The American Historical Association capitulates to the woke mob

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The President of the American Historical Association (AHA), Professor James H. Sweet, recently published an essay in the organisation’s magazine on the problem of “presentism” in academic historical writing.

According to Professor Sweet, an unsettling number of historians allow their political views to distort their interpretations of the past. As an historian of the African diaspora, he said he was “troubled” by the way contemporary narratives of the slave trade performed “historical erasures” to “confirm current political positions”. The problem, he argued, was that in “foreshortening and shaping history to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions” historians were “undermin[ing] the discipline and “threaten[ing] its very integrity”. In that context, he proceeded to (gently) question the basic premise of The 1619 Project, a revisionist text that portrays ‘white supremacy’ and ‘anti-blackness’ as foundational to American history. (On this point, also see Peter Wood's excellent piece for the Spectator).

Within moments of this cogent, well-argued pushback against woke orthodoxies having appeared, “all hell broke loose on Twitter” (Real Clear Politics). A Professor of History at Knox College led the pile-on, with a widely-retweeted thread calling on colleagues to bombard the AHA’s Board with emails protesting about Sweet’s column. Other tenured historians joined in, flooding the thread with profanity-laced attacks on Professor Sweet’s gender and race, calling for his resignation, and, in the case of one Professor, apparently taking issue with historians offering any public criticism of The 1619 Project because such criticism would then be “weaponised by the right”.

Reviewing Professor Sweet’s piece for PowerLine on the same day, Steven Hayward half-jokingly guessed at what would happen now that “the mob had been summoned”, ending his piece with the line: “Cue Prof. Sweet’s apology tour (and perhaps the removal of the article) in three, two…”.

It was remarkably prescient. The next day the AHA tweeted a “public apology” from Professor Sweet which reads like something he’d been required to sign at the end of a Maoist struggle session for academic wrongthink. He took “full responsibility” for the “harm” his essay had caused. He “sincerely regretted alienating some of his Black colleagues and friends” (note the capital ‘B’ for ‘Black’, now mandatory in academia). He was “deeply sorry”. He “apologised” for the “damage” he had caused. He “hoped that he might redeem himself in future”. He was “listening and learning”.

As Free Speech Union General Secretary Toby Young has long pointed out, apologising in the hope one’s contrition might make the outrage mob disperse isn’t a good idea. In fact, it tends to have the opposite effect, whetting its appetite for more concessions and confessions from a target now known to be susceptible to folding under pressure.

So it proved in this case. Professor Sweet’s apology duly excited his activist colleagues but did little to placate their ire (PowerLine).

The resignation demands continued, and the fact that this white male historian’s criticisms of The 1619 Project would, as Professor Kevin Gannon put it, be used by “right-wingers, Nazis, and other bad-faith actors… in the service of white supremacism”, had now been compounded by an apology that many of the gathered pitchfork enthusiasts regarded as insincere. (Such apologies are always insufficiently pious in the eyes of the woke mobsters.)

In his original essay, Professor Sweet said he had recently “travelled to Ghana to research and write”, and that his first assignment while there “was a critical response to The 1619 Project” for a forthcoming forum in the American Historical Review. No doubt the significance of the adjective “critical” won’t have escaped the attention of his detractors. To borrow a line from Steven Hayward: Cue Prof. Sweet’s apology tour (and perhaps the removal of the article) in three, two…

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