The conservative freak out about the 1619 Project (of which Cotton is just the latest example) is not about history. It's about memory; about what parts of the nation's past we should hold in our memories going forward & about how we tell the story of the nation to our children.

The history remains the history. We can't change what happened. But what always changes is how we pick out parts of the nation's past & bring them into our present. Cotton wants to return to how he was taught history in his Arkansas high school, as if that's "the real history."

It reminds me of this moment at the end of the White Lies podcast. Joanne Bland, an African-American woman in Selma, talks about how white people want the history of racism to just go away, to be forgotten. But she can't forget it, because she has to live inside it every day.

One key point of the White Lies podcast (which you should listen to if you haven't) and the 1619 Project (which you should read if you haven't) is that white people have lead the lives they've led in part because black people have led the lives they have. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1143972326456741889?s=20

As historian Nathan Huggins put it in the late 1980s, the histories of white Americans and black Americans are "joined at the hip." There is no such thing as a history of white America or a history of black America that can be told in isolation.

To give just one small example. Many Southern planters sent their sons north to be educated at places like Tom Cotton's Harvard. Some had difficulty affording this, and so to cover the costs they would sell or mortgage an enslaved person.

The white family would advance their intergenerational well-being, by selling a mother away from her children, a sister away from her siblings, a father away from his children, a son away from his father, an uncle away from his nieces and nephews.

And then the descendants of those white families would tut tut about how supposedly dysfunctional black families were, while priding themselves on how hard they and their ancestors worked to get to where they've gotten.

It's easy for white families that benefited from slavery and Jim Crow to say that's all behind us now, no need to remember it...because they have the luxury of thinking they live outside of that history.

Their ancestors sold that person south, never to be seen again. They probably even forgot that person's name over time. But that person, 500 miles away, never forgot that child they'd been separated from, the lover they'd never see again. That wound was never healed.

So when people like Cotton, the beneficiary of 7 generations of white supremacy and settler colonialism, says we need to pay more attention to the great white men who built America and less attention to slavery, well...I'm not buying it.

Tom Cotton is trying to use his power as a US Senator to silence black historians and journalists who have brought forward parts of American history that make him uncomfortable, that he'd rather not reckon with. Well, that history is there whether he likes it or not.

This memory/history distinction is also useful when we think about statues. A statue of someone is not history. It is a site of memory. Our historical memory has and will always change over time, hence the statues we put up and take down will change over time. It's really ok.

And if you're a white person and you're really into the history of freedom in America...you'll never guess which people in the American past spent the most time thinking about what freedom meant and how important it was....and who might have something to teach you about it...

That's right...enslaved people and their descendants spent a helluva lot of time thinking and talking and writing about freedom. They are your fellow Americans, from whom you might learn something, just as you've learned from Washington or Hamilton or Jefferson.

But before you can learn from the historical experiences of black Americans, you first have to stop being such a snowflake and actually pick up something written by a black person that might offer you insights and information you didn't know already. It'll be ok, I promise.

And developing a bit of empathy and understanding for the lives that black people lived in the American past, might, just might, make you a bit more willing to acknowledge (and even utter the words) that "black lives matter" today.

Returning to add a link to this thread about the interplay of history, memory, and race in my own life, and pertaining to post-emancipation American history. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1266475196073930754?s=20

Had no idea this would blow up like this. There's one thing it's important for me to add. Many folks have picked up on this particular formulation. I learned this from historian Elsa Barkley Brown, and her 1992 article "The Politics of Difference." https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1287609972805656576?s=20