Meme - "Ida Bae Wells: The 1619 Project explicitly denies objectivity. We state in the intro that this was a reframing of history and sought to center black contributions in the narrative. This has been my primary problem with this so-called criticism. People engage critiques but not the actual project"
It's not objective, but they want it taught in schools and if you oppose it you're a white supremacist. And CRT is just teaching accurate history
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history - World Socialist Web Site - "Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race... The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones writes in the series’ introduction: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”... The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analyzed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labor, but, rather, as the manifestation of white racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions.Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes. Democratic Party politician Stacey Abrams, in an essay published recently in Foreign Affairs, claims that whites and African Americans are separated by an “intrinsic difference.” This irrational and scientifically absurd claim serves to legitimize the reactionary view—entirely compatible with the political perspective of fascism—that blacks and whites are hostile and incompatible species... In yet another article, published in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, the neurologist Robert Sapolsky argues that the antagonism between human groups is rooted in biology... Sapolsky’s simplistic dissolution of history into biology recalls not only the reactionary invocation of “Social Darwinism” to legitimize imperialist conquest by the late nineteen and early twentieth century imperialists, but also the efforts of German geneticists to provide a pseudo-scientific justification for Nazi anti-Semitism and racism.Dangerous and reactionary ideas are wafting about in bourgeois academic and political circles... There is a vast body of literature dealing with the widespread practice of slavery outside the Americas. As Professor G. Ogo Nwokeji of the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has explained, slavery was practiced by African societies. It existed in West Africa “well before the fifteenth century, when the Europeans arrived there via the Atlantic Ocean.”... Professor Lovejoy remarked in the preface to the Third Edition of his now-classic study that one of his aims in undertaking his research “was to confront the reality that there was slavery in the history of Africa, at a time when some romantic visionaries and hopeful nationalists wanted to deny the clear facts.”... history is not a morality tale. The efforts to discredit the Revolution by focusing on the alleged hypocrisy of Jefferson and other founders contribute nothing to an understanding of history. The American Revolution cannot be understood as the sum of the subjective intentions and moral limitations of those who led it. The world-historical significance of the Revolution is best understood through an examination of its objective causes and consequences... It was not an accident that the victorious conclusion of the revolutionary war in 1783 was followed just four years later by the famous call of English abolitionist William Wilberforce for the ending of Britain’s slave trade... Hannah-Jones does not view Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator,” as the freed slaves called him in the 1860s, but as a garden-variety racist who held “black people [as] the obstacle to national unity.” The author simply disregards Lincoln’s own words—for example, the Gettysburg Address and the magisterial Second Inaugural Address—as well as the books written by historians such as Eric Foner, James McPherson, Allen Guelzo, David Donald, Ronald C. White, Stephen Oates, Richard Carwardine and many others that demonstrate Lincoln’s emergence as a revolutionary leader fully committed to the destruction of slavery.But an honest portrayal of Lincoln would contradict Hannah-Jones’ claims that “black Americans fought back alone” to “make America a democracy.” So too would a single solitary mention, anywhere in the magazine, of the 2.2 million Union soldiers who fought and the 365,000 who died to end slavery.Likewise, the interracial character of the abolitionist movement is blotted out... Hannah-Jones dares not mention that for the antislavery movement Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was, in the words of the late historian David Brion Davis, their “touchstone, the sacred scripture.” Hannah-Jones and the other 1619 Project contributors—claiming that slavery was the unique “original sin” of the United States, and discrediting the American Revolution and the Civil War as elaborate conspiracies to perpetuate white racism—have little to add for the rest of American history. Nothing ever changed. Slavery was simply replaced by Jim Crow segregation, and this in turn has given way to the permanent condition of racism that is the inescapable fate of being a “white American.” It all goes back to 1619 and “the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day.”... This is not simply a “reframing” of history. It is an attack and falsification that ignores more than a half-century of scholarship. There is not the slightest indication that Hannah-Jones (or any of her co-essayists) have even heard of, let alone read, the work on slavery carried out by Williams, Davis, or Peter Kolchin; on the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood; on the political conceptions that motivated union soldiers by James McPherson; on Reconstruction by Eric Foner; on Jim Crow segregation by C. Vann Woodward; or on the Great Migration by James N. Gregory or Joe William Trotter. What is left out of the Times’ racialist morality tale is breathtaking, even from the vantage point of African-American scholarship. The invocation of white racism takes the place of any concrete examination of the economic, political and social history of the country. There is no examination of the historical context, foremost the development of the class struggle, within which the struggle of the African-American population developed in the century that followed the Civil War. And there is no reference to the transformation of the United States into an industrial colossus and the most powerful imperialist country between 1865 and 1917, the year of its entry into World War I.While the 1619 Project and its stable of well-to-do authors find in the labor exploitation of slavery a talisman to explain all of history, they pass over in deafening silence the exploitation inherent in wage labor... Replacing real history with a mythic racial narrative, the 1619 Project ignores the actual social development of the African-American population over the last 150 years... In the numerous articles which make up the 1619 Project, the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. appears just once, and then only in a photo caption. The reason for this is that King’s political outlook was opposed to the racialist narrative advanced by the Times... Given the 1619 Project’s black nationalist narrative, it may appear surprising that nowhere in the issue do the names Malcolm X or Black Panthers appear. Unlike the black nationalists of the 1960s, Hannah-Jones does not condemn American imperialism. She boasts that “we [i.e. African-Americans] are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military,” and celebrates the fact that “we” have fought “in every war this nation has waged.”