How Not to Understand Slavery

Matt Walsh would like you to know you’ve been lied to. Last month, the right-wing provocateur appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show to discuss his new video series, Real History With Matt Walsh. “When you really start getting into it,” Walsh told Kelly, “you realize that, wow, they really lied about everything.”

He begins the series by examining the practice of chattel slavery, he said to Kelly, “because this is, we’re told, the original sin” of the United States. In Walsh’s account, the left believes that “America was built on slavery, and it has no right to exist, and every white American carries, somehow, that legacy, that guilt in their blood”; therefore progressives feel they have the “moral justification to just do whatever they want” to white people. Walsh intends to stop this. So in Real History, he relentlessly downplays the brutality of slavery in the United States.

Sanitizing slavery has become a core objective of the reactionary right under Donald Trump—a malignant response to the progressive left’s oversimplification of American history for their own present-day ends. But the truest understanding of slavery doesn’t serve any political faction. Rather, it acknowledges the horrors of racial oppression while still allowing us to see beyond them.

In 2019, Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of The New York Times, reportedly described “The 1619 Project” to his staff as “the most ambitious examination of the legacy of slavery ever undertaken” by a newspaper. Despite its grand ambition, however, the project arrives at a narrow conclusion: “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

This argument, which received ample criticism from historians at the time, seems to have emerged from the authors’ commitment to the ideological mission of the “anti-racist” left. As Baquet himself reportedly said, a major goal of the project was not historical but contemporary: “to try to understand the forces that led to the election of Donald Trump.” In reality, the project and its progressive defenders fed those forces rather than clarified them. Before Walsh could even finish explaining to Kelly why slavery occupies such a privileged place in his series, she cut in to provide an answer: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led “The 1619 Project,” wants people to believe that slavery is, in Kelly’s words, “the whole reason America was formed.”

[Sean Wilentz: A matter of facts]

At the end of Trump’s first term, the White House released The 1776 Report in response to the Times initiative. As the Princeton historian Matthew Karp noted in Harper’s, the document contains a “range of pseudo-patriotic distortions about slavery and the founding era.” Nonetheless, Karp observed, “the report’s authors celebrated Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, praised Reconstruction, and condemned the postbellum South’s descent into Jim Crow, ‘a system that was hardly better than slavery.’”

Whatever modicum of analytical balance that report exhibits is absent in Trump’s second term. Reinterpreting the history of slavery has given way to suppressing its memorialization entirely.

The Trump administration has viewed Juneteenth with particular disdain. Last year, the president used the occasion not to remember emancipation but to complain that America had too many holidays. In December, he ordered the National Park Service to stop allowing free entry on Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Trump added Flag Day in their place, which falls on his own birthday.

Back in March, he strong-armed a host of institutions by issuing an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directs federally funded museums, monuments, and parks to remove materials that promote “corrosive ideology.” Last month, the park service obliged, eliminating an outdoor exhibit at Independence National Historical Park, in Philadelphia, where George Washington’s house once stood. The exhibit honored nine slaves who toiled at the residence—part of an effort to explore “the paradox between slavery and freedom.” Such nuance appears to have violated the more patriotic version of history that the government seeks to instill.

The administration has applied perhaps the most pressure on the Smithsonian Institution. In August, the White House ordered the Smithsonian to implement “corrections” to any public-facing materials whose “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals” the administration deemed unacceptable. On Truth Social, Trump made clear what he thought needed fixing: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.” (The Smithsonian has turned over records to federal officials, but late last year, the group’s leader insisted to staffers that it alone was responsible for “all content, programming, and curatorial decisions.”)

In its campaign over the past year, the MAGA movement has squandered what might have been a reasonable position. David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University and a biographer of the civil-rights leader John Lewis, told me that the right could have made a persuasive case against the excessive preoccupation with slavery and racial politics that some on the left have shown. Instead, Trump and his allies seem unwilling to tolerate virtually any acknowledgment that America subjugated Black people. Rather than making a dispassionate case against the idea that the country was founded to enslave Africans, MAGA is taking down plaques commemorating basic facts, such as Washington’s slaveholding. “That’s not turning back the last 10 years,” Greenberg said. “That’s turning back historical understanding to the 1960s, if not further.”

In Real History, Walsh turns the clock back further still. One of his principal aims is to show that slavery was the norm across human history, and that American slavery was hardly the most extreme version. (Among other oversights, he fails to acknowledge that the link America forged between bondage and racial identity had little precedent in antiquity.) Walsh appears to think this lets American slaveholders off the hook. When all are guilty, he seems to suggest, no one is. The argument recalls Thomas Jefferson’s infamous defense of slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia. “We know that among the Romans,” Jefferson wrote, “the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America.”

Walsh also notes that the descendants of Africans trafficked to what became the United States are now in better socioeconomic shape than those whose ancestors remained in the Old World or were transported to Latin America or the Caribbean. He draws an odious conclusion from this—American slavery wasn’t that bad—yet the point is not entirely incorrect. Other far more serious thinkers have made versions of it too.

America’s slaves lived “in the presence of more human freedom and individual opportunity than they or anybody else had ever seen before,” the Black critic Albert Murray wrote in his 1970 essay collection, The Omni-Americans. “The conception of being a free man in America was infinitely richer than any notion of individuality in the Africa of that period.” Many slaves, Murray noted, internalized this ideal of American freedom despite their own subjugation. “The fugitive slave, for instance, was culturally speaking certainly an American, and a magnificent one at that.”

[Clint Smith: Tell students the truth about American history]

And this points to the crux of the matter. When recounted accurately, from beginning to end, the story of slavery is the most inspirational and unifying narrative that the country has. Today’s multiethnic society is deeply flawed, of course, but the fact that it emerged from such cruel beginnings should be a source of pride for Americans of every background.

“The destruction of slavery is one of the great American achievements,” Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton and critic of “The 1619 Project,” told me. “Taking slavery seriously in American history is not anti-American. The story of slavery in the U.S. is about an ancient institution that was planted here, thrived here, and then was confronted and ultimately attacked in the 19th century through enormous sacrifice, including military conflict. That’s an extraordinary American story.”

For MAGA revisionists as well as some progressives, commemorating slavery implies that the U.S. is permanently stained by it. Yet downplaying or exaggerating American slavery threatens something even graver than perpetual guilt: the loss of the country’s shared moral language.

The story of slavery and its abolition is ultimately one of irrepressible human dignity. Properly told, it makes reconciliation possible and future injustice avoidable.