As someone who has been reading about history since I finished my first “Dick and Jane” book,
Dick and Jane Series
and growing up with a PAPA that served in World War I and bought us history books like the Time-Life “This Fabulous Century” and other history books and “National Geographic” and “Readers Digest”. Papa loved to have me read to him. We read a lot!
This Fabulous Century – Full Set (8 Volume Set) Hardcover – January 1, 1970
I have been wondering why all of the vitriol aimed at the New York Times “1619 Project”? There have been a lot of history books, documentaries and other products produced over the years, and I am hard-pressed to think of any other one attacked with as much fervor as this one. I made the following tweet pondering that,
A college professor and a 1619 Project critic somehow found outrage in my tweet (I am not outraged, just pondering)?
I never mentioned Oakes criticism of the project. I made the assumption he read it. LOL! If you look at the thread of this tweet some of us have a civil and lively discussion. Someone sent me a link to a review that has a lot in common with Oakes’ commentary (I don’t have access to Oakes’ because it is behind a paywall) and asked me what I thought of it. I promised him I would annotated it. I love to annotate!
Here is the link he sent me:
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history
Let me get started with some chronology (being someone that loves history). Look at the date.
“Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, David North 6 September 2019″
September 1, 2020 – when CRT enters the FOXNews Lexicon
Chris Rufo calls on Trump to end critical race theory ‘cult indoctrination’ in federal government
“‘Critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government,’ Rufo tells Fox News”
Trump tweets about Critical Race Theory for the first time on September 5, 2019
And this critique comes out on
“Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, David North 6 September 2019″
Why did it take a calendar year for Rufo and Trump to address the “1619 Project”? Maybe because of the current events of September of 2020? A presidential campaign and BLM protests?
Why are conservatives throwing a tantrum about anti-racism? The George Floyd protests.
On to the annotation, I will use quotes for critique and I will use standard text for my annotations.
““The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history entirely through the prism of race and racial conflict. The occasion for this publication is the 400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Point Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America. On the very next day, the slaves were traded for food.”
You can read it free here,
https://archive.org/details/1619project/full_issue_of_the_1619_project/page/n0/mode/2up
“The Project, according to the Times, intends to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.””
Part of the contention of many critics is when was our “true founding”? Some point to Christopher Columbus, even though he never touched U.S. soil. He did start the Columbian Exchange. It IS named after him 🙂 Others say the Vikings beat Columbus by 471 years. Others argue that the original Native Americans ‘discovered’ the U.S. when they made the long journey from Asia. I have made the argument since I was in elementary school that our “true founding’ is NOT July 4th, 1776, but June 21st, 1788,
U.S. Constitution ratified
“New Hampshire becomes the ninth and last necessary state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, thereby making the document the law of the land.”
when we went from being 13 sovereign nations to 1 United States.
“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.”
This passage has nothing to do with historical accuracy or the contents of the project. This is a politically-motivated attack. As we go along, we will look for when the project (1) lies about history or (2) discusses gender, (3) sexual preference or (4) ethnicity. If miss any of these in these annotations, please tweet me at https://twitter.com/david4potus2020.
“The Times is promoting the Project with an unprecedented and lavishly financed publicity blitz. It is working with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has developed a proposed teaching curriculum that will be sent to schools for teachers to use in their classes. Hundreds of thousands of extra copies of the magazine and a special supplement have been printed for free distribution at schools, libraries and museums across the country. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the staff writer and New America Foundation fellow who first pitched the idea for the Project, oversaw its production and authored the introduction, will be sent on a national lecture tour of schools.”
How is this any of the above a bad thing? Actors do the late-night shows rotation. Authors do book tours.
“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 word “hatred” appears one (1) time in the “1619 Project”:
“Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that
continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.”
“hatreds that continue to plague it to this day”
AMA: Racism is a threat to public health
“Get Out”: Black Families Harassed in Their Own Homes
Torrance police traded racist, homophobic texts. It could jeopardize hundreds of cases
“This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development. The transfer of this critical biological term to the study of a country—even if meant only in a metaphorical sense—leads to bad history and reactionary politics. Countries do not have DNA, they have historically formed economic structures, antagonistic classes and complex political relationships. These do not exist apart from a certain level of technological development, nor independently of a more or less developed network of global economic interconnections.”
