The 1619 Project at the Smithsonian

Like most Americans, I was taught very little about the institution of slavery. Of course, slavery explained why my family was here and why all of the black people that I saw around me were here. But like most Americans, I was taught about slavery because historians who wrote our school books had to explain why we fought the Civil War. But in that oh-so-brief discussion, slavery was relegated largely to the backward South and we were taught that slavery had very little to do with the development of America. In fact, we were assured of the fact that slavery was simply a marginal institution to the American story. So I’ve been thinking about this anniversary, this 400th year, pretty obsessively for the last two years. My friends know I’ve actually been obsessed with years 1619, as I said, since high school. But as the anniversary was approaching, I kept thinking, this momentous time, this foundational moment, was likely going to pass in most American households with little notice If there was notice at all. That most Americans actually had never heard of this year and had no idea that there was to be an anniversary and that like much of the history of slavery, it was just going to be relegated to the history books. But I also understood that that was wrong and that I had an opportunity to do something about that, because slavery is actually the very reason we exist as a country. And we would not be the country that we are were it not for this institution.

I will say this: I think every black population throughout the world — with perhaps the exception of the Ethiopians because they were never colonized — but I think virtually all communities in the black diaspora merit reparations. And I want to use the term merit. They merit reparations, but not necessarily from the United States government. So the United States government, as culpable party, is relevant to black descendants of American slavery. If, on the other hand, an individual is from Haiti, they should demand reparations from France. And in fact, paradoxically, Haiti was forced to pay reparations to France — which is absolutely insane. And then if an individual is from Jamaica, then the United Kingdom is the object for reparations, and so forth.

But black music is a completely different story. It brings with call-and-response and layers of syncopation in this rougher element that we call “noise.” But is this unique sound that arises from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument. Basically what I’m talking about is that like “err,” what I call “scraping the bottom of the pan” get all those good bits up. “Stank” is another word for it. You know “putting their foot in it,” “losing it,” you know lots of — we have lots of expressions for how good black music is. But there’s something even more fundamental to it than these elements of noise and syncopation. And it’s improvisation. It’s one of the most crucial elements of what we think of as black music. And this isn’t to say that rehearsal doesn’t happen and black musicians don’t practice and they don’t compose and write stuff down. That’s — all those things are true. But separate in how we think of the difference between what we call white music and what we think of as black music is this idea of improvisation. And it essentially is the raising of individual creativity and expression to the highest possible place in the world of a song. Basically a black musician is free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation when he’s making music. Through music that no one composed, “composed,” music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope, of communion. And it can’t be really, fully copied. You don’t — you just don’t copy it because it can’t be copied. You embody it. You are it. Frederick Douglass bemoaned white minstrel performers as the filthy scum of white society. And he would have been one of the few people who had an opportunity to actually make that character—— one of the few black people who would have had an opportunity to make that characterization. But in minstrels’ wake you begin to see black performers on stage and hear them record as themselves. People like Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. Here some of them are right here. You get Fats Waller, and Ma Rainey, and Cab Calloway, and Muddy Waters. And for the first time, you find a fully black human self in American popular art. At the same time, you have the injustice and brutality of Jim Crow, you also have something like Blue Note Records. You have black musicians thinking about how to move art forward. But not just black art. American art. You had Charlie Parker. You had Chuck Berry. You had Motown. Ah, Motown. The Motown project was to take white Western musical ideas of orchestration, strings and horns, straightforward harmonies, melodies, and marry those to a weekend where on a Saturday night, you’re at a juke joint having a good time, with, say, the jump blues, and then the next day — basically the jump blues, by the way, a guitar, drums, bass. And on Sunday morning, you drag your hangover over to church. A church like 16th Street Baptist. A place where the hymns come with hand claps, and holy harmonic arrangements, and call-and-response, and a lot of feeling. A lot of stank. A lot of noise. Motown, you see, was the antidote to American minstrelsy. On a song like “Heat Wave,” you can actually hear the hands slapping the tambourine like it actually is Sunday morning. And it, to me, is just the most exciting, romantic sound you’re ever going to hear, at the center of what can only be described as refulgent and regal blackness. And if we’re talking about Martha and the Vandellas still, and I actually still am, It’s interesting to think that those three women are what those four little girls never grow up to be and what you hear in Motown, what you hear in black music is possibility, struggle and strife. Yes, it is certainly true. But you also hear humor, and sex, and confidence. And that, of course, is ironic because this is the sound of a people who for decades and centuries have been denied freedom. They’ve been denied what you respond to in black music, which is the ultimate expression of a belief in that freedom. A belief that the struggle is worth it, that the pain begets joy, that the joy you’re experiencing is not only contagious, it’s necessary, and urgent and irresistible. Black music is American music because as Americans, we say we believe in freedom. We say that’s our core value — our biggest moral export. And the power of black music, for this country, is that it’s always been the sound of freedom.

But particularly the 14th Amendment, the language has nothing to do with race. It has nothing to do with African-Americans. It’s for everybody. And it produced a tremendous expansion of the rights of everybody in the United States, not just the four million emancipated slaves. It’s a perfect example of what Nikole was talking about in her talk, how the struggle for freedom of African-Americans has actually reverberated out to change how everybody in the country enjoys and experiences rights. So, you know, throughout American history. The black struggle has been this dynamic element. Not just for African-Americans and not just to sort of become part of a pre-existing structure. That very struggle changes the structure. When African-Americans got these rights after the Civil War, it changed what it meant to be an American for everybody. And we see that all the way up to the present.

Now people have told me all the time, “that doesn’t make any sense. Why would slaveholders kill their property? This is money to them.” First that suggests that slavery is a rational system. Secondly, in their minds “I’ll just get some more. I’ll get a new group that I think I can successfully control.” So when you understand that black people know that this is what’s at stake and yet they continue to resist anyway tells you about the tenor and the temperament of the people that these Anglo Americans are trying to keep in bondage. So that tension that ultimately culminates in the Civil War always exist from the very beginning and it is because of the conditions that are established, which is that “you must be my property.” “I know that you are a human being.” “I, as the enslaved person, know that this— I have experienced enslavement. Slavery did exist in Africa, but I also know that I don’t consider you as a lawful captor because you were not the person that I was fighting in wars,” for example that you mentioned. So there’s always this contest. And so what we learned is to sort of hide in plain sight. A lot of our feelings a lot of our intentions and you know that silence, if you will, or that covert action sometimes has been misunderstood as compliance to the system.