March 12, 2022
FAIRStory 4: Standing Idly on the Road to a Better America

In its Video #5, The Road to a Better America, FAIRstory profiles civil rights leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Chief Standing Bear, and Martin Luther King. Later, FAIRstory explores the abolitionist movement among White Americans in some detail, profiling William Lloyd Garrison and others.

FAIRstory’s treatment suggests that change occurs when articulate, relentless members of oppressed groups and their allies gain the ear of … it’s never made clear who, but someone sees the light and change happens. Of course, it hasn't quite worked that way. Our history is one of oppressors using raw political power and extra-legal violence to deny all but a select group of us fundamental human rights, activists be damned. Rarely has the arc of United States history bent toward justice without bloodshed. Before activist rhetoric has changed us for the better, it has driven us to the point of the sword.

People who cannot express and celebrate their identities are not free. FAIRstory sidesteps this simple truth in the interest of mollifying those on the right who are more interested in assimilation than in free expression. FAIRstory cherry-picks quotes from Martin Luther King and others in support of the fiction that civil rights leaders wanted a colorblind society, and wanted it right away. The FAIRstory curriculum explicitly states that legal discrimination ended in the 60s as a result of the efforts of King and with Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act. It’s over, nothing to see here.

On the matter of antisemitism, a quote attributed to Sigmund Livingston is particularly egregious: “Jews must work to dissipate the notion that the Jew differs from the general public in any manner except in his religious faith.” Of course, members of the Jewish community are the general public, can defy normative expectations at will, and have no obligation to explain themselves to anyone. Subtle notes are everywhere in FAIRstory to reinforce the notion that some collectives stand outside the mainstream of American culture and need to assimilate for their own good.

Should members of the LGBTQ community be included in stories about the expansion of civil rights in the United States? FAIRStory doesn’t seem to think so. Google cannot find evidence that they exist on FAIRstory’s website.

FAIRstory’s videos omit the pernicious use by Christians of Bible passages to justify slavery, a tactic prevalent in the run-up to the Civil War. Was FAIRstory mindful that doing so might excite comparisons to evangelists’ political maneuvers in the present and rile right-wing Christians?

A curriculum which charts the midpoint between the harsh realities of our history and the feel-good expectations of triggered White, straight Christians is no curriculum at all.

Link: https://halwrightnewtown.info/blog/FAIRStory-4-Standing-Idly-on-the-Road-to-a-Better-America-18/

January 11, 2022
Jefferson and Hemings and Network TV
by Hal Wright

I first became aware of the existence of Sally Hemings when I watched an episode of Head of the Class in the 1980's. In the episode, called "The Way We Weren't," Darlene, a brilliant Black high school student (played by Robin Givens, in her breakthrough role) wrestles with the knowledge that she is a descendant of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.

It's not that I had never heard of or read about Hemings before that. It's that I had never felt any part of the weight of the story until I saw a young Black woman tell it.

Yesterday, I bought and rewatched the episode. It wasn't as groundbreaking as I thought at the time. And the script was... awful. Darlene's White history teacher, played by series star Howard Hesseman, tells Darlene exactly what she should think about her fifth great grandparents. He says historians think Jefferson and Hemings were in love and that the times demanded he keep her enslaved, as this was the only way they could be together. The teacher cites writings by Hemings' son Madison as proof of the loving nature of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship, claims that Jefferson's having brought Hemings to Paris is proof of his affection for her, and states that Jefferson granted Hemings her freedom upon his death. Darlene's anguish soon evaporates.

The trouble with this explanation is that it stinks like the manure on Jefferson's fields.

We will never know exactly what Hemings and Jefferson held in their hearts. But we can learn a great deal more about the circumstance of their connection than what this television show and most popular sources reveal.

Hemings was a child of 13 or 14 when she accompanied Jefferson's daughter Maria to Paris as her maid-servant. According to Madison Hemings, at age 16 Hemings agreed to leave France, where she could have remained as a free woman, and return to Monticello with Jefferson so long as he agreed to free all of her unborn children by age 21. That Hemings was worried about unborn children in Paris, and that she gave birth to Jefferson's child shortly after her return to Monticello, provides important context.

More context comes with the knowledge that Sally Hemings was Jefferson's deceased wife's sister, his sister-in-law. Martha Jefferson's father John Wayles enslaved and raped Hemings' mother Elizabeth. Sally Hemings and her family came to Monticello when Martha inherited her father's wealth, including the people he had enslaved.