Every country has a DNA. I lived in The Netherland for 2 1/2 years. That country’s DNA is kindness and tolerance. Wooden shoes. Delft pottery. Windmills. Another word for the DNA of a country is its Culture. DNA/Culture derives from History. The French DNA, Citroens and Wine. German DNA, BMWs, Mercedes Benz, Porsche and Beer. Australian DNA, Koala Bears, Crocodiles, Kangaroos and Beer.
“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.
Some nice word-salad here. Hannah-Jones does not state that current Americans (the people” have racism in their DNA). The word “racism” appears 10 times. The first passage is in the Editor’s Note by Jake Silverstein:
1) “Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required”
How is that sentence wrong? Irrational?
The next two occurrences are in the opening article by Nikole Hannah-Jones:
2) “The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a ‘‘slave’’ race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the ‘‘Negro race,’’ the court ruled, was “‘‘a separate class of persons,’’ which the founders had ‘‘not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government’’ and had ‘‘no rights which a white man was bound to respect.’’ This belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the ‘‘we’’ in the ‘‘We the People’’ was not a lie.”
Dred Scott Decision: The Case and Its Impact
Opinion of the Court
Mr. Chief Justice TANEY delivered the opinion of the court.
“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.”
“inferior class”
“The words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizens’ are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the ‘sovereign people,’ and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate [60 U.S. 393, 405] and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.”
“No one of that race had ever migrated to the United States voluntarily; all of them had been brought here as articles of merchandise. The number that had been emancipated at that time were but few in comparison with those held in slavery; and they were identified in the public mind with the race to which they belonged, and regarded as a part of the slave population rather than the free. It is obvious that they were not [60 U.S. 393, 412] even in the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they were conferring special rights and privileges upon the citizens of a State in every other part of the Union.
Indeed, when we look to the condition of this race in the several States at the time, it is impossible to believe that these rights and privileges were intended to be extended to them.
“It is very true, that in that portion of the Union where the labor of the negro race was found to be unsuited to the climate and unprofitable to the master, but few slaves were held at the time of the Declaration of Independence; and when the Constitution was adopted, it had entirely worn out in one of them, and measures had been taken for its gradual abolition in several others. But this change had not been produced by any change of opinion in relation to this race; but because it was discovered, from experience, that slave labor was unsuited to the climate and productions of these States: for some of the States, where it had ceased or nearly ceased to exist, were actively engaged in the slave trade, procuring cargoes on the coast of Africa, and transporting them for sale to those parts of the Union where their labor was found to be profitable, and suited to the climate and productions. And this traffic was openly carried on, and fortunes accumulated by it, without reproach from the people of the States where they resided. And it can hardly be supposed that, in the States where it was then countenanced in its worst form-that is, in the seizure and transportation-the people could have regarded those who were emancipated as entitled to equal rights with themselves.“
3) “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.”
The Great Betrayal
Compromise of 1877
Those two passages are not the work of an “irrationalist”.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irrationalism
“Definition of irrationalism
1: a system emphasizing intuition, instinct, feeling, or faith rather than reason or holding that the universe is governed by irrational forces
2: the quality or state of being irrational
4) The next time “racism” appears is in “Fabric of Modernity: How Southern cotton became the cornerstone of a new global commodities trade” By Mehrsa Baradaran
“There is some comfort, I think, in attributing the sheer brutality of slavery to dumb racism. We imagine pain being inflicted somewhat at random, doled out by the stereotypical white overseer, free but poor. But a good many overseers weren’t allowed to whip at will. Punishments were authorized by the higher-ups. It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner but the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design. ‘‘Each individual having a stated number of pounds of cotton to pick,’’ a formerly enslaved worker, Henry Watson, wrote in 1848, ‘‘the deficit of which was made up by as many lashes being applied to the poor slave’s back.’’ Because overseers closely monitored enslaved workers’ picking abilities, they assigned each worker a unique quota. Falling short of that quota could get you beaten, but overshooting your target could bring misery the next day, because the master might respond by raising your picking rate.” How is this irrational?
