Time for a White Trash Museum on the Washington Mall

I expect that you, like all good people, are delighted that there is a National Museum of African American Culture and History in Washington DC at 1400 Constitution Av NW right next to the Washington Monument.

I expect that you, like all good people, are delighted that there is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC just across the Mall from the African American Museum. Just as the African American Museum is on the left hand of the Washington Monument, so the Holocaust Museum is on the right hand of God, er Washington.

And you are pleased as punch at the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in the shadow of the Grant Memorial at 4th St SW in Washington DC at the Capitol end of the Mall

But I expect that you are shocked, shocked, as I was to discover that there is no National Museum of White Trash on the Washington Mall.

Because, as we all know, the story of White Trash, and the history of America as the dumping ground for the "waste population" of England, begins in 1584 with the arrival of the first ship of White Trash off the shores of Virginia to found the Roanoke colony, courtesy of Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of Good Queen Bess. I have written about this as my "1584 Project."

If you want a scholarly narrative on the subject, try Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Just like Dr. Jill Biden, Isenberg is a doctor.

Yes, I know, such a museum, fetchingly configured as a trash can, perhaps with different receptacles for plastics, and bottles and cans, seems an obvious addition to the glorious monuments of Washington DC. And there is a spare slot on the Washington Mall, right between the African American Museum and the Holocaust Museum.

That way we could have three Museums of the Victims, side by side: Jews, White Trash, and Black Slaves.

And then we Americans could spend the next one hundred years arguing about who is the biggest victim: Jews, poor whites, or descendants of slaves.

Of course, I am sure you can see my cunning plan behind this. It is to de-legitimize the lefty division of the world into three parts, the Allies, the Oppressed Peoples, and the White Oppressors.

Which White Oppressors would that be, cupcake?

And we all know the answer to that. The real oppressors are the whiteys in the Educated Elite, now commonly referred to among those in the know as "laptop whites."

Definition of Privilege: someone who can work at home and interact with co-workers and clients using Zoom. White Trash need not apply.

Oh No! I've Been Banned By Google!

Yesterday I got an email from "Google Publisher Policy" telling me that my page christopherchantrill.com had been in violation of its "Google Publisher Policies." As follows:

• New violations were detected. As a result, ad serving has been restricted or disabled on pages where these violations of the AdSense Program Policies were found. 

Who, me? I thought? Let's look at Google's "Google Publisher Policy." For instance: "We do not allow content that:

• incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.

Examples: Promoting hate groups or hate group paraphernalia, encouraging others to believe that a person or group is inhuman, inferior, or worthy of being hated

I think that what Google didn't like was my blog post "My '1584 Project'" from a couple of days ago. In that post I made the argument that, if Nikole Hannah-Jones was going to push her "1619 Project" that dramatized the arrival of the first slaves in North America as the true founding of the US -- Talk about inciting hatred! -- then I had the right to come up with a counter-narrative.

If NHJ was going to represent 1619 as the true founding, how about 1584, which was the date that the Roanoke Colony was founded. And what was the Roanoke Colony all about? It was all about cleansing England of its "waste population," according to scholar Nancy Isenberg in White Trash. So you tell me which is the true founding of America? Sending the waste population of Europe to the Americas or sending slaves to North America? Both pretty shameful if you ask me.

But here is what I think triggered Google's hate speech AI thingy. I included a paragraph from Isenberg's book that listed all the pejoratives used over the years to describe White Trash:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [N-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

[My bold]. In the original I did not use "N-word." I used the original unredacted text -- once used by white supremacists and now by black rap artists -- in the interest of scholarly accuracy. But, of course, Google's Department of Ideological Conformity would have found [N-word] and flagged it as an example of "incites hatred..." and so forth.

Truth is, of course, that the noble task of purging our society of hatred and all the rest is not quite as simple as flagging banned words, Google. And I suggest to you, Google, that you are starting down a rabbit hole that will end in nothing but hate and violence, and you will find yourself, Google, in the middle of the cross-fire.

Indeed, as we hurtle into what seems like a revolutionary and inquisitorial maelstrom, with defenders of the establishment like Google trying to push back on the barbarian hordes, the only question to me is the size of the butcher's bill.

