The Fallacy of Objectivity
A musing on white guilt, white ignorance, and the dismemberment of historical truth
Born out of frustration for the erasure of black voices in the teaching of American history, Nikole Hannah-Jones in partnership with The New York Times launched the 1619 Project, a collection of written pieces meant to center one of the most important, yet one of the most suppressed, portions of the American story: the narrative of black suffering at the hands of the state, and tales of black resilience despite such domination. In her introductory essay for the ambitious venture, Hannah-Jones rejects the modus operandi of the American education system, a methodology that is perhaps nowhere else most visible than in the teaching of American history. The teaching of American history indoctrinates the populace into the great American myth—a myth that privileges whiteness and alienates all else; a myth that breeds a pernicious complacency and encourages a malicious investment in the status quo; and a myth, Hannah-Jones argues, that is built upon false virtues that have yet to be realized since the first slaves stepped foot on North American soil in 1619.[1] Through the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones and the project’s other contributors urge us to remove the rose-colored glasses of blind and unquestioning patriotism so that we as a nation might look the truth of our past in its face, and walk steadfastly together along the path of justice and restoration for those groups whose backs the country stands upon.
Some, however, in their well-intentioned faith in the goodness of America, believe that adopting such a critical paradigm towards our nation’s past can only serve to breed contempt and division. A year following the launch of the 1619 project, former US president Donald Trump announced the creation of an initiative promoting the teaching of a “patriotic education” meant to fortify the minds of America’s youth against those preaching “hateful lies about this country”. Dubbed the 1776 Commission, its purpose was to protect against the wiles of "critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, an ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together”.[2] A few months later on January 18, 2021, the commission published its final report. In The 1776 Report, the commission retaliates against the “false theories” of the critical perspective adopted by Hannah-Jones and calls for the reinstatement of patriotic education, encouraging the citizenry to approach the nation’s history with “reverence and love” and reject the words of those who “speak only of America’s sins”. Patriotic education, then, is “an expression of the American’s mind,” a mind that has supposedly only ever been oriented towards liberation and greatness. Rather than enveloping the American story in narratives of “oppression and victimhood,” the commission believes that the education system should predominantly focus on stories of American heroes such as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, whose efforts were exemplary of freedom and equality, despite both purported heroes being complicit in the slavery of an entire race of human beings (follies of the time, they decry). Ultimately, we must reject the “logical apex” or progressivism—that “there is no ultimate or objective truth.”
Herein lies the tension between the critical and ideal perspectives of the past: who does the blotting out of America’s transgressions serve, what do the idealizations encourage by this conception of patriotism protect, what demographics are being acknowledged when they speak of America, and, ultimately, what is meant by claims to objectivity? Questions of this nature were similar to those that W.E.B. Du Bois almost 100 years prior in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. Embarking on a sincere and authentic retelling of the truth of Reconstruction, DuBois ends his 1935 seminal work by critiquing the use of history for nefarious, ideologically-driven purposes by white America in “The Propaganda of History”. Here, Du Bois deconstructs the idea of the historian as a scientist, a purveyor of objective truth, regarding the study of history within the bounds of the classroom as an ideological project that conveys distorted “version[s] of historical fact[s]” to “influence and educate” new generations in “the way we wish”. In this way, the “science” of history is indeed no science at all.[3]
Following in the spirit of Du Bois, this paper serves as a critique of the purported “objective” and its role in both the protection and production of America’s moral salience. Here, I argue that the re-creation of the White American mythos following the failures of Reconstruction constituted a calculated effort to assassinate the truth of the past and dismantle the moral and legal obligations held by the country to newly the freed black population. This revision, masked under the white man’s objectivity, served not only to placate white guilt, but to further solidify the normative understandings of whiteness under the racial-capitalist regime, thereby fortifying the value of whiteness. Ultimately, if we are to begin to reconcile the enormous debts owed by this country to Black America, we must refuse the illusions that claim to adhere to standards of “objectivity”, standards that only serve to substantiate white ignorance and devalue blackness as both a moral and epistemic resource. In doing so, I hope to vindicate the critical paradigm advanced by Hannah-Jones, Du Bois, and other thinkers within the Black Radical and Marxist traditions who call for an unadulterated truth “on which a right future [might] be built,” either through reparations or other means.[4]
(Mis)Remembering Reconstruction: Lies in Truth’s Clothing and The Panacea of White Guilt