5) The next time “racism” occurs is in “A traffic jam in Atlanta would seem to have nothing to do with slavery. But look closer. …” by Kevin M. Kruse.
“Even as the suburbs became more racially diverse, they remained opposed to MARTA. After Gwinnett voted the system down again in 1990, a former Republican legislator later marveled at the arguments given by opponents. ‘‘They will come up with 12 different ways of saying they are not racist in public,’’ he told a reporter. ‘‘But you get them alone, behind a closed door, and you see this old blatant racism that we have had here for quite some time.’’” How is this irrational?
6) The next time “racism” appears is in “Myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery — and are still believed by doctors today.” by Linda Villarosa.
“This disconnect allows scientists, doctors and other medical providers — and those training to fill their positions in the future — to ignore their own complicity in health care inequality and gloss over the internalized racism and both conscious and unconscious bias that drive them to go against their very oath to do no harm.”
Too Many Doctors Still Believe Dangerous Racial Stereotypes
“In a 2016 study from the University of Virginia, a team of psychologists examined doctors’ and nurses’ beliefs about biological differences between races, and explored how those false assumptions contributed to the systematic under-prescription of pain medication to black patients. For the first part of the experiment, the researchers, led by Kelly Hoffman, asked 121 white Americans — without any medical background — to assess a series of false statements about how members of different races responded to pain. Most of them — about 73 percent — endorsed at least one myth. Thirty-nine percent believed that black people’s blood coagulated faster than white people’s; 20 percent said that black people’s nerve endings were less sensitive than whites’; 58 percent believed that blacks had thicker skin.“
How is this irrational?
7) The next three times we see the word “racism” is in “For centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. No wonder everybody is always stealing it.” By Wesley Morris
“In 1830, Rice was a nobody actor in his early 20s, touring with a theater company in Cincinnati (or Louisville; historians don’t know for sure), when, the story goes, he saw a decrepit, possibly disfigured old black man singing while grooming a horse on the property of a white man whose last name was Crow. On went the light bulb. Rice took in the tune and the movements but failed, it seems, to take down the old man’s name. So in his song based on the horse groomer, he renamed him: ‘‘Weel about and turn about jus so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.’’ And just like that, Rice had invented the fellow who would become the mascot for two centuries of legalized racism.”
Thomas Dartmouth Rice
“Thomas Dartmouth Rice, bynames Jim Crow Rice and Daddy Rice, (born May 20, 1808, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 19, 1860, New York City), American actor regarded as the father of the minstrel show.
Rice was an itinerant actor until his song and dance Jump Jim Crow, first presented in Louisville in 1828, caught the public fancy and made him one of the most popular specialty performers of his day. Although he was not the first white entertainer to perform in blackface, Rice created a vogue for impersonating African Americans in both the United States and England through a series of extremely successful tours. He wrote and appeared in Ginger Blue, Jim Crow in London, and a burlesque of Othello. These engendered the stereotypes for the skits in the popular minstrel shows that evolved in the 1840s, primarily as a result of Rice’s success.”
8) “What blackface minstrelsy gave the country during this period was
an entertainment of skill, ribaldry and polemics. But it also lent racism a stage upon which existential fear could become jubilation, contempt could become fantasy. Paradoxically, its dehumanizing bent let white audiences feel more human. They could experience loathing as desire, contempt as adoration, repulsion as lust. They could weep for overworked Uncle Ned as surely as they could ignore his lashed back or his body as it swung from a tree.”
9) “The proliferation of black music across the planet — the proliferation, in so many senses, of being black — constitutes a magnificent joke on American racism. It also confirms the attraction that someone like Rice had to that black man grooming the horse. But something about that desire warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving black culture has never meant loving black people, too. Loving black culture risks loving the life out of it.“
How ‘Race Records’ Turned Black Music Into Big Business
How is this irrational?
The last time we see the word “racism” is in the List of Contributors
10) “Eve L. Ewing (Page 42) is the author of ‘‘1919,’’ the ‘‘Ironheart’’ series, ‘‘Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side’’ and ‘‘Electric Arches.’’ She is from Chicago””
Whew! That was a lot to cover from one paragraph of criticism! Did you find anything I found to be irrational? I used some pretty good sources. I was taught how to do research in an awesome “Historian’s Craft” class with a great professor and some amazing fellow students. Let’s go the the next paragraph,
“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.””