... It is no coincidence that the promotion of this racial narrative of American history by the Times, the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the privileged upper-middle-class layers it represents, comes amid the growth of class struggle in the US and around the world... The 1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. The Democrats think it will be beneficial to shift their focus for the time being from the reactionary, militarist anti-Russia campaign to equally reactionary racial politics.The Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, was explicit in this regard, telling staffers in a taped meeting in August that the narrative upon which the paper was focused would change from “being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character.” As a result, reporters will be directed to “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.”... This focus on race is a mirror image of Trump’s own racial politics, and it bears a disturbing resemblance to the race-based world view of the Nazis"
Presumably The World Socialist Web Site, published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the leadership of the world socialist movement, the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, is part of the "far right"
As always, the best critiques of post-Marxists come from Marxists
Nikole Hannah-Jones 1619 Project is "Not a History"- American Exceptionalism is Nonsense - "Nikole Hannah-Jones admitted that the 1619 Project is “really not a history.” While arguing with herself, Hannah-Jones reveals that her main goal is not to teach America about the tragic history of slavery or the achievements of black Americans, which she apparently knows little about, but to promote socialism and make our youth believe that American exceptionalism is “nonsense.”"
The New York Times Dropped Millions On Facebook To Advertise The 1619 Project…While Trying To Bully Facebook Into Censoring Others - "Roose isn’t the only voice at the Times promoting the notion that Facebook’s role in allowing free flow of information results in election corruption. Contributing opinion writer Kara Swisher has devoted outsized attention to the supposed problem of Facebook’s unwillingness to crack down on those she deems insufficiently woke. The goal here is obvious: force Facebook to restrict content, thus re-establishing the monopoly on information the mainstream media lost with the rise of the internet.But while the Times has been one of the most significant drivers of this pressure campaign to force Facebook to censor more content — particularly paid advertising — the Times has taken advantage of rules crafted to its benefit and has dumped tens of millions of dollars into marketing its most radical content via Facebook. As it turns out, the Times isn’t worried about money and politics on Facebook. They’re simply trying to dominate the system themselves, barring all others. The Times’ opinion page has routinely and repeatedly criticized Facebook for the supposed sin of utilizing openness toward speech as a guise for profit-making. This, of course, ignores the fact that Facebook makes a tiny fraction of its income from political ads. But facts have never stopped the Times. In January, propaganda-donor George Soros wrote an editorial for the Times in which he accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of colluding with Donald Trump toward Trump’s re-election, because the two “realize that their interests are aligned — the president’s in winning elections, Mr. Zuckerberg’s in making money.”Yet when it comes to utilizing Facebook as a marketing tool for its own propaganda, the Times is more than willing to pour in money. According to estimates from marketing intelligence platform Pathmatics, the Times spent around $65 million over the course of the last twelve months in Facebook advertising for all of its various promotional campaigns. A review of just three ads promoting the 1619 Project over the course of about two months in Fall 2019 estimates a spend of around $3 million. For three ads. Is it any wonder that the 1619 Project became one of the most talked-about pieces of pseudo-history in American history?... the Times’ crusade to shut down dissenting opinions on Facebook, to avoid scrutiny for its own ad spending, and to overwhelm the system with its own marketing money demonstrates nothing so much as perverse self-interest... many in the news media were unhappy with Facebook’s new transparency effort because they were “seeing their journalism classified as if it were paid partisan advocacy.” Facebook agreed, with the director of product management, Rob Leathern, acknowledging that classifying ads promoting news pieces as “political ads” was “problematic for a number of news organizations.”... The Times promptly used its exemption to press forward the most openly propagandistic project in its history, all without facing any scrutiny or accountability in its marketing practices... The 1619 Project was never news. It was always advocacy — an attempt to undermine Trump’s winning message — Make America Great Again — by rewriting our history in a way that suggests America was founded on the evil of slavery and not the aspiration of the Declaration of Independence, and was therefore never great. Yet, because of the Times’ exemption for its status as a news entity, not a single ad for the 1619 Project — into which it appears to have poured millions in advertising dollars in an election year — is included in Facebook’s political ads archive. As a result, the public does not know precisely how much the Times spent, to whom the project was marketed, or in what states it was promoted — for example, electoral swing states."
