OR: How Christopher Rufo aspires to be the Tucker Carlson of higher education ...
I hate to link to it, but you really need to be able to see it:
It not only pre-exists the development of Critical Race Theory, it pre-exists the entire life of the race-hustling Rufo.
The emphasis on the idea that Blacks were passive recipients of the white grace of emancipation delivered by President Abraham Lincoln is one of the prime mantras of the avowedly racist writings of the highly influential "Dunning School" of Civil War and Reconstruction history at Columbia University that dominated US textbooks from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Here's an example of the kind of writing that the Dunning School offered, from William E. Woodward's Meet General Grant (1928):
"The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world that ever became free without any effort of their own. ... They had not started the war nor ended it, [but] twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals, and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres and a mule.”
This kind of racist, anti-historical crap (to which both Mssrs. Rufo and Carlson appear to subscribe) was most ably answered by W. E. B. Dubois in the closing pages of Black Reconstruction in 1935:
"The facts of American history have in the last half century [have] been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy."
I should note -- before somebody does their research (by which we mean googling Dubois on Wikipedia) -- that Dubois did use Marxist economic theory as part of his analysis of Reconstruction. He did not, however, defer to that in the segments of his history that referred to the Black role in winning the Civil War, and his research there has stood the test of time (cf. John Hope Franklin [1961]; LaWanda Cox [1981] Vincent Harding [1981]; James M. McPherson [1982]; Ervin L. Jordan Jr [1995]; David H. Donald [1995] Eric Foner [1995]; Noah Andre Trudeau [1998]; David Blight [2001]; Armstead Robinson [2005] Ira Berlin [2015] and so many more] (1)
These are not historians associated with CRT -- this list includes both liberal and conservative historians (as the term used to be applied to both -- who are considered among the front ranks of Civil War historians of the latter half of the 20th Century and the first two decades of the 21st.
The historian most associated in modern terms with the thesis of "self-emancipation" was Vincent Harding, who published There is River in 1981 -- two years before Mr Rufo's parents had any idea that their little bundle of race-hustling joy was about the grace their presence.
This engendered lively debate: while nobody except Neo-Confederates propagating the "Black Confederate soldiers" conspiracy theory argues of the centrality of the Black experience and the agency of Black men and women in opposing the Confederacy and fighting for freedom, there is considerable discussion of whether Lincoln's act in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation or the direct efforts of 3.8 million Black Americans should be awarded primary responsibility for freeing the enslaved populations of both South and North.
The most famous debate about these rival interpretations occurred between McPherson (Lincoln) and Berlin (self-emancipation) from 1995-1997. It was remarkable for its civility, erudition, and the willingness of each historian to acknowledge that while he disagreed with the other's position, that position was a legitimate historical interpretation, and at least partly right.
In the end, most historians settled on the idea that Lincoln was a necessary but not sufficient cause of the enslaved being freed, as the actions of the enslaved Black Americans was also a necessary but not sufficient explanation for their own freedom. In other words, both are factors, and the one to which you ascribe the prime responsibility is a matter of viewpoint and evidence interpretation ... not ideology as modern conservative race hustlers would have you believe.
Ironically, both McPherson and Berlin, while remaining friends and good colleagues, STILL disagree on the topic. That's OK because real historians DO often disagree. For years, to take one related example, there have been three different theses regarding the "main cause" of the Civil War. The oldest is the "irrepressible conflict," which was followed by the "blundering generation" and then by "modernization."
It's relevant to point out that this debate played out primarily during the years when Mr Rufo was in elementary school, awaiting the onset of puberty. I am sure it will arrive soon, though probably not soon enough to salvage intellectual integrity at New College. (Race hustling, I understand, diminishes testosterone.)
It's also important to note that as Mr Rufo began to go to high school, great strides were made in terms of economic history and the place of enslaved Africans in the US expansion boom of the first half of the 19th Century. It turns out that Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, and many others have been busily amassing the evidence to demonstrate that slavery was not merely the South's "peculiar institution," but the major driving impetus behind the entire nation's growth.
If you are prone to believe this is CRT in action, as some of the race hustlers will tell you, it's important to note that South Carolina slaveholder and US Vice President John C. Calhoun was actually the first to advance this thesis in 1828, and everyone up to Mississippi slaveholder and Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the slave South agreed with it. Who knew that slaveholders were advocates of CRT? (Although it IS perhaps significant that historian Richard Hofstadter once characterized Calhoun as the "Marx of the Master Class.")
So when Penny Proud sings that Black people built this country, and that Lincoln didn't personally free the slaves, guess what? This Disney cartoon character (and her scriptwriters) have a much firmer grasp on American history than the race-hustling Mr Rufo.
His reaction actually reflects less a conservative mindset than an eruption of Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. No, I am not comparing Mr Rufo to the Nazis -- he'd have to be several standard deviations more consequential to the flow of history to qualify for that.
What I AM saying is that Mr Rufo, outside the rarified air of Fox News, the Discovery Institute, Claremont, and Ron DeSantis' Florida, is too inconsequential a person in intellectual terms for anybody's histories to remember him in the upcoming decades. He's NOT Eichmann, he's not Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox, Curtis LeMay, George Wallace, or even ... Tucker Carlson.
He's a man with one parlor trick and an audience of poorly educated, very afraid people that he's exploiting for power and profit. In a sense, he's like the mythical carpetbaggers, ostensibly come South to rehabilitate the poor, incapable Black people, but really planning to head home with those suitcases filled with cash.
Notes:
(1) In case anybody wonders if, on this topic, I am another internet wonder "doing my own research" by watching a lot of YouTube videos and MSNBC, let me point out that I hold a PhD in American History with a speciality in the Civil War and Reconstruction from that notoriously Marxist institution The College of William and Mary. I published the first of five books and over two dozen articles on the period roughly when young Mr Rufo was entering the 4th grade. (He was in kindergarten when I achieved that PhD.) Along the way, by contrast, I served 21 years in my country's uniform, safeguarding his right to free if absurd and dangerous speech (I am still trying to determine if I regret that). As far as the current historiography goes, I am a recognized scholar on Black resistance to slavery and the Confederacy ("African-Americans Resist the Confederacy: Two Variations on a Theme," North & South, vol 8 (November 2005), and I literally wrote the book that documented how said Black resistance contributed to the defeat of the Rebel army.
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