Five decades following the end of Reconstruction, Du Bois ends Black Reconstruction with a poignant critique of the study and teaching of the short, yet, influential era. “What are American children taught today about Reconstruction?”, Du Bois asks before providing his readers with an overview of the dominating Reconstruction scholarship. The narrative advanced by these expert accounts can be summarized as follows: The Black populace was ignorant, indolent, irresponsible, corrupt, and extravagant. That the humble efforts of White America in providing pathways to upward mobility ultimately failed in securing nominal freedom for the formerly enslaved was not due to Southern contempt or Northern negligence. Rather, it was due to an unwillingness, and, perhaps even an inherent inability, to grasp the totality of what it means to be a freed individual. Legally, morally, and economically, the newly freed were wholly unfit for their freedom.[5] Such accounts could be found littered throughout the history textbooks for American youth during the time of Du Bois’s writing. Civil War scholarship can be seen as “[mechanizing]” its cause, stripping the question of slavery of all its moral importance, and reducing the critical struggle between the North and the South to a matter of the clash between Southern “agrarian feudalism” and the modern, more superior Northern “industrial machine”.[6]
In these descriptions of the past, the notion of Black subservience is either naturalized and justified, or erased and forgotten. That is, either the situation of Blackness is due to intrinsic inferiority, or it lacks acknowledgment altogether, to absolve the nation from any stricture, so that “in the end, nobody seems to have done wrong, and everybody was right”.[7] In the end, “there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy”.[8] Borrowing terminology from James Baldwin’s 1965 essay “The White Man’s Guilt,” the at best insincere and at worst slanderous interpretations of the past function primarily to placate white guilt and maintain the integrity of the white supremacist and capitalist web of beliefs that are central to the American ideology. Truly, these methods of depicting the past work to “[reassure] white Americans that they do not see what they see”.[9]
The American myth is comprised of a web of beliefs, a network of interwoven falsehoods that serve to legitimize the social hierarchies under which we exist. And while some might believe that the democratic ideals of unity and equality are the leading principles of the web, the beliefs that are truly most central are those that validate and naturalize the social, economic, and political status of those who sit atop these hierarchies. Brutally supplanted upon the bloodied backs of Native Americans, constructed by the chained hands of African slaves, and fortified by the labor of countless groups of non-Western immigrants believing in the supposed sanctity of the American dream, the nation’s web of beliefs holds the ideals of racial-capitalism at its core. Undeniably, this country was founded upon the suffering of those intentionally reduced and immobilized by the societal mechanisms that define the American hierarchy. These groups have been systematically gaslighted by the insistence of patriotic ideals that discourage the oppressed from voicing their discontent, enforcing instead the belief in the American “truths” of liberty and equality—a truth that is antithetical to the lived realities of the non-white (or male) citizenry.
The production of this mutilated truth functions as a transluscent bandage resting upon a festering wound. Knowing that they are the cause of such rancid decay, white America sits comfortably in the privilege that its whiteness affords at the expense of its racialized other. Ultimately aware of the cost of this privilege, however, guilt colors the white American conscience. And rather than facing the source of said guilt head-on, the operating paradigm is one of flattery and self-deceit. In attempting to rectify this “incoherence”, white America uses history as a means of rationalizing its superiority and absolving itself from taking responsibility for the situation it constructed. “Let bygones be bygones,” they dismiss. Suddenly, rather than reckoning with the nation’s participation in the dehumanizing enterprise of labor expropriation both before and after the Civil War, slavery becomes a mere morsel of the past that was not “a uniquely American evil”, and the steadfastness of racial ideology that kept freedmen materially in chains despite their legal independence is not only deprived of its structural nature, but responsibility for its existence is turned away from white America and towards its “shiftless” and “vicious” black victims.[10],[11] The historian in sustaining the American myth, then, is less akin to a scientist than they are an alchemist.
An Epistemology of Exclusion: White Ignorance and the “Objective” Status of Whiteness
Key to the production of these false narratives, Du Bois identifies, is the exclusion of the black voice from the telling of history: “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself, has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected”.[12] Simultaneously dehumanized and invisibilized in the eyes of history, the exclusion of the black perspective leaves both him and his oppressor unable to grasp true humanity and practice an unimpeded agency—one because he is systemically subjugated and unable to participate freely and authentically in the production of social meaning; the other because, in his willingness to traverse only within the bounds of his disfigured subjectivity, refuses to face the truth of his situation, and would rather, by any means necessary, sacrifice his perceived inferior to maintain the fickle comfort that his ignorance allows. Put simply by the late Charles Mills, “the white delusion of racial superiority insulates itself against refutation”.[13] History and its claims to objectivity, then, are not only rooted in white ignorance, but so long as it remains unchallenged, substantiates whiteness and white ignorance as the domineering moral and epistemic standards.
