Around the time of the publication of my book,
The Sit-Ins,
I decided to give more attention to something I had mostly avoided up to that
point: writing op-eds. I was looking for ways to draw more attention to the
book, and this seemed a good way to do that. I placed an
op-ed
in
USA Today that ran on the
anniversary of the seminal 1960 lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North
Carolina. I also
wrote
several
pieces
for the
Washington Post’s “
Made
By History” section.
I have two takeaways from this experience. One is that an
academic writing an op-ed should know some basic tricks. The other is that a
historian writing an op-ed faces distinct challenges. Effective op-ed writing often
demands the kind of presentist orientation to the past that conflicts with the
essence of effective historical writing.
The Tricks
I quickly learned there are basic tricks to writing pieces op-eds.
The most important is to remember your audience. Op-eds are aimed toward a
general readership, and you need to make sure to pitch your prose at the right
level. Make it accessible. Don’t assume knowledge. Avoid abstract concepts and
technical terminology. Use details selectively, and then only to illustrate or
to add texture to the point you’re trying to make.
A related trick: Don’t try to do too much. Figure out what the
point of the piece is and stick to it. Avoid excessive qualifications. Accept
that nuance is not the coin of this realm. For scholars who dedicate their
careers to the complexity of historical material, who carefully craft article
and books by threading together subtle arguments and sub-arguments, this can be
a difficult and painful process.
And then there is the always-looming word count. You need to
cut, cut, and cut some more. You might get some more space if you’re writing an
exclusively online essay, but if you have a chance to get into actual print,
this requires even more cuts.
The Challenges
Beyond figuring out how to express yourself in accessible
800-word form, there are more substantive concerns that historians face when
writing op-eds.
If you want an editor to pick up your op-ed, you need a hook.
What do you have to say that will make a general reader stop to take a detour
into history with you? Sometimes the historical material itself is the
enticement. But if you’re trying to get the attention of an editor receiving
hundreds of submissions every week, you probably need something more. And often
that something more is a “lesson” of history. You’re a historian, and you want
to show the world that you have something to add to the discussion. And what
clearer, more relevant way to declare your importance than to say that history
provides special insight on some issue of contemporary importance?
In navigating this terrain, there are two basic moves the
historian can make: critique and construction. The historian as critic might
simply seek to correct some historical misconception that has entered into
public debate. Or, the historian as critic might seek to undermine present-day
assumptions, to destabilize established certainties. The historian does this by
showing that the status quo was constructed out of lost alternatives, that the
present does not need to be the way it is. History shows us that things have
changed and that things can change again.
The other move is probably more appealing to op-ed editors,
but it is the one I find far more challenging and more potentially problematic.
This move involves the historian extracting a lesson from history that says something
about the way the present should be.
Some lessons of history focus on lineage. The historian
shows how present debates are the legacies of past debates. Understanding the
past illuminates the stakes of the present. So, for example, liberal historians
argue that the embrace of a “color-blind” reading of the equal protection
clause by segregationists in the 1960s and 1970s illuminates the sins of
modern-day color-blind constitutionalists. Conservative historians critique
modern liberalism by tracing its lineage to the paternalistic, racist, and
eugenicist strands of the Progressives.
Another kind of lesson of history is comparative. The
historian places the past alongside the present so as to illuminate the
present. This was how I framed my op-eds on the sit-ins.
One
described lessons the sit-in movement offered for present-day protest
efforts.
The
other compared the 1960 student movement to the recent student-led gun
rights movement.
The reason I find this kind of writing challenging is
because Rule #1 for any serious historian is that past is different from the
present. The most common mistake for nonhistorians engaging with the past is
anachronism and presentism. Recovering the past requires attention to the
distinctive circumstances and worldviews of historical actors. Finding
ourselves in the past is easy—probably because it says more about us than about
the past. The best historical work tends to show difference.
Extracting lessons from the past that are useful to the
present is an exercise in selection in which the selection criteria is as much
about present-day utility than about historical fidelity. To make history serviceable
to the present also requires compromise and simplification. Richness and
complexity of history inevitably is lost in the process.
So, for example, to reduce modern color-blind
constitutionalism to the legacy of segregationism requires placing aside many
other strands of historical influence that played a role in its rise to
conservative orthodoxy. My
comparison
of the lunch counter sit-in protesters to the post-Parkland student gun-control
activists required me to pick out points of intersection and push aside points
of differentiation. The comparison was driven by my admiration for the students
and what they were trying to do, both then and now. I want the students today
to succeed, and it was this desire, as much as or more so than my knowledge of
history, that moved me to compare them to one of the most inspirational and
successful students movements in history.
***
These are the tricks and challenges of writing op-eds. The
tricks I found sometimes frustrating, always time-consuming, but readily
manageable. The more substantive challenges I found harder to navigate. I had
to recognize that the art of the op-ed simply requires tapping into a different
skill set than that of an academic historian.
In the end, I was proud of the op-eds I wrote. I felt I was
able to minimize the inevitable trade-offs of the genre. They drew attention to
historical material I felt deserved more attention. And the linkages I drew
between the past and the present hopefully enriched some readers’ understanding
of both.
