In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with David Pan about his article “Unalienable Rights, the 1619 Project, and Nation-State Sovereignty,” one of a group of essays from Telos 192 (Fall 2020) on the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Unalienable Rights, the 1619 Project, and Nation-State Sovereignty
David Pan
Both the Commission on Unalienable Rights, chartered in July 2019, and the 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times one month later, have reflected upon how the ideal of equality has interacted with the practice of slavery in the U.S. tradition. But while the commission’s report[1] took July 4, 1776, to be the founding moment of the United States, the 1619 Project suggests that “the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August 1619 . . . when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans.”[2] By shifting the focus away from the Declaration of Independence and emphasizing racism instead of equality, the 1619 Project deprives itself of the ability to grasp the contradictions that made the U.S. progress toward human rights possible. Ideas are the drivers of human history, and if we take racism rather than equality to be the founding principle of the nation, we undermine the foundation upon which to oppose that racism.
Nikole Hannah-Jones refers to this dynamic in her opening essay for the 1619 Project, in which she recognizes the importance of ideals for the struggle for equality: “despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.”[3] In referring to the centrality of the “American creed” and its “founding ideals,” she identifies the crucial role that such ideals have had in creating the basis for struggles for human rights. The Declaration of Independence was a defining moment because it established ideals that could later be referred to as guidelines for action. But when she writes that “[t]he United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie,”[4] she obscures the role of ideals in human history. Ideals are valuable, not because they honestly describe a reality but because they create a standard toward which we can aspire. Slave revolts could have been carried out without reference to the principle of universal equality, but in that case such revolts, like Nat Turner’s Rebellion, would have been reduced to an anti-white rage that could only lead to continuing violence. If, as Hannah-Jones claims, “[a]nti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” and not the ideal of equality, then we would be condemned to race-based warfare without end.
The alternative path that the commission has taken in its report is to affirm human rights ideals as the nation’s essential basis, not because they have always reflected the reality but because they have, through a series of decisive political struggles, become the guiding principles for the trajectory of American history. The mere expression of an ideal is of course incomplete without the political struggles that are necessary to realize the ideal in practice in competition with competing ideals. The commission’s report emphasizes not that the founding ideals were always a reflection of a reality but that they provided the inspiration and direction for the struggles that led to such decisive events as the end of slavery, the establishment of women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movement.[5] Pointing to the tradition of activism that runs through Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the commission’s report accords with Hannah-Jones in describing these struggles as essential stages in the American commitment to human rights. But contrary to her approach, the commission argues that such activity could only begin after the founding ideals were enunciated and established as political goals in 1776 that would become the moral and spiritual impetus for change.
The contradiction between the ideas of equality and hierarchy at our nation’s founding was an issue not just of hypocrisy but of competing ideals. By rejecting monarchy in favor of a republic, the American Revolution initiated a radical transformation by eliminating the perceived divide between aristocracy and the common people.[6] In pre-revolutionary America, slavery was not a unique institution but the lowest rung in a system of hierarchy that included white indentured servants, who could often be bought and sold and treated in similar ways as black slaves, even if they were seldom bound for their lifetimes.[7] The black indentured servants brought to North America in 1619 were not a break with but a continuation of pervasive hierarchical structures. The American Revolution initiated the dissolution of such hierarchical relationships, but slavery could still persist because the idea of a republic as laid out in the Constitution was not the same as the idea of equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence. If the Bill of Rights could be understood as a set of protections for individual rights, implying a notion of equality that would grant to all people the same rights, regardless of role, status, or origin, it was also possible to interpret it more narrowly as a defense of republican practices, established to inculcate the public virtue that is necessary for turning the subjects of a monarch into the citizens of a republic.[8] While this focus on virtue and republican values was crucial for the success of the revolution, eighteenth-century political theory did not necessarily equate republicanism with democracy. A republic was defined by Montesquieu, for instance, simply as the rule of the many as opposed to the rule of the one or of the few. The rule of the many could also mean the rule of a subset of the population, and Montesquieu describes “aristocratic” republics as well as democratic ones.[9]
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1. Commission on Unalienable Rights, Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2020), https://www.state.gov/report-of-the-commission-on-unalienable-rights/.
2. Jake Silverstein, “The 1619 Project: Introduction,” New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, p. 4.
3. Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Idea of America,” New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, p. 16.
4. Ibid.
5. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 7.
6. Ibid., pp. 11–97.
7. Ibid., pp. 51–55.
8. Cass Sunstein, “Rights and Citizenship,” prepared testimony for the November 1, 2019, meeting of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, https://www.state.gov/commission-on-unalienable-rights, p. 3; Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, pp. 95–96.
9. Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), p. 19.
