After our discussion with Peter Wood on his book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, I was really able to see the parallels between that of the 1619 Project and the Communist Revolution and the Cultural Revolution of the 60’s. As we discussed in class, the main parallel goal between these movements is the fact that their followers believe there is something inherently wrong with our society and world and it needs to be altered in some way. Marx’s point that the lower class in a society is being oppressed by the upper class is being altered in a way to fit the narrative of the 1619 Project. They claim that our whole society and the polity of the United States was built on the basis of slavery. That the two boats that arrived in Virginia carrying ~30 slaves is the base starting point of America making our society incredibly racist and ridden with white supremacist language and ideas. However, Wood attempts to clarify and disprove much of the already false arguments that Nikole Hannah-Jones makes in her statement.
We touched on two topics that I thought were especially crucial to the argument and salience of the 1619 Project. One being the idea of post-modernism and its ability to spread false truths to the public. Post-modernism in itself is when facts are constructed by people to fit their own narrative. They often provide provisional answers to questions but are made up. The idea of post-modernism allows not just intellectuals but all people to be able to interpret “fact” and “truth” in whatever way they see fit. People that ascribe to this type of interpretation deny the existence of over-arching or undeniable truth in the universe. This can be quite detrimental to the way society functions. One person’s truth could be the ultimate truth to them but could be a complete falsehood to another and vice versa. How can there be trust of information or integrity within an intellectual community if all ideas are relative? Who does one believe in such a situation?
Another crucial topic discussed was the idea of dehumanization of slaves. Peter Wood began by stating that slaves were not dehumanized. Yes, slavery is immoral we can all agree but dehumanizing is something of a different nature. He writes that slaveowners knew their slaves were humans and they never pretended they were not. That they did awful things to them such as overworking and abusing them, I will not discount is unethical and wrong. However, Wood gave an example of the Soviet’s working their workers in the labor camps to near death and starving them as a similar phenomenon. The Soviet’s did understand they were humans and they never pretended they were not. There is a misuse of language here. One may think that in order to do such depraved things to other human beings they must acknowledge they are not human first, because how could they possibly do such evil things to another human being? Being property also does not preclude you from being human, it too is another depraved idea but is not dehumanizing. I thought these ideas were especially important for our discussion especially as it relates to intellectuals.
One reply on “Blog 10”
I understand what you are saying here completely so I decided to look up the definition of dehumanize. The definition states: deprive of positive human qualities. But then I did some further research and dehumanization was explained as: to deprive (someone or something) of human qualities, personality, or dignity such as to subject (someone, such as a prisoner) to inhuman or degrading conditions or treatment. Based on this, it seems like what slaves and even the soviet workers in labor camps fit the definition of dehumanization because they were being deprived of many things and they were degraded to inhuman conditions and treatment. When the slaves were brought over from Africa they had them on boats chained up in wooden beds without feeding them and then if they got sick or died they were thrown overboard because they were not considered strong enough to do the work they were going to be asked to do once they got to Amercia. They were also whipped by their slave masters whenever they did something that they did not like and even sometimes just for the sake of doing it. I think the confusing for this all stems from dehumanization being considered “not realizing someone is human”.Of course they realized they were humans, they just looked at them as s group of people they can control and use for there benefit so they did not treat them like humans because no one was able to tell them otherwise. I don’t think that anyone or group of people in the modern era who have used a specific group of people to their benefit have truly not realized that the people they were using were not human.