying on Thomas C. Holt's article from 2013 in South Atlantic Quarterly on Black Reconstruction. https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/112/3/419/3632/A-Story-of-Ordinary-Human-Beings-The-Sources-of-Du?redirectedFrom=fulltext …
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One of Holt's arguments, which he's worked on for his entire career, is about how it was possible for Du Bois to write his revolutionary interpretation of Reconstruction w/o access to primary sources. (Basically, he & Foner later confirmed Du Bois's analysis w/ primary sources.)pic.twitter.com/I5vGBipEPh
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Holt observes that Du Bois actually cited a number of racist works about the period. These were the source of his "facts." And that raises a puzzle about how he arrived at his interpretation.pic.twitter.com/Pu86UIjkrb
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And Holt cautiously makes the grounded claim, which I would amplify, that Du Bois was able to argue that ordinary Black people made a political movement and a political revolution not b/c of the primary sources available to him but b/c he TALKED to ordinary Black people.pic.twitter.com/F7yi9XuP5k
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Du Bois was both a historian and a sociologist, and in his sociological work, he spoke to ordinary Black folks, some of whom would've lived through Reconstruction or would've been of the very next generation. He learned his facts about the past through contemporary ethnography.
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In other words, Du Bois's interpretation of the political capacity of ordinary Black people to work together, to organize, to imagine democratic political worlds that did not yet exist--these came from listening to Black people talk about their lives in/after Reconstruction.
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(There is another story to be told, which is partly present in Aldon Morris's incredible book The Scholar Denied about how this research on the rural South also influenced Max Weber and may even have tamped down Max's tendency toward racist bile.)
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When I taught Du Bois last semester in Social Theory, I spent some time on these "methodological" points about BR because I don't think you can fully appreciate Du Bois's theory without them.
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It strikes me as deeply cynical to wield Du Bois in this way: essentially to argue that Du Bois would support claims that he actually wouldn't and to use Du Bois, popular among anti-racists/radicals, to score points and fuel the backlash against anti-racist thinking.
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That Wilentz doesn't see a contemporary replay of Du Bois vs Dunning in Hannah-Jones vs him/WSWS is astonishing. It's also just odd that his primary beef w/ this amazing Black woman writer seems to be that she's not crediting white ppl enough for sometimes not being racist.
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Do I expect to agree with everything I read? Um, no. But grumbling about an epochal transformation in historical interpretation that puts anti-racism at the forefront, while the US is where it's at today, seems a bit like a lost cause to me.
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