The 1619 Project (book) by Nikole Hannah-Jones
We just received our copy of this book (Christmas 2021) in return for a contribution. Helen has begun to read it. Only days ago I finished reading Forget the Alamo!
The "Project" book recalls that the first slaves arrived on North American soil before the Pilgrims (whence the "1619" reference) and that the U.S. was built on the system of chattel slavery. Maintianing slavery, when other nations were abbolishing it, was a strong motivation of the American movement to indeppendence from the British Empire.
Forget the Alamo!
In a similar manner (although stylistically certainly not comparable with Hannah-Jones's work and internally inconsistent), "Forget the Alamo!" explains how the move to Texas' independence from Mexico (which the — lost — Battle for the Alamo is supposed to symboize) was a long-term effort of U.S. slaveholders to colonize a Mexican province to prevent the Mexican abolition of slavery from causing said U.S. colonists from losing their human property. That is to say, a multi-level racism played out in the Mexican federal state out of which Texas was carved, as Anglo-Texans (Texians) owned African slaves and sought to rest control of their own provincial government from Mexican-Texans (Tejanos). Both of these terms refer to residents of the region when it was still under Mexican Federal rule.
Noted on July 9:
For those of us watching the news since I last wrote (other than the January 6 Committee hearings) you will have noticed that Texas, Florida and other states have done their darnedest to draw attention away from the truths revealed in the aforementioned books — indeed to ban all books not aligned with certain Christian white nationalist views of the world. "Banned in Boston" (or Texas or Florida) has always been a good selling point, but book-banners always forget this fact. We will be on pins and needles until the mid-term elections begin to show how all this may play out.
Meanwhile, all eyes are on the January 6 committee
Reaction
In response to these two books, both the Trump adminstration and the State of Texas attempted to set up "historical" commissions and legal requirements to omit the truth revealed in these books when teaching hisotry in public school in favor of what is known in the Texas context as the "Anglo-heroic" interpretation, e.g., of the Americans' defeat at the Alamo.
California
Although California is not Texas, when I first visited "Old Town San Diego" I was deeply impressed by the tidbits of the history of the pre-U.S. regional government there, a society where many ethnic groups, if not equal, lived and worked cooperatively – Africans, Mestizos, Europeans, Indigenous — and thought to myself that they had certainly lost a lot when California became a part of the U.S.A. I don't know the degree to which forces similar to those in Texas played a role. On a positive note, slavery was never legal in California — although it was pracitice to capture Native Americans and keep them as indentured servants under vague laws and vague law enforcement. The Spanish Mission enterprise had cost untold Native lives during its reign before its replacement by the equally problematic ranchero system — remnants of both remaining visible in the California landscape.
Eric K. Ward — First U.S. Winner of the Courage Prize (2021)
"Nationally recognized expert on authoritarian movements and hate violence, Eric K. Ward has spent more than 30 years promoting the promise of inclusive democracy in America." "This is the first time in the award’s history that an American has won the prize, revealing the dangerous proliferation of hate crimes and political violence by authoritarian and extremist movements in the United States." He currently serves as Executive Director of Western States Center, Senior Fellow with Southern Poverty Law Center and Race Forward, and as Chair of The Proteus Fund..
