JUDY WOODRUFF: Four hundred years ago this
month, in August 1619, the first African slaves
arrived in Virginia.
It is regarded by many as the beginning of
America's long relationship with slavery.
The 400th anniversary and the ways slavery
has affected American history since then are
being commemorated.
One of the more notable efforts is The New
York Times' 1619 Project, which is spotlighting
parts of history that are less well-known.
We are going to focus on some of the economic
legacies, including the larger connections
with modern capitalism.
Specifically, we're going to look at how the
production of American sugar, known as white
gold, helped to fuel slavery and became ingrained
in our society.
Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad of Harvard's
Kennedy School wrote about that for The New
York Times.
Louisiana, he wrote, led the nation in destroying
the lives of black people in the name of economic
efficiency.
And he joins me now.
He joins me now.
Professor Muhammad, thank you very much for
being here.
Help us understand how sugar is connected
to the origins of American slavery.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, Harvard's Kennedy
School: Sugar was the most dominant economic
incentive for European colonization of the
Americas.
No other crop was as abundant or successful
in drawing Europeans to these shores, and
I mean by that North America and South America,
for the purpose of cultivating sugar for a
worldwide market, and particularly for Europe,
that had already established a taste for sugar,
but would grow exponentially in terms of demand
over time.
There's no way to really understand the significance
of the colonization of the Americas without
understanding the role of sugar in it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And how -- and explain how
slavery played such an important role from
the very beginning.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Sure.
So, the origin story, of course, is that Christopher
Columbus brings some cane stalks with him
by way of the Spanish Canary Islands in 1493.
So sugar is already part of the globe, but
it has not become the commodity in bulk form
that it will become once Christopher Columbus
brings it to the New World.
As such, sugar was always an incredibly difficult
product to produce.
First, the cane itself is heavy and unwieldy.
And, secondly, to take the plant and turn
it into sugar required incredible labor and
often dangerous and difficult labor.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And you write about how, of
course, that began in the 1600s, but then
it went on literally for hundreds of years.
It changed shape.
You get closer to the Civil War, and the shape
of the sugar industry has changed, but, still,
slaves are an essential piece of it.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Absolutely.
So, Louisiana doesn't get into the business
of sugarcane cultivation until the end of
the 18th century.
As a result of the attempt to cultivate sugar,
it blossomed and bloomed, and by the top of
the 19th century, Louisiana was producing
about a quarter of the world's cane sugar
supply.
It was a pretty miraculous turnaround.
But all of that was made possible by the enslavement
of people of African descent.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And I know I'm asking do you
skip over a lot of history here, but you move
forward to today, to the 20th and even into
the 21st century, and you write about how
the legacy of what happened in Louisiana and
other places still plays a role in the economy,
a vital role in the economy of this country.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Well, if we go from
sugar to cotton, we basically explain two
crops that, in their totality, explain much
of the infrastructure of our capitalist economy
to this day.
We can explain everything, from the abundance
of land that was originally held by the indigenous,
and the labor of enslaved people, as America's
competitive advantage.
By the 19th century, cotton, for example,
was essentially the major export of the United
States.
And that cotton export helped make possible
the wealth not only in enslaved people, but
also the wealth of banks in the North that
were responsible for financing investments
in this country that were often mortgaged
on the basis of enslaved people.
There's no way to really understand the economic
might of America by the 19th century without
understanding the role of cotton slavery and
earlier sugar slavery in it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: One of the other writers for
these series of articles in the Sunday New
York Times, Matthew Desmond -- he's a professor
at Princeton -- writes about how not only
that today's economy has its roots in slavery,
but that modern American capitalism is as
severe as it is in its treatment of people,
and that that too has its roots in slavery.
Some people are going to look at that and
say, is that a leap too far?
How do you answer that?
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Well, it's a good
question, and I can see why people would give
pause.
But if we take a step back, and we really
ask a fair question, we could ask ourselves,
has our economy been built on the notion of
personhood or profit?
And, in that sense, from slavery to the late
19th century of immigration of Europeans from
around the world, to the 20th century today,
people have been ground up in our economy
for the purpose of moneymaking.
How else would you explain the great labor
unrest of the late 19th and early 20th century
that brought us essentially our modern social
welfare system, eventually in the New Deal,
but for the fact that capitalism created misery
for people at the lowest end of the economic
totem pole?
That's our history, whether we like it or
not.
Some people prospered in that system, but
it was a system that was often quite brutal
to workers who were responsible for doing
the heavy lifting of our economy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally, why is it important,
Professor Muhammad, that Americans understand
what you have written about?
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Well, it's important
because we don't treat our past with the same
commitment to truth and honesty and accuracy
as we do, say, science and technology.
If there is a concern in this day and age
about the -- questioning global warming or
climate change, if scientists are under attacks
for making things up, that's a new phenomenon,
a product of our late 20th century.
But we have been having cultural wars about
how the interpret the American past from the
very beginning.
And the consequences of that are what drove
the editors of the 1619 Project to look closely
at the work of academic historians, just like
many people look at the work of scientists
and say, what do academic historians tell
us about the past that we have not been teaching
and we have not learned as well as we should?
JUDY WOODRUFF: Khalil Gibran Muhammad, he's
a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, one
of the writers for this New York Times series
the 1619 Project, looking at the 400th anniversary
of the beginning of slavery, thank you very
much.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Thanks so much for
having me.
