Interventions like the 1619 Project and Thirteentherism are darker expressions of the practice of attending to the past for allegorical purposes. They are extreme extensions of a disposition to abjure historical complexity out of commitment to producing accounts of unremitting brutalization and oppression of black people at the hands of “whites” or an abstract White Supremacy, which sometimes seem like oppression porn. This tendency militates against nuanced historical understanding, as in a moralizing inclination to reduce slavery and Jim Crow to what my historian son exasperatedly describes as “white people’s permanent sadistic camp” for blacks. He has noted also that Read more