But, of course, the midwits operating the Google Publisher Policies have No Idea about this. Defending the ruling class and its orthodoxy and its perquisites is just what a good Googler does, instinctively, because that is what he or she has been carefully taught, from year to year, in his or her dear little ear.

The only good thing about this, I reckon, is that the folks at Google and elsewhere in tech are flying blind. Or, to change the metaphor, they are like a colonialist army marching up some mountain valley in Afghanistan, utterly blind to the unseen bandits watching from the heights.

The Google guys really do not know what they are getting into. And neither, I suspect, does anyone else.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

1584 Project -- Contents

1584 was the real "real" foundation of America, NHJ

1. My "1584 Project"
   America began when the first ship of "waste population" hit the shores


2. Oh No! I've been banned by Google
   Because of the Dreaded N-word

The Weird Benefit of the NYT "1619 Project"

As you would expect, conservatives have been in the forefront of mocking the New York Times "1619 Project" that proposes that African slavery is the story and the meaning of America.

But I must say that it helped me think a bit more deeply about slavery.

Because it encouraged me to think instead: why should we, in the last two centuries, have been the ones to experience slavery as a scandal, and do something about it?

And it encouraged me to think up a counter-narrative, that we might call the left's "1848 Project" to reinvent slavery as socialism and to create the two biggest slave states in history.

Anyway, now the Wall Street Journal has published a pay-walled opinion piece "The '1619 Project' Gets Schooled," in which it takes the NYT to the wood-shed on the 1619 Project with the help of historians and Trotskyites.

The project's creator, Mikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it "decenters whiteness" and disdains its critics as "old, white male historians."

It would be funny, if not so serious, that this woman, who has "an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master's in journalism", is so up-front and, dare I say, mindlessly racist.

But, in a way, it is helpful for The New York Times to front such a superficial project, because it makes people like me think about the issue. Why did we, the paragons of "whiteness," abolish slavery?

Was it because of moral superiority of our white patriarchal culture? Was it because of the moral fervor of Christian evangelism in the 18th century? Was it because slavery does not pay, compared to free labor? Was it because the North hated the South and cooked up the slavery issue in the 1850s as a club to beat the South?

Or was it because of popular literature like Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography and Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin? Or was it because of black Americans that, according to Hannah-Jones, "fought back alone" against racism?

Whatabout a Brit sailor like William Richardson in A Mariner of England that in 1790 joined a slaver bound for Guinea as Fourth Mate, and spent six months at anchor slowly buying slaves on the Bonny River from the local African chief?

Or whatabout the white slave trade in Circassian beauties from the NE coast of the Black Sea -- sold by their families into slavery -- that were trafficked to harems in the Middle East?

The truth is that, when we construct our historical narratives, whether as a credentialed historian or as a young journalist that "literally knows nothing," we are picking documents to tell a story. Some people want to celebrate the glorious arc of "white" progress; others want to "decenter whiteness." We all pick the items that help us tell the story we want to tell.

My own approach is the notion that slavery does not pay, compared to free labor. So no moral story. Just bottom-line thinking. Just as, in WWI and after, the Germans changed the basic organization of the battle by assigning responsibility downwards from commissioned officers to NCOs because, in the "lethal battlefield" of machine guns and artillery, there was no way for the higher officers to supervise every detail of the battle.

In other words, the world does not change from brilliant strategic thinking. It just reacts to the facts on the ground.

You could have the same argument about labor unions. Some people say that it was unions that raised the wages and benefits of workers; others that it was "productivity" and the simple action of supply and demand for labor. Some people say that it was unions that forced companies to treat their employees like human beings; others that unions make a company so inflexible and uncompetitive that unionized companies just can't survive in the global marketplace.

Hey, whatabout my argument about the welfare state being neo-feudalism? You can argue that the serfs of the old feudal system, abandoned by their lords in the agricultural revolution of the 16th century, voted for a resumption of feudalism in the modern administrative welfare state that tasks the ruling class with looking after the welfare of the workers. So you have the voters of Britain voting for a little more NHS from Boris Johnson rather than a lot more NHS from Jeremy Corbyn. But nobody is proposing to put the responsibility for health care on the shoulders of each individual citizen.

So, is the modern feudalism a step towards slavery? Or what? I doubt if the young journalists of The New York Times would have a clue about that, beyond what they had been carefully taught in our nation's schools and colleges.