No link to the essay? No citation of the exact passage that contains “intrinsic difference”? Some might argue that the GOP sees “intrinsic difference” in their recent rush to change voting laws,
for example,
Georgia Republicans purge Black Democrats from county election boards
“The unusual rash of restructurings follows the state’s passage of Senate Bill 202, which restricted ballot access statewide and allowed the Republican-controlled State Election Board to assume control of county boards it deems underperforming. The board immediately launched a performance review of the Democratic-leaning Fulton County board, which oversees part of Atlanta.
The Georgia restructurings are part of a national Republican effort to expand control over election administration in the wake of Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. Republican-led states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona have enacted new curbs on voter access this year. Backers of Trump’s false stolen-election claims are running campaigns for secretary of state – the top election official – in battleground states. And some Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to eliminate the state’s bipartisan election commission and threatening its members with prosecution.”
I don’t have a subscription to “Foreign Affairs” but I found this,
Stacey Abrams’s new essay on identity politics reveals why she’s a rising star
We are about to see the word “fascism”,
“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.”
No one is making the argument that all blacks and all whites are hostile to each other. The argument being made is our country’s history has been shaped and influenced by racism. I know that there was not a lot of diversity in Donald Trump’s Administration,
Trump’s cabinet is mostly white and male. What will that mean for policy?
Interns,
Trump White House Facing Criticism over Lack of Diversity in Intern Program
and Judges,
White, male and conservative: Trump’s damaging legal legacy
I grew up in Alabama in the 1960s. I saw hate. I learned to hate hate.
Being opposed to voting laws that suppress the vote of black men and women is not irrational. It IS reactionary, just as it was in 1965.
“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. Extrapolating from bloody territorial conflicts between chimpanzees, with whom humans “share more than 98 percent of their DNA,” Sapolsky asserts that understanding “the dynamics of human group identity, including the resurgence of nationalism—that potentially most destructive form of in-group bias—requires grasping the biological and cognitive underpinnings that shape them.””
Here is a HUGE hint this is nothing more than a “Hit Piece”. What does Stacey Abrams and Robert Sapolsky have to do with the “1619 Project”? Have we seen (1) lies about history or (2) discusses gender, (3) sexual preference or (4) ethnicity yet?
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.
Again, nothing to do with “1619 Project”
“Dangerous and reactionary ideas are wafting about in bourgeois academic and political circles. No doubt, the authors of the Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided arguments.”
Talking about being irrational! I have yet to see one (1) false or one (1) misguided argument pointed out by the authors of this review. They have yet to point to a factual error.
“American slavery is a monumental subject with vast and enduring historical and political significance. The events of 1619 are part of that history. But what occurred at Port Comfort is one episode in the global history of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world, and of the origins and development of the world capitalist system. 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.”[1]”
True, and a great example of “Whataboutism”.
“Historian Rudolph T. Ware III of the University of Michigan writes, “Between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, millions lived and died as slaves in African Muslim societies.”[2] Among the most important of contemporary scholarly works on the subject is Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, originally published in 1983, by the Canadian historian Paul E. Lovejoy. He explained:”
“Slavery has been an important phenomenon throughout history. It has been found in many places, from classical antiquity to very recent times. Africa has been intimately connected with this history, both as a major source of slaves for ancient civilizations, the Islamic world, India, and the Americas, and as one of the principal areas where slavery was common. Indeed, in Africa slavery lasted well into the twentieth century—notably longer than in the Americas. Such antiquity and persistence requires explanation, both to understand the historical development of slavery in Africa and to evaluate the relative importance of the slave trade to this development. Broadly speaking, slavery expanded in at least three stages—1350 to 1600, 1600 to 1800, and 1800 to 1900—by which time slavery had become a fundamental feature of the African political economy.[3]”
So the argument here seems to be “others enslaved people, so what we didn’t wasn’t all that different or all that bad, it isn’t like we INVENTED slavery!” The person being enslaved does not care about the history of slavery.
“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.” [4]”
Slavery occurs in The Bible,
What does the Bible say about slavery?