Sally Hemings likely bore seven children by Thomas Jefferson, four of whom lived to adulthood. All remained enslaved until the age of 21. Sally Hemings was never formally released from bondage, though after Jefferson's death in 1826 his daughter Martha allowed her to leave Monticello and to live as a free woman in Charlottesville with her son Madison.

Jefferson enslaved Black Americans for the entirety of his adult life, over 600 in all, and granted freedom to only a few of them.

Returning to Head of the Class, Darlene's classmate and rival Allen expresses envy that Darlene is related to a founding father. Darlene says, "I win the snob contest because Thomas Jefferson slept with a distant relative of mine? He owned her Allen. He could have set her free but he didn't until after his death. A little late. Am I supposed to be proud of that?"

The teacher then presses the false narrative that Jefferson brought Hemings to Paris as the "woman of the house."

Darlene says, "A happy slave story? No thank you." No thank you indeed. Undeterred, Darlene's teacher doubles down.

I will share more about Jefferson and Hemings on a different day. For now, I will do what Darlene's history teacher should have done, what all history teachers should do: leave you to process your own thoughts and feelings, if you wish.

Link: https://halwrightnewtown.info/blog/Jefferson-and-Hemings-and-Network-TV-11/

December 22, 2021
George Will Doesn't Like the 1619 Project
by Hal Wright

In a tantrum spanning the first two-thirds of his op-ed, Will excoriates the 1619 Project host Nikole Hannah-Jones for her statement that the Revolutionary War was fought in large part to preserve slavery in North America. On the basis of this mildly hyperbolic statement, which Hannah-Jones has since walked back, Will brands the entirety of the 1619 Project as "historically illiterate."

It would not be productive to parse Will's words here. If Will knows much about the 1619 Project beyond what historian Gordon Wood has written about it, he provides no evidence to that effect in his op-ed. Nor is there evidence that Will read the article cited in his op-ed which takes Wood to task for ignoring Black Americans and American slavery almost entirely.

Instead, let's consider what makes the 1619 Project so inflammatory to right-wing pundits and politicians. The 1619 Project chronicles in gruesome detail how enslaved Americans and their progeny have experienced the country in which they live. It celebrates the patriotism of Black Americans who, in fighting for their own liberty, have expanded liberty for all of us. It posits persuasively that Black art and music are the engine of American culture. In pointing fingers, and it does point fingers, the 1619 Project presents actual atrocities as evidence of broad-based intent to harm.

Now let's look at facts which no honest observer would dispute. For 240 years, enslavers crafted chattel slavery into an ever more efficient system of degradation and torture for their own gain. In the 100 years after the Civil War, every attempt by Black Americans to engage in citizenship from a position of equality was met with violent, deadly resistance. The years since the civil rights legislation of the 1960's have been better but far from ideal. And vestiges of the bad old days are embedded in our public policy, in our institutions, and in our economy.

Right-wing Americans have pushed back against every freedom movement in our history, sowing fear and resentment with the same reactionary tropes around hidden political agendas and communism. It's predictable that George Will would join the chorus. His breathless appeals to somewhere south of the cerebral cortex notwithstanding, Will is wrong when he says the transformation Hannah-Jones seeks would destroy us. Like similar transformations of the past, purging systemic racism would improve our country, bringing us closer to the aspirations laid out in our founding documents.

All good history lessons have flaws. The 1619 Project was written by smart, conscientious, imperfect humans. It tells the truth the great majority of the time, and at its best it hits like a punch to the gut. We cannot blame a descendant of enslaved Black Americans when she centers in her work the systemic brutality people who look like her have endured, and names the evil actors. We can admire the persistence of abolitionists and quibble about details of fact while remaining grateful for the opportunity to learn Hannah-Jones's perspective provides.

Link: https://halwrightnewtown.info/blog/George-Will-Doesnt-Like-the-1619-Project-6/

December 15, 2021
DEI Programs: Necessary Intervention, Not Indoctrination
By Hal Wright

In her pitch-perfect opinion piece, Downer highlights the need for DEI programs by listing just some of the indignities happening right now in Bucks County schools:

Students who feel unsafe in school have difficulty learning and experience mental health issues at higher rates. A well-crafted DEI program isn't an ideological indoctrination. It's a direct and practical effort to help all students feel comfortable and welcomed in schools they are required by law to attend.

Link: https://halwrightnewtown.info/blog/DEI-Programs-Necessary-Intervention-Not-Indoctrination-5/