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In order to evaluate the Whiggish narrative of racial equality as somehow immanent in the American Founding and this inevitably unfolding over the course of US history, we need to consider it in two ways: as a description of reality and as a piece of agitprop. https://twitter.com/nicholasguyatt/status/1291724353680420864
I largely agree with Guyatt that it fails as a description of reality, both in its teleological understanding of history and in its often optimistically obfuscatory readings of, e.g., the Constitution as frames in 1787.
Which is not to say that the American founding does not provide some raw materials out of which one might make a case for racial equality. And, from the beginnings of the republic, African Americans, Indians, and others attempted to use those raw materials to do exactly that.
When comparing Garrison's ("a covenant with death") and Douglass's ("a glorious liberty document") evaluations of the Constitution, we may well conclude both that Garrison offered a more honest assessment of the document, but that Douglass practiced far more effective politics.
It is precisely the preciousness to white liberals of the Whiggish narrative of the US's immanent racial equality that has made that narrative such a powerful and useful tool in the centuries long Black freedom struggle.
But saying that the Whiggish narrative of racial equality has been a powerful political tool in the struggle for racial equality is only the starting point for evaluating it as a piece of agitprop.
Using untrue understandings of history as political tools tends to come with certain costs. And the tricky part of evaluating the agitprop value of the narrative of the US's immanent racial equality is accurately describing those costs.
What aspects of systemic racism are systematically obscured by inaccurately optimistic accounts of the core values of our country and of its history? Conversely, what are the political costs of insisting on more pessimistic accounts of the American past?
(To acknowledge those political costs is not at all to suggest that we oughtn't to pay them. As a historian, I'm committed to truthful accounts of the past, full stop. But we do ourselves no favors by not preparing for the political battles that can accompany those accounts.)
