Her response, to the AHR editor's sneering, is very strong; an excerpt:
Despite your disclaimer that “in principle” being white should not “invalidate” the views of 1619 critics, in fact the skin color of historians critical of the 1619 Project has been scorned (and far worse) over and over again in the Twitterverse—by historians as well as the general public—as the preeminent reason for discrediting our views. In my case, not one of them has bothered to note (if they knew or bothered to find out) that my entire body of published works over the past thirty years has analyzed the effects of class, race, and gender on the nineteenth-century South. It’s not simply that my skin color matters to certain historians and others. It now appears that it’s all that does matter (with my age a close second)....
Perhaps it’s not surprising that racial essentialism forms the basis of much of the public reaction against historians critical of 1619, since the same essentialism underlies the Project itself. My understanding of class deeply informs my analysis of race, both of which I addressed in my interview with the WSWS, and my essay, “A Historian Critiques the 1619 Project,” published on my blog, Renegade South, and by the WSWS. In both the interview and the essay, I dismissed pseudoscientific theories about separate races and argued that such beliefs predispose one to embrace a theory of hypodescent (i.e., the “one-drop-rule” of race), which posits certain ancestral “bloodlines” as more powerful than others. From there emerges the assumption, implicit throughout the 1619 Project, that only “black” people in North America were enslaved. Yet, anyone familiar with the history of U. S. slavery knows it was a multiracial institution. We know that many enslaved women gave birth to the children of white men (often their enslavers), and that those children were decreed by law to be slaves. Yet, these children were at least as white as they were black.
Northern abolitionists liked to post photographs of enslaved children whose appearance belied not a trace of African ancestry. Mostly they did so to appeal to racist whites who recoiled at the sight of white-skinned children in bondage, but in so doing the abolitionists wittingly or unwittingly exposed the fact that many enslaved children exhibited white as well as black ancestry. Furthermore, the intertwined nature of race- and class-based laws provided an additional means of social control. Southern white lawmakers not only enslaved black and mixed-race people, they frequently appropriated the labor of lower class white children and free children of color by removing them from the homes of their mothers through apprenticeship laws.
For these reasons and more, I object to the 1619 Project’s failure to adequately discuss racial identity, beginning with its failure to contextualize slavery and extending to its seemingly willful determination to omit virtually all interracial relationships and cooperative efforts to end slavery, combat racism, or work across racial lines for the greater good of society. I do not object in order to be “fair” to whites; I do so because to ignore multiracial families and interracial challenges to racism divides American society into oppositional “white” and “black” categories of race that further support the Project’s suggestion that racism is simply embedded in the DNA of our nation....
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