Portland Activist Calls for 'Abolition' of the United States - "a protester who identified herself as an “Afro-Indigenous non-binary local organizer” declared that she is advocating for the abolition of “the United States as we know it.” This brief declaration arguably encapsulates the destructive spirit of antifa and the impetus behind the violent riots that have ravaged the streets of Portland... Sinclair’s call to abolish “the United States as we know it” is not just a fluke of one speech she gave in Portland. Last month, she told the Mercury, “I work on abolitionist principles because I know the United States was founded on genocide. I know that there is clearly no respect for the sanctity of human life.” She argued that America’s involvement in foreign countries “is not leadership—it’s imperialism and neocolonialism dressed up in a way to make people forget the genocide.”... Sinclair believes that white “oppression” is so ingrained in the minds and attitudes of supposedly oppressed people that they have to “unlearn” the “colonized thought” of Christianity and the “gender binary” — which is rooted in the scientific binary of biological sex. She seems to believe that certain “cultural expectations” rooted in the “genocide” upon which America was founded have brainwashed her and she needs to unlearn basic truths like the fact that people are male or female... the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) released a horrifying Marxist lesson on whiteness that “deconstructed” various aspects of American and Western culture, including capitalism, science, the nuclear family, and Christianity, as nefarious relics of white supremacy. The lesson also claims that a work ethic, delayed gratification, being polite, and getting to meetings on time are aspects of the “whiteness” culture that must be deconstructed and rejected. To call this “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” would be an understatement. In fact, nefarious teachings like this actually encourage black people to reject basic standards of hard work, delayed gratification, politeness, and timeliness that are essential for getting ahead in a free-market society — or almost any society, for that matter.This experiment in Marxist critical theory also emerges in The New York Times‘s “1619 Project,” which claims that America’s true founding came in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves, rather than in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. According to this theory, every aspect of American society must be examined and uprooted in the interest of “racial justice.”When vandals toppled a statue of George Washington in Portland, they spray-painted “1619” on the statue. When Claremont’s Charles Kesler wrote in The New York Post “Call them the 1619 riots,” the project’s founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, responded (in a since-deleted tweet) that “it would be an honor” to claim responsibility for the destructive riots and the defamation of American Founding Fathers like George Washington.In a November 9, 1995 op-ed, the 1619 Project founder condemned Christopher Columbus as “no different” from Adolf Hitler and demonized the “white race” as the true “savages” and “bloodsuckers.” She went on to describe “white America’s dream” as “colored America’s nightmare.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) expressed a similar sentiment when she called for the “dismantling” of America’s “economy and political system,” in order to root out supposed racist oppression. Yet the “1619 riots” have arguably oppressed black people far more than the U.S. supposedly does. The riots have destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments. At least 22 Americans have died in the riots, most of them black... She has brainwashed herself and she is fighting to destroy a country that has brought an unprecedented degree of freedom and prosperity to its citizens and to the world.After the rally that Lilith Sinclair addressed, rioters launched fireworks and other incendiary devices near the Portland Police Bureau as others walked the streets with katanas. The next day, antifa rioters set fire to the police union and again attacked the federal courthouse and Justice Center. Portland is a war zone, thanks in large part to this noxious critical theory."