We are getting a map!
and a Karl Marx reference! (This review IS on a Socialist site).
“In relation to the New World, the phenomenon of slavery in modern history cannot be understood apart from its role in the economic development of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Karl Marx explained in the chapter titled “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” in Volume One of Das Kapital:
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.”
So more examples of others practicing slavery. How is that relevant to the “1619 Project”?
“Marx’s analysis inspired the critical insight of the brilliant West Indian historian Eric Williams, who wrote in his pioneering study Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944 :”
“Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”
Even more examples of others practicing slavery. Again, how is that relevant to the “1619 Project”?
“The formation and development of the United States cannot be understood apart from the international economic and political processes that gave rise to capitalism and the New World. Slavery was an international economic institution that stretched from the heart of Africa to the shipyards of Britain, the banking houses of Amsterdam, and the plantations of South Carolina, Brazil and the Caribbean. Every colonial power was involved, from the Dutch who operated slave trading posts in West Africa, to the Portuguese who imported millions of slaves to Brazil. An estimated 15 to 20 million Africans were forcibly sent to the Americas throughout the entire period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of these, 400,000 ended up in the 13 British colonies/United States.”
Where in the “1619 Project” is the argument that none of the above is true? This is the classic “everyone else was doing it, so why was it so bad that we did it?” argument.
“Slavery was the inescapable and politically tragic legacy of the global foundation of the United States. It is not difficult to recognize the contradiction between the ideals proclaimed by the leaders of the American Revolution—which were expressed with extraordinary force by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—and the existence of slavery in the newly formed United States.”
Sounds like the writer questions “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nikole Hannah-Jones typed “In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: ‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”
“But 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.”
The United States Holocaust Museum may argue that history IS a morality tale. https://www.ushmm.org/
The https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum twitter feed might argue that history is a morality tale. The hypocrisy of Jefferson and others will become more apparent when the U.S. Constitution is written in 1787. No one is discrediting the American Revolution. The only mention of the America Revolution in “1619 Project” is:
“The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.”
Crispus Attucks
This passage has been singled out as an historical error,
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones has addressed this and has revised this in the “1619 Project” Book.
The New York Times Revises The 1619 Project, Barely
“We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists. A note has been appended to the story as well.”
“The analysis provided by Williams refutes the scurrilous attempt by the 1619 Project to portray the Revolution as a sinister attempt to uphold the slave system. Apart from the massive political impact of Jefferson’s Declaration and the subsequent overthrow of British rule, Williams stressed the objective impact of the Revolution on the economic viability of slavery. He wrote:
“”When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…” Jefferson wrote only part of the truth. It was economic, not political, bands that were being dissolved. A new age had begun. The year 1776 marked the Declaration of Independence and the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Far from accentuating the value of the sugar islands [in the Caribbean], American independence marked the beginning of their uninterrupted decline, and it was a current saying at the time that the British ministry had lost not only thirteen colonies but eight islands as well.”
As I noted above, Hannah-Jones has already addressed this.
“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.”
Speaking of William Wilberforce,
Fact Checking the 1619 Project and Its Critics
“1. Was the American Revolution fought in defense of slavery?
One of the most hotly contested claims of the 1619 Project appears in its introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who writes “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
After more than a decade of failed attempts Fox eventually persevered, steering a bill that allowed the slave trade ban through the House of Commons as one of his final acts before he died in 1806. It would take another generation for Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, invested in a decades-long public campaign that highlighted the horrors of the institution and assisted by a large slave uprising in Jamaica, before a full Slavery Abolition Act would clear Parliament in 1833.
The Verdict: The historians have a clear upper hand in disputing the portrayal of the American Revolution as an attempt to protect slavery from British-instigated abolitionism. Britain itself remained several decades away from abolition at the time of the revolution. Hannah-Jones’s argument nonetheless contains kernels of truth that complicate the historians’ assessment, without overturning it. Included among these are instances where Britain was involved in the emancipation of slaves during the course of the war. These events must also be balanced against the fact that American independence created new opportunities for the northern states to abolish slavery within their borders. In the end, slavery’s relationship with the American Revolution was fraught with complexities that cut across the political dimensions of both sides.“
“In examining the emergence of British opposition to the slave trade, Williams made a fundamental point about the study of history that serves as an indictment of the subjective and anti-historical method employed by the 1619 Project. He wrote:”
“The decisive forces in the period of history we have discussed are the developing economic forces. These economic changes are gradual, imperceptible, but they have an irresistible cumulative effect. Men, pursuing their interests, are rarely aware of the ultimate results of their activity. The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless.”