The fiction of America’s history has been authored by individuals with a vested interest in maintaining the power relations of the status quo. The purpose of these histories is not the advancement of truth. Specifically, Du Bois identifies how “nearly all recent books on Reconstruction agree in discarding the government reports” which shed an authentic light on the past, and, in its place, “substituting selected diaries, letters, and gossip”.[14] Such biased methods might, to some, produce “inspiring” narratives, “but it is certainly not the truth”.[15] Instead, in servitude to the great myth, these corrupted tales which comprise the annals of history have “led the world to embrace and worship the color bar as social salvation”.[16] How, then, can such accounts be regarded as objective fact? The answer lies in Mills’ exploration of white ignorance. Opening up the 2007 collaborative philosophical work Race and the Epistemologies of Ignorance, Mills delineates how whiteness can act as an inhibitor to the creation and perception of knowledge. Cognition, Mills explains, can be influenced by various components, including memory, testimony, perception, and conception, all of which simultaneously act on and transform each other.[17]
Concepts, for instance, are how we orient ourselves towards the world. We create concepts in response to our material conditions and how we might want to change them. Our frameworks of interpretation—our perceptions—are then mediated through these concepts. Mills writes:
Once established in the social mindset, its influence is difficult to escape, since it is not a matter of seeing the phenomenon with the concept discretely attached but rather of seeing things
through the concept itself.[18]
We might believe that we are perceiving the world “as is”, but, in truth, this “as is” has been partially socially constructed. History in the way that it has been written creates the subject upon which its discourse arrests, and authorizes the practices that have been constructed in response to the subject. When the concept of blackness is imbued with accusations of “fraud[ulence]”, “incompetence” and “extravagance”, the existence of whiteness as benevolence is justified, and the violent racial order becomes necessary in suppressing the barbarity of blackness. White ignorance as an epistemic framework is blinded by normative concepts that entangle what it means to be “good” with what it means to be white. It is unable to decipher between natural givens and social constructions. In doing so, white knowledge that reconfirms white ignorance invalidates blackness as a valid contributor to knowledge creation.
Conclusion
So long as we are insincere about our remembering of the past, we will never be able to sit with the gravity of our indebtedness to the continuously subjugated classes upon which this country stands. Du Bois, Baldwin, Mills, and Hannah-Jones provide us with the path towards justice: we must face the truth of our history as it actually occurred. Though it might be tempting, we must refrain from indulging in the opiates of revisionism that flatters America’s past and reduces its ongoing victims as mere growing pains. Further, we must continue to critique the appeals to objectivity that have silenced the oppressed and have overly privileged the perspectives of the oppressors whose immediate ignorance precludes them from authentic participating in the project of collective liberation. Ultimately, what is at stake is the unadulterated truth of the American experiment and, ultimately, its future. Refusing to sincerely address the nation’s violent past leaves us predisposed to repeating it. To build a true unity not based on white manhood, we must remove the red, white, and blue glasses of traditional American patriotism and instead be critical of our exclusionary history.
[1] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “America Wasn't a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One,” The New York Times (The New York Times, August 14, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html?mtrref=undefined&gwh=C464D2E47A8D51AB4DBB8698CE198463&gwt=pay&assetType=PAYWALL.
[2] Alana Wise, “Trump Announces 'Patriotic Education' Commission, A Largely Political Move,” NPR, (NPR, September 17, 2020), https://www.npr.org/2020/09/17/914127266/trump-announces-patriotic-education-commission-a-largely-political-move
[3] W E B Du Bois, “The Propaganda of History,” in Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1998), 759.
[4] Ibid, 770.
[5] Ibid, 757.
[6] Ibid, 759.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” in Collected Essays (New York, NY: Library of America, 1998), 722.
[10] 1776 Report, 10.
[11] Black Reconstruction, 757.
[12] Ibid, 766.
[13] “White Ignorance”, 19.
[14] Black Reconstruction, 768, emphasis added.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] “White Ignorance”, 23.
[18] “White Ignorance”, 27.