Sorry, New York Times, But America Began in 1776 - "1776 has three core goals: (1) rebutting some outright historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project; (2) discussing tragedies like slavery and segregation honestly while clarifying that these were not the most important historical foundations of the United States; and (3) presenting an alternative inspirational view of the lessons of our nation’s history to Americans of all races... Many of the claims made by the 1619 Project, which attempts to link everything from non-socialized medicine to American sugar consumption to historical slavery, are simply not true. Gordon Wood, one of the USA’s leading historians of the Revolutionary War, has been sharply critical of 1619’s best known essay (“America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones), dismissing Hannah-Jones’s claim that the USA seceded from Britain primarily to protect the institution of slavery as factually inaccurate... The eminent historian seems bemused and angered by the decision of the Times to support an arguably questionable scholarly project, saying: “I was surprised by the scope of this thing, [since] it’s going to become the basis for high school education, and has the weight of the New York Times behind it.” Given that the generally reputable Pulitzer Center is already offering a “1619 Project Curriculum” targeted at “all grades,” Dr. Wood’s words of warning ring true. Similarly, John Oakes, Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the City University of New York, has been extremely critical of the 1619 Project’s claim that “anti-Black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” and the project’s explicit attempt to link many Black problems of today (i.e. “mass incarceration”) to historical slavery. As Oakes notes, this is an almost ahistorical view. To people who believe it: “There has been no industrialization. There has been no Great Migration. We’re all in the same boat we were back then.”... quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery. For example, the Black rate of “illegitimate” out-of-wedlock childbirths was 11 percent in 1938, barely 70 years after slavery ended, but today hovers around 74 percent—and the illegitimacy rate today is approximately 35 percent for American whites. The welfare policies of the 1960s frankly have been a greater cause of this multi-colored social issue than racialized oppression 150 years ago. The same could be said of a dozen other issues, from opioid and cocaine abuse to high rates of local incarceration, which seem to bedevil our poor white countrymen roughly as much as blacks, while having little effect on West Indian immigrants who are also almost entirely descended from slaves. A third—at the very least—strategic omission that is consistent throughout almost all the 1619 Project essays is a focus on American slavery in isolation, to the frequent exclusion of both (1) narratives about the successful American anti-slavery movement and (2) narratives about the far harsher slave trades conducted around the globe for most of history. As yet another internationally famous professor, Princeton University’s James McPherson, has pointed out, slavery in the U.S. was not unique, but rather “only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries.” In all likelihood, human beings have been capturing and trading slaves since the first Neolithic battle leaders progressed past simply killing and eating their war captives... it is hardly honest to attribute the unique characteristics of American society to slavery, when essentially all societies had slavery historically and only one became the USA. As the 1776 bossman Bob Woodson has noted, lies and omissions are not effective tools with which to fight racism... Three core elements of my view of slavery—and, I think it is fair to say, 1776’s as well—are: (1) recognizing that an anti-slavery movement led by white and Black people of goodwill existed in this country as long as slavery did, and won in the end; (2) recognizing that slavery did not “build the USA,” but rather made the pre-bellum South into something of a backwater, due largely to the proud if subtle resistance of the slaves themselves; and (3) recognizing that America paid a diverse butcher’s bill of hundreds of thousands of lives, during the Civil War, in order to FREE the slaves... the thesis underlying many 1619 Project essays—and, arguably, most arguments on the identitarian Left—can be summed up as “You do not control your own life.”... If the REAL reason young brothers struggle with the SAT is “the subtle institutional structural racism of the white gaze,” and not the fact that we study a bit less for the exam, then why ever bother to study more?... probably the worst possible predictor of ethical behavior among people, especially young males, is the belief that one is not in charge of one’s own destiny... the upper-middle class black and white protesters promoting amoral po-mo ideas in the hood don’t have to live there: “The activists do not have to stay in the conditions they are causing.” When Black Lives Matter wildly exaggerated the rate of police brutality, and ended up causing a backlash “Ferguson Effect” that claimed 3,000 lives, the movement’s grad-school radicals could return to bucolic college campuses at will. In the meantime, working class residents of Ferguson had little choice but to stay home and watch their neighborhoods burn. Very often, those responsible for promoting hip, new, brave ideas never stick around to watch them fail."
