Academic consensus about slavery never reached the general public

Evidence

But this scholarship, so uncontroversial among historians, has often struggled to permeate mainstream understanding of American history, which is still wedded to a mythology of our founders as unimpeachable heroes and our founding as divine event. There is, as the historian Jelani Cobb told me, a “gap between the academy and the world. So while scholars of color and progressive white scholars have spent decades fighting and, for the most part, winning these battles in the academy and in the profession, they’ve remained isolated from the rest of the world.” As a result, the American public has an outdated and vague sense of the past. And yet the 2019 Washington Post poll found that despite their meager knowledge of slavery, two-thirds of Americans believe that the legacy of slavery still affects our society today. They can see and feel the truth of this fact—they just haven’t learned a history that helps them understand how and why. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 32

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘gap between the academy and the world’ as a structural problem — an essay on why scholarly consensus fails to displace public myth, and whether reframing arguments are the remedy or symptom.