Against Activist Historiography

Woke historians endanger the collective remembrance of history even more than woke vandals tearing down statues.

Alex DiPrima has written an excellent article against activist historiography for the London Lyceum.  I heartily commend it to you (even if my opinion of David Barton is higher than DiPrima’s).

The bulk of activist historians today, such as Du Mez, Tisby, Barr, Hannah-Jones of 1619 Project infamy, and too many more, are driven by woke ideologies.  Is there any academic discipline not being corrupted by the hokum of Critical Theory?  The books of these woke activist historians are more propaganda than history.  Yet they are made textbooks and recommended books for many.

Activist historiography is older than wokeness, of course.  Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States comes to mind immediately. And any number of sources for history, be they ancient, medieval, or modern, had their agendas.   But as DiPrima writes, historians have a duty to be accurate, not activist.  Further, activism is often the enemy of accuracy.  I found gross omissions of inconvenient facts in a Tisby book before I got past the second page.  No historian is without bias, but he should at least try to put revealing what happened in the past and why above his own preferred agendas.  Now certainly one is free to write activist works.  One should not push them as scholarly history as Hannah-Jones does.

I am not at all saying we should ignore history that puts, say, the United States or the United Kingdom in a bad light.  But to rip such events out of their context and distort them is destructive and the stuff of manipulative tyrants not scholars.

To use one recent example of many, the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson is an important and consequential event that should not be glossed over.  But to ignore that he attacked the police officer and that the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative was a lie that inflamed the subsequent riots, and that much of said riots was opportunistic criminality and looting, to ignore this as Tisby did is flat out dishonest and a grave disservice to those in the future who wish to know and understand what really happened.

Such activist historiography distorts and even erases history more than it reveals it.  Woke historians endanger the collective remembrance of history even more than woke vandals tearing down statues.

But more and more spaces in university faculties and library shelves are getting filled by activist historians more into critical theory and accompanying agendas than accurate scholarship.  If we do not want to lose our past, those of us who care about history should push back and insist on a revival of the exercise of scholarly history with integrity.  Blessings upon Alex DiPrima for so doing.