The Right Side of History

The trouble started with a writer on deadline. James Sweet, who goes by Jim, is a white professor of African history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the former president of the American Historical Association (A.H.A.). Every month, he was tasked with writing a column for Perspectives on History, a magazine put out by the association, which is mostly read by academics. Last summer, while he was on vacation in Ghana, he was struggling to come up with a column idea, and so he started looking around for inspiration.

At his hotel one morning, “a group of African Americans began trickling into the breakfast bar,” he wrote. Sweet noticed that one of them had brought along “a dog-eared copy of The 1619 Project,” a book-length expansion of the Times’ exploration of America’s founding, which looks at the country’s origins through the lens of slavery and racism. Later, Sweet and his family visited Elmina Castle, a slave-trading post on the Gulf of Guinea. “Our guide gave a well-rehearsed tour geared toward African Americans,” despite the fact that “less than one percent of the Africans passing through Elmina arrived in North America.” To Sweet, these examples illustrated the temptation of “presentism”—a concept, often used by scholars in a derogatory manner, referring to studies of the past that are distorted by the ideas of the present. In his essay, he leaned on some other examples, such as “The Woman King,” a popular film from last year, which seemed, to him, to twist violent episodes of African history into a story of Black, feminist triumph. He also brought in Supreme Court decisions written by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who made historical arguments to support decisions on guns and abortion rights. It was a list of strange bedfellows, but his point, or at least the point he wanted to make, was methodological. “We’re being inundated with history at all sorts of turns. No one is immune to that,” Sweet told me recently. “Certain narratives are harnessed in the service of particular political perspectives. For me, that’s a dangerous trend for professional historians to get drawn into.”

The piece was published on the afternoon of August 17th. Sweet, who is also a high-school football coach, was walking off the field after practice when he got the first indication that something was up: an e-mail in his in-box from a famous historian that said “Wow! . . . Just, wow.” By the time that Sweet got home, his piece was blowing up on Twitter. “Oh, hell,” he recalled thinking. “Here we go.”

A number of academics were exasperated that Sweet criticized “The 1619 Project,” which had already come under attack from other white-guy senior historians. Others were confused that he used non-academic examples to illustrate supposed problems in academic history. Some were incredulous that the leader of the country’s premier history organization seemed to dismiss work that was focussed on fundamental issues of power: Jamelle Bouie, a columnist at the Times, tweeted, “Bold take from [checks byline] the president of AHA that race, gender, sexuality, nationalism and capitalism are ‘contemporary social justice issues’ which have been imposed on the study of history.” Many observed that Sweet’s targets for criticism were nearly all Black. One junior faculty member at a private Catholic university wrote about the essay on his blog, saying that he “cried re-reading it, seeing starkly the smug condescension and slap in the face to professional historians of Africa, and to Black Americans.”

And yet supportive e-mails also started flooding in, often from other white, male professors. One academic who works on a prominent African American-studies journal wrote, “The issues you identified are so pervasive, especially in my field, that I have come to question the worth of history and the humanities.” Another professor, a self-described centrist Democrat, echoed Sweet’s concerns about how history is used as a political tool. But, like many of the people who reached out to Sweet with support, he didn’t want to post the sentiment online. “I’m not close enough to retirement to get fired from my job,” he explained.

It was a strange juxtaposition. If someone looked only at Twitter, they might reasonably assume that Sweet is a racially insensitive crank. But, if they peered into his in-box, they would get the impression that he is a brave free-speech warrior. This split-screen view is an indication of what academic history has become: a weapon in America’s daily war over contemporary politics. On the Internet, historians have become influencers—judges who rule on the present using the gavel of the past. To Sweet, this kind of behavior inevitably leads to bad history. “The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past,” he wrote. “This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.”

Jim Grossman, the executive director of the association, called Sweet and explained that the A.H.A. was potentially at risk of losing hundreds of members. They discussed the possibility of the A.H.A. issuing a retraction, but decided against it. Ultimately, Grossman asked him to draft an apology, which specifically included two things: an admission that Sweet had harmed the A.H.A., and a clarification that responsibility for the piece was Sweet’s alone. (Grossman says that it was more of a suggestion.) “The organization basically put me on an island and said, ‘You need to own this thing,’ ” Sweet told me.

Sweet apologized, drawing the ire of right-wingers on Twitter, who felt that he was yielding to the woke academic mob. White supremacists started trolling the A.H.A.’s account, prompting the organization’s staff to take the account private for a brief period. Sweet became his own mini news cycle, fodder for analysis in the Washington Post and on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” But, eventually, the commentators moved on, leaving historians to their own debate about who and what their work is for.

Sweet is part of a dying breed of old-school academics. He has a secure job in a field where tenure-track positions are dwindling. He relishes writing books and teaching, not influencing public policy or the news cycle, which many academics now consider part of their job; his manuscripts have led him aboard a mutinous eighteenth-century British slave ship, into the religious lives of early-modern Africans, and along the unlikely travels of an eighteenth-century slave and healer named Domingos Álvares. In a field that’s deeply divided over whether archives can do justice to the stories of the marginalized, Sweet is an archives guy; to tell Álvares’s story, he sifted through a six-hundred-page Inquisition file, along with Catholic parish records, travelogues, and census records. And, as a white expert in African history, he has become part of a larger debate about whether someone should teach a history that is not their own.

Sweet finds it strange that he’s been cast as a reactionary conservative. He went to public schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, that had only recently been forced to integrate by the Supreme Court. He grew up in a working-class community where many people have since become Trump supporters, but Sweet himself has always been unabashedly liberal. He found his way to Latin American history, and later African history, through the encouragement of a mentor at the University of North Carolina, where he went to college. In graduate school, he discovered that there wasn’t a lot of scholarship on the beliefs and cultures of the wildly diverse African groups that were brought to early-modern Brazil via the slave trade. He would eventually make this the focus of his career. His second book, which was on Álvares, charts a map of the Atlantic world: the kingdoms of West Africa connected by ship to the rural towns and unruly cities of Brazil, crisscrossed by Portuguese slavers and watched by suspicious Inquisitors, who were deeply shaped by notions of racial and biological hierarchy. By necessity, it is work closely focussed on the power of racism and white supremacy.

The question of how much historians should pay attention to these topics has been a subject of intense public discussion—and the A.H.A. has been actively involved. After Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, took over a small public school, New College of Florida, and banned a new Advanced Placement course in African American studies in Florida classrooms, the A.H.A. signed on to a statement saying that these “attacks threaten public understanding of our nation’s history and culture.” Sweet has played a role in the organization’s advocacy work. His first Perspectives column as president decried Republican bans on “divisive concepts,” such as race, gender, and sexuality. In a video on the association’s Web site, titled “Teaching with Integrity: Historians Speak,” Sweet points out that race and slavery are fundamental features of every American’s history. “I have a very difficult time understanding the kind of fear that this stokes,” he says, referring to G.O.P. legislators. “My question back to them would be: What are you scared of?”

Sweet thinks some of the backlash to his essay came from colleagues who saw the piece as a snub against the A.H.A.’s advocacy efforts, which is not what he intended. “There is such a great urgency in the profession right now for historians to have public voices because of the way that history has been under attack,” he told me. His actual target was the “professional historians who believe that social justice should be their first port of entry, which is not the way that we’ve traditionally done history.” Even though archives, especially those that deal with slavery, are often partial accounts created by people who oppressed others, that “doesn’t mean you can use literary devices or use a fragment of evidence and try to embellish it into history,” Sweet said. He sees these methodological approaches as “dangerously close” to the selective approach to history that he believes has been deployed by the American right.

The Right Side of History
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