Historian David Blight responds to being attacked by Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald in Quillette

This is one of those instances when my interests collide. 

I have been enjoying historian David Blight's work while doing research for my almost-complete play GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN.

Primarily through Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass, but also through his Yale lecture series about the Civil War and Reconstruction. And let's not forget his appearances on C-SPAN.

So although I've written about Blight on a few occasions on this blog, including Mac Donald's attack on Blight, I happened to be listening, yesterday, to one of Blight's more recent Yale Lecture series "Legacies of Reconstruction and the Origins of Jim Crow Society" for my play research rather than for content for Pinkerite. 

But lo and behold, right smack in the middle of the Class 24, Legacies of Reconstruction video -  available for free on YouTube, thank you Yale - Blight responds to the Mac Donald attack and it is a thing of beauty. 

Blight is in the middle of discussing Yale's Civil War Memorial (Blight wrote about it for The Atlantic in February 2024) which Blight calls "a Yankee apology for Reconstruction" when he mentions the Mac Donald attack. Transcript below.

It’s Russell’s and the War Memorial committee's and Yale's apology for Reconstruction. Yeah. You know, we over we took over the South. We colonized it. We imposed black suffrage on you. Oh my God. Yeah. You reacted violently here and there, but we understand. It's OK. Come back to Yale. 

 

It's a Yankee apology for Reconstruction. And the next time you walk through this, think of it that way if you can. And I apologize for getting animated about this. 

 

Not really. 

 

But I just got viciously attacked in an online essay about my New York Times essay. And I would otherwise not respond except the woman who wrote it for a very right-wing – I didn’t know about it until people started saying “have you read this have you read this?” I said no. It's a site called Quillette. OK, I'm sure some of these students must know it, it's its roots are in Australia, it turns out, very libertarian, very, very right wing stuff. But she wrote an essay far longer than my New York Times piece, attacking me and Yale. And all the elitism of our universities. And on and on and on and on she went. She especially went after how I treated this reconciliation story in the Yale and Slavery book. She said “these elite liberals have become so terrible they don't believe in reconciliation.” 

 

That is such a misreading of the book I wrote called - she mentioned my book Race and Reunion but clearly never read it. Or even if she did, it didn't impress her. 

 

The Jim Crow system in the South evolves in a culture forgetting what the Civil War was really about. A purposeful forgetting of the essential results and consequences of the liberation of four million people. The American reunion of North and South is built on a new edifice of the destruction of black rights. Political, civil and eventually of even black lives. 

 

Alright, that's enough of an editorial. Now you're all going to go try to - they have a paywall though for this Quillette thing, so… I got to read it initially. Now there’s a paywall. I was going to quote her today but it couldn't open - I was not gonna pay for it. I mean, come on. 

 

Uh. I don't know, sometimes it's good to get attacked viciously like that. It means somebody read it.

If Blight wants to read the Quillette article without the paywall, and I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to pay for Quillette, I have it archived for free right here.

Later in this lecture, Blight mentions race science (38:47) but doesn't make an explicit connection between that and Quillette.

I’m just sorry that Blight's days of being blissfully unaware of the existence of Quillette are over.