The Real Goals of "The 1619 Project" - "No longer preaching faith in the Constitution or civic brotherhood, the New York Times hopes that—by creating enough hatred for the nation’s founding, its ideals, and for America’s majority group—justice and harmony will somehow emerge. This, anyway, is the idea behind its “1619 Project.”Its lead essay, written by activist Nicole Hannah-Jones, falsifies important parts of American history with a view to engineering this new approach. While it has been roundly debunked by a chorus of renowned academics for gross factual and thematic inaccuracies, its most outlandish claim is that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery. The preeminent historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, points out that he does not know “of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves.” Nor does anyone else. There is no historical record. After months of embarrassing criticism, the Times finally issued a non-apology apology, which it comically calls an “Update.” What looks like a redaction is really a hardening of their original position—for they “still stand behind the basic point.”Had the Times simply admitted its many errors, it could have begun to claw back what remains of its reputation for honest journalism. But it will not retract or apologize.No longer really a newspaper, the Times more and more represents the postmodern age of propaganda; its goals of moral and political transformation, distinct from honest reporting, are barely hidden. And the 1619 Project seems to have at least three such goals.
1. Get Them When They’re Young
For at least a generation, many colleges and universities have taught students that America fundamentally is a white supremacist regime in need of deconstruction. By offering an accompanying school curricula, the 1619 Project explicitly targets middle- and high-schoolers, so far largely untouched by this propaganda. But since the 1619 Project’s publication last August, tens of thousands of students in all 50 states have been taught parts of its curriculum... The overriding lesson is clear: young people must learn to despise their nation—its Constitution, ideals, economic system, and its Founders. They must resent and reject their past; possess an aggressive, contemptuous, and disobedient attitude toward the present; and strive forcefully to create a triumphant future where the enemies of old are punished, and the innocent finally rule. Teaching young people that they have no country, that there is neither God nor justice, but only their own anger to right wrongs leads not to civilized self-rule, but to fanaticism and self-destruction.
2. Hannah-Jones has spoken openly about the project’s second goal: “When my editor asks me, like, what’s your ultimate goal for the project, my ultimate goal is that there’ll be a reparations bill passed.” In other words, as Americans learn to despise their country and their fellow citizens, they should demand a moral buyout, where moral debts are settled in cash. Of course, remaining unanswered is what will happen when neither equality nor moral wholeness emerges as a result of cash transfers?
3. Identity Politics Über Alles
But the real goal of the project, as Hannah-Jones explains, is to get “white people to give up whiteness.” This statement appears opaque at first, but follows the unmistakable logic of identity politics...
America’s liberal elites, represented by and educated in the moral fashions of the Times, are remarkably short-sighted. It is not difficult to see that a new spirit of vengeance created by such “journalism” will lead neither to political stability nor to justice. Nor is it difficult to see why mainstream journalism has rightly fallen out of public favor."
The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones abandon key claims of the 1619 Project - "The New York Times, without announcement or explanation, has abandoned the central claim of the 1619 Project: that 1619, the year the first slaves were brought to Colonial Virginia—and not 1776—was the “true founding” of the United States... According to the New York Times and Hannah-Jones, the fight against slavery and all forms of oppression were struggles that black Americans always waged alone.The Times’ “disappearing,” with a few secret keystrokes, of its central argument, without any explanation or announcement, is a stunning act of intellectual dishonesty and outright fraud... With the aim of creating a new syllabus based on the 1619 Project, hundreds of thousands of copies of the original version of the narrative, as published in the New York Times Magazine, were printed and distributed to schools, museums and libraries all across the United States. A very large number of schools declared that they would align their curricula in accordance with the narrative supplied by the Times. The deletion of the claim that 1619 was the “true founding” came to light this past Friday, September 18. Ms. Hannah-Jones was interviewed on CNN and asked to respond to Donald Trump’s denunciation, from the standpoint of a fascist, of the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones declared that the “true founding” contention was “of course” not true. She went further, making the astonishing, and demonstrably false, claim that the Times had never made such an argument... This is, of course, an outright lie. Hannah-Jones has repeatedly made the “true founding” claim in innumerable Tweets, interviews and lectures. These are attested to in news articles and video clips readily available on the Internet. Her own Twitter account included her image against a backdrop consisting of the year 1619, with the year 1776 crossed out next to it. Ms. Hannah-Jones, caught in one lie, doubles down with new and even bigger lies... If, as Hannah-Jones now claims, all the Times had sought to do was draw more attention to the history of chattel slavery in the years it existed in British North America (1619-1776) and the United States (1776-1865), there would never have been a controversy. Neither the World Socialist Web Site, nor the scholars it interviewed—James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Richard Carwardine, Dolores Janiewski, and Adolph Reed, Jr.