Daryl Michael Scott

For over a century, the idea that African Americans are psychologically damaged has played an important role in discussions of race. In this provocative work, Daryl Michael Scott argues that damage imagery has been the product of liberals and conservatives, of racists and antiracists. While racial conservatives, often playing on white contempt for blacks, have sought to use findings of black pathology to justify exclusionary policies, racial liberals have used damage imagery primarily to promote policies of inclusion and rehabilitation. In advancing his argument, Scott challenges some long-held beliefs about the history of damage imagery. He rediscovers the liberal impulses behind Stanley Elkins's Sambo hypothesis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Negro Family and exposes the damage imagery in the work of Ralph Ellison, the leading anti-pathologist. He also corrects the view that the Chicago School depicted blacks as pathological products of matriarchy. New Negro experts such as Charles Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, he says, disdained sympathy-seeking and refrained from exploring individual pathology. Scott's reassessment of social science sheds new light on Brown v. Board of Education , revealing how experts reversed four decades of theory in order to represent segregation as inherently damaging to blacks. In this controversial work, Scott warns the Left of the dangers in their recent rediscovery of damage imagery in an age of conservative reform. |In reassessing the image of the damaged black psyche from 1880 to 1996, Scott argues that damage imagery has been the product of both liberals and conservatives, racists and antiracists. While racial conservatives, often playing on white contempt for blacks, have sought to use findings of black pathology to justify exclusionary policies, racial liberals have used damage imagery primarily to promote policies of inclusion and rehabilitation. Scott challenges long-held beliefs about the history of damage imagery, warning the Left of the dangers in their rediscovery of damage imagery in an age of conservative reform.

The rise of multiculturalism in American society has rarely, if ever, been linked to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Many scholars believe that the Court viewed its opinion as the beginning of the end of ethnoracial divisions. In his call for a postethnic America, the historian David A. Hollinger goes a step further and argues that those who struggled against segregation “had little incentive to embrace the pluralist emphasis on the autonomy or durability of ethno-racial groups.” As the multicultural movement blossomed in the early 1990s, the liberal historian John Higham joined Nathan Glazer and other racial neoconservatives (who opposed social engineering to bring minorities into the mainstream) in pointing an accusatory finger at the black power movement and white guilt as the parents of multiculturalism. Most recently, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has extended this line of interpretation, claiming that therapeutic race experts, fueled by black power's identity politics, hijacked the civil rights movement and forged an excessive multiculturalism. To such critics, multiculturalism, like black power, smacks of separatism, overwrought group consciousness, the suffocation of individualism, and the decline of class politics.1

Why has the American Historical Review commissioned nineteen scholars to review the 1619 Project? There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude. Without question, the 1619 Project has become a very public flash point within academic and public debates centered on the work history does in the world. Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay that opened the project in an August 14, 2019, special issue of the New York Times Magazine.1 And some historians of the United States credited the 1619 Project with opening up new ways of looking at the American past and with helping to give the work of academic historians on slavery a broader audience. But many specialists in early American and antebellum history offered sharp criticism of the project for what they termed interpretive overreach and factual slippage. “Was slavery really the salient cause of the American Revolution?” some of them asked. For other American historians, the 1619 Project did not go far enough in its efforts to reconceptualize the larger meanings of the Black experience in North America.