When The Economist issued its review on Ed Baptist’s The Half of the Story Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism at the beginning of September, it derided Baptist for his lack of objectivity in describing United States slave trade. Instead of working within the framework of Baptist’s contention that the United States owes most of its success to the brutal treatment of its slave population, the review suggested that more “traditional” forces of American success might be at play such as “its individualistic culture, Puritanism, the lure of open land and high wages, Yankee ingenuity and government policies.” The review concluded, tellingly, with a final lamentation of Baptist’s condemnation of plantation owners. “Unlike Mr. Thomas,” it reads, “Mr. Baptist had not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites, villains. This is not history, it is advocacy.”
Next to the review was a picture of actress Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, her character in last year’s Twelve Years a Slave.
Not only does The Economist fail to be objective — citing Hugh Thomas’ controversial book The Slave Trade as a “definitive” history, despite its paternalistic dismissal of slave accounts and its conspicuous elevation of slave owners as the first “citizens of the world,” it hides its own subjectivity behind clean statements. In this sense, The Economist has not only damaged Baptist’s credibility as a historian by labeling his book “subjective,” they have also elevated their own opinions to that of uncontestable, objective fact.
After public outcry over the piece, The Economist quickly withdrew the review and issued an online apology statement, stating that “slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of this evil.” According to the magazine, in the interest of transparency, the original article, without the image of Ms. Nygong’o, was attached to the apology statement, but is otherwise unavailable on the website. This is not the first time The Economist has understated the severity of America’s slave trade. Nor is it the first time that media sources have questioned the credibility of materials based on their lack of objectivity. It pushes the dominant narrative of the United States, which says that our nation was founded, not on the blood and bones of people traded like cards, but rather on a steely Puritanical work ethic and homegrown determination. What is most dangerous about this article — and a large portion of our media and scholarly corpuses, all of which have been misleadingly termed “objective,” is that is does not acknowledge the personal, political and social subjectivities of its author. It fails to hold itself accountable for the inevitable biases that are constantly at play when we make decisions to provide any audience with information.
Objective, in the most literal sense of the word, is defined as not being influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts. But objectivity in practice, as a journalistic and historical technique, looks very different. Naoko Shibusawa suggests in Ideology and Culture Proofs that a universal practice of “objectivity” might not even be in place at all. Even when we construct research projects, scholarly texts, or news pieces, the lens through which we make decisions — what we choose and do not choose to report, is largely determined by culture and cultural ideologies, which tend to “shape what passes for common sense.” These histories that are put forth, though not necessarily incorrect, selectively whitewash narratives of historical events.
“American exceptionalism” has served as the underlying common sense that prevails in US foreign policy. The notion that the United States has an exceptional duty to help other nations achieve democracy and economic freedom has its roots in a history of paternalism, the idea that it was the United States’ duty to civilize the supposedly uncivilized conquered people. Currently, “American exceptionalism” has been particularly manifest in foreign policy relations in the Middle East, the most recent example of which can be seen in public discourse on military actions to prevent the spread of ISIS. Portrayed by American media outlets and public officials as a relentless and barbaric evil, with some their tactics harkening allusions to the totalitarian annihilation goals of the Nazi regime, ISIS is, perhaps rightly, seen as a formidably threatening and brutal organization.
Yet the presence and growth of ISIS has also been used as a justification for recent US air strikes in Syria, despite persistent skepticism and outrage from the opponents of Assad’s regime. The airstrikes have also targeted another group in Syria called the Nusra Front, which the United States decries as an Al Qaeda affiliate, but whom many rebel groups within Syria — including those the United States has supported — rely on as a tactical ally. Furthermore, the United States has not carried out airstrikes in areas where there is more popular support for them, such as the Northern Aleppo province in Syria, where Kurdish residents have been pleading for military assistance amid a weeklong assault by the Islamic state. In this sense, though the United States’ political and media coverage of the Islamic State have highlighted the dire and urgent need for action on ISIS, there is still a paternalistic lean to this form of “American exceptionalism” and there are, therefore, narratives that are silenced.
“Objectivity” is also an issue when it comes to engaging the national memory in textbooks. The recent debate over the textbook industry in Texas has profoundly shaped what is emphasized and what is forgotten in national accounts of American history. As a hub for the production of textbooks used all across the US, the final say in history textbook content comes from the politically motivated Texas Board of Education, whose members are elected from single member districts in Texas for four years and is currently comprised of five Democrats and nine Republicans — all of whom are overseen by the governor-appointed Commissioner of Education. But this controversy of how history should be written is not local to the United States — it is an ongoing and global issue. We can look to the controversy over the selective and highly controversial historical narratives of the Balkans, the continuous denial and silencing of the Armenian genocide and the 1941 pogrom of a small Polish town’s entire Jewish population by its non-Jewish residents as just a few examples of the ways in which national memory forgets historical events that clash with common and cultural identity. These histories that are put forth, though not necessarily incorrect, selectively whitewash narratives of historical events. As Howard Zinn points out in his Failure to Quit, “the chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of ‘important,’ of course, depends on one’s values.”
Although the inherent bias within “objectivity” is hard to grasp and debate, this does not mean that it cannot be molded. Indeed, with the publication of Jan Gross’ Neighbors in 2000, which provided an in-depth investigation of the atrocities at Jedwabne, what followed in Poland was, essentially, a national soul-searching and an attempt to reconcile the events with the country’s national identity. This reaction is a step in the right direction in our efforts to contend with what we believe to be objective fact. It was an acknowledgment of Poland’s national biases and the silent voids of history that came with it. Another example of reexamining the “objectivity” of past generations is the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. This measure paid compensation to some 20,000 Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II and issued a formal statement of apology from the United States government. This instance of contending with the once-ubiquitous notion in the United States that all Japanese-Americans were “enemies” of the United States is not notable because of any “national soul-searching” that it invoked, nor is it notable because of the scope of its effects. It is notable because it showed that “it was possible for the American nation to confront an historical injustice in a serious way, to apologize publicly for it and to offer…amends.” Fora nation whose legacy includes slavery, colonization, mass killings of Native peoples and various human rights abuses abroad that are not talked about or discussed in public discourse, the United States has a feeble track record of contending with alternative stories that disrupt its own national narrative.
And it will continue to be difficult to contend with alternative stories if we continue to label traditionally respected platforms of information delivery as “objective” without requiring that they acknowledge their personal biases in research, reporting, and the ultimate delivery and language of information they convey. The Economist’s piece is one such instance of this difficulty. The good news is that people did notice it and they did speak up — a suggestion that that silenced narratives are increasingly being heard.