—ever disputed the importance of slavery in the historical development of the United States. Tens of thousands of books and scholarly articles have been devoted to the study of slavery and its impact on the historical development of the United States... The WSWS’ rebuttal of the Times provided an account of the emergence of chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere, its central role in the formation of capitalism, and its revolutionary destruction in the Civil War. Hannah-Jones responded to the WSWS intervention by denouncing its writers as “anti-black racists” on Twitter.When Wood, McPherson, Bynum, and Oakes, joined by Sean Wilentz of Princeton, wrote an open letter to the Times last December requesting specific corrections to clear errors of fact, they stressed that their objection was not over whether or not slavery was important. The five historians expressed their dismay “at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein published a haughty and dismissive reply, in which he flatly rejected their criticisms... the Pulitzer Prize given to Hannah-Jones this spring in the field of commentary for her lead essay, in which the false claims about the “true founding” and the American Revolution were made, should be rescinded.The 1619 Project was never about historical clarification. As the WSWS warned in September 2019, the “1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class.” As revealed in a leaked meeting with Times staff, Executive Editor Dean Baquet believed that it would be helpful to the Democratic Party to shift focus after the failed anti-Russia campaign... It was in response to Trump’s attacks that Hannah-Jones appeared on CNN. She noted that Trump is trying “to bring the 1619 Project into the culture wars.” She went on, “He clearly is running on a nationalistic campaign that’s trying to stoke racial divisions, and he sees it as a tool in that arsenal.”True enough. But Hannah-Jones is one of the key “stokers” of racial divisions; and it was the New York Times that brought “the 1619 Project into the culture wars,” viciously attacking all critics of a historical narrative that makes racial hatred the driving force of American history.The falsification of history always serves the interests of reactionary political forces."
The 1619 Project and Uses and Abuses of History - "The Stephens essay deals largely with the press’s proper role and responsibilities. He views the Times’ effort to reframe the narrative of American history and the national conversation over race and to alter classroom teaching as overreach. “The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.”His piece raises a seemingly rhetorical question: Should a deep-pocketed corporation be able to distribute a curriculum to K-12 schools without serious professional vetting?...
Criticisms of the 1619 Project by major historians instead focus on:
Its omissions, including the failure to discuss the dispossession of indigenous homelands and of economic class.
Its racial essentialism, apparent in its failure to take into account the biracial struggle against slavery and discrimination.
Its dismissal of the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality as a sham, and failure to recognize that U.S. history has involved an ongoing, incomplete struggle about whether this country will live up to its founding ideals.
Its lack of nuance, whether about the motives of the American revolutionaries or Abraham Lincoln’s attitudes toward slavery and racial equality.
Its overstatement of slavery’s role in the nation’s wealth accumulation and economic growth.
Its ahistoricism, in minimizing the importance of change and struggle over time."
Twelve Scholars Critique the 1619 Project and the New York Times Magazine Editor Responds - "The 1619 Project offers a historically-limited view of slavery, especially since slavery was not just (or even exclusively) an American malady, and grew up in a larger context of forced labor and race. Moreover, the breadth of 400 years and 300 million people cannot be compressed into single-size interpretations; yet, The 1619 Project asserts that every aspect of American life has only one lens for viewing, that of slavery and its fall-out. “America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One,” insists the lead essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones; “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation,” asserts another by Matthew Desmond. In some cases, history is reduced to metaphor: “How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam.”We are also dismayed by the problematic treatment of major issues and personalities of the Founding and Civil War eras. For instance: The 1619 Project construes slavery as a capitalist venture, yet it fails to note how Southern slaveholders scorned capitalism as “a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, petty operators, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists.”"
The Fatal Flaw of the 1619 Project Curriculum - "That’s not a wise position to take. The radical ideologues promoting Nikole Hannah-Jones’ grotesque view of America aren’t after the mature readers of the Atlantic or the Wall Street Journal. Despite their recent, rapid gains, they’re sticking to the long game they’ve been playing for decades, going after young, impressionable minds. Their method is not to persuade. It is to propagandize.Their method has been working for some forty years. Their patron saint, the late Howard Zinn, aimed his subversive, error-packed People’s History of the United States at teenagers, most of them ill-equipped to see through his irrationality, misuse of sources, and politicized misinterpretations. Indeed Zinn never tried to disguise his aims when addressing mature audiences, to which he said many times that objective truth does not exist and that teaching history is nothing more than a means to advance a political agenda by confecting and presenting interpretations to support it.The simplicity of the radical dialectic—a bipolar world of oppressors and oppressed, without the complexity or confusing contradictions of a more nuanced, realistic, view of the past—appeals to many young people. It also simplifies the task of overburdened teachers faced with the challenge of equipping students to interpret a complex and confusing world... the fact remains that history is complicated and requires patient study, a willingness to weigh and assess confusing, fragmentary, and sometimes contradictory evidence, and the sophistication to understand that historical events and actors are shaped by many factors, of which race, while often important, is only one. Students really ought to be taught to emulate scholars who understand this, rather than to follow a venomous twenty-first-century Madame Defarge intent on reducing American history to a dismal story of racists and their victims. The 1619 Project curriculum is actually worse than the dishonest and deceptive material on which it is based. A mature adult reader of the 1619 Project may be equipped to apply critical reasoning to its claims—particularly Hannah-Jones’ claim that the purpose of the American Revolution was to perpetuate slavery. We cannot reasonably expect middle school and high school students, to whom we ought to be teaching critical reasoning skills, to bring the same kind of skepticism to their reading of works we assign them. The 1619 Project curriculum goes out of its way to avoid a critical reading of Hannah-Jones central claims. It expects student to accept her conclusions about the nature of American history and culture without critical inquiry and asks them to regard the world around them from Hannah-Jones’ perspective, rather than treat Hannah-Jones as one of many interpreters, much less recognize her as a journalist with no credentials or standing as an historian. The premise of the curriculum is that Nikole Hannah-Jones has discovered a fundamental truth about American history that has eluded the historical profession: that the central, defining feature of American history and culture is racism. The exercises that make up this curriculum are all based on this premise.None of those exercises invite students to challenge the premise. Every exercise involves asking students a loaded question—a question that presupposes the relevant facts and serves the questioner’s agenda. The effect is the same as asking an innocent man if he has stopped beating his wife. The only sensible response is to dispute the premise by saying “I have never beaten my wife.” But students are rarely welcome to dispute the premise of their teachers’ questions. Indeed in the current cultural climate, a student brave enough to challenge the Hannah-Jones premise is quite likely to be accused of being a racist—the fastest route to such a charge at this time being to challenge the thesis that something called “systemic racism” is the defining characteristic of American history and culture. The truth of this thesis has quite suddenly become an article of faith, not subject to scrutiny or consideration using the traditional canons of evidence. The Pulitzer Center’s curriculum is not a tool for intellectual exploration or discovery. It is a catechism... A student who suggested we rely on James McPherson’s view of Lincoln, elaborated in collected works spread over nearly sixty years of patient scholarship, instead of the view of Nicole Hannah-Jones, whose collected works on Lincoln fill a few skimpy paragraphs, risks being labeled a racist by the new inquisition. The 1619 Project curriculum does not admit the possibility that “other resources from which you have learned about U.S. history”—the collected works of James McPherson, perhaps—could be right and the 1619 Project wrong. That would be heresy. The whole dismal exercise bears comparison with the work of a German pedagogue of the 1930s, Werner May, whose German National Catechism asked leading questions in the same style: “How has the Jew subjugated the peoples?” The answer: “With Money . . .Thousands and thousands of Germans have been made wretched by the Jews and been reduced to poverty.” And another: “What other guilt does the Jew bear?” The answer: “While the German people was fighting a life and death battle during the World War, the Jew incited people at home and seduced them into treason. . . . He corrupted Germans through bad books . . . Everywhere, his influence was destructive.” The cost to a young German of challenging the premise of these questions was high, and few students dared. Most, of course, dutifully repeated the dogmas as they were told to do."