See “The Verdict” above.
“The victory of the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States did not solve the problem of slavery. The economic and political conditions for its abolition had not sufficiently matured. But the economic development of the United States—the simultaneous development of industry in the North and the noxious growth of the cotton-based plantation system in the South (as a consequence of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793)—intensified the contradictions between two increasingly incompatible economic systems—one based on wage labor and the other on slavery.
It sounds like the critics agree with the “1619 Project” on this,
“Cotton was to the 19th century what oil was to the 20th: among the world’s most widely traded
commodities. Cotton is everywhere, in our clothes, hospitals, soap. Before the industrialization of cotton, people wore expensive clothes made of wool or linen and dressed their beds in furs or straw. Whoever mastered cotton could make a killing. But cotton needed land. A field could only
tolerate a few straight years of the crop before its soil became depleted. Planters watched as acres that had initially produced 1,000 pounds of cotton yielded only 400 a few seasons later. The thirst for new farmland grew even more intense after the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s. Before the gin, enslaved workers grew more cotton than they could clean. The gin broke the bottleneck, making it possible to clean as much cotton as you could grow“
“The United States heaved from crisis to crisis in the seven decades that separated the adoption of the Constitution and the election of President George Washington in 1789 from Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. None of the repeated compromises which sought to balance the country between slave and free states, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, were ever able to finally settle the issue.”
The 1619 Project does not argue against this.
“It is worth bearing in mind that the 87 years of history invoked by Lincoln when he spoke at Gettysburg in 1863 is the same span of time that separates our present day from the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. The explosive socio-economic tendencies which would do away with the entire economic system of slavery developed and erupted in this relatively concentrated period of time.”
Socio-economic tendencies? What about South Carolina and others NOT wanting to change those socio-economic tendencies? Letter of Secession?
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
People DIED to change those socio-economic tendencies.
“The founding of the United States set into motion a crisis which resulted in the Civil War, the second American Revolution, in which hundreds of thousands of whites gave their lives to finally put an end to slavery. It must be stressed that this was not an accidental, let alone unconscious, outcome of the Civil War. In the end, the war resulted in the greatest expropriation of private property in world history, not equaled until the Russian Revolution in 1917, when the working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, took state power for the first and so far, only time in world history.”
So the writers agree that people died to change those socio-economic tendencies.
“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.”
Let’s revisit Fact Checking the 1619 Project and Its Critics
“2. Was Abraham Lincoln a racial colonizationist or exaggerated egalitarian?
2. Was Abraham Lincoln a racial colonizationist or exaggerated egalitarian?
In her lead essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones pointed to several complexities in the political beliefs of Abraham Lincoln to argue that his reputation as a racial egalitarian has been exaggerated. She points specifically to Lincoln’s longstanding support for the colonization of freed slaves abroad as a corollary feature of ending slavery, including a notorious August 1862 meeting at the White House in which the president pressed this scheme upon a delegation of free African-Americans.
Elsewhere she points to grating remarks by Lincoln that questioned the possibility of attaining racial equality in the United States, and to his tepid reactions to the proposition of black citizenship at the end of the Civil War. Hannah-Jones’s final assessment is not unduly harsh, but it does dampen some of the “Great Emancipator” mythology of popular perception while also questioning the extent to which Lincoln can be viewed as a philosophical egalitarian, as distinct from an anti-slavery man.
The Verdict: Nikole Hannah-Jones has the clear upper hand here. Her call to evaluate Lincoln’s record through problematic racial policies such as colonization reflects greater historical nuance and closer attention to the evidentiary record, including new developments in Lincoln scholarship. The historians’ counterarguments reflect a combination of outdated evidence and the construction of apocryphal exonerative narratives such as the lullaby thesis around colonization.
“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.”
Those soldiers died to reunite the country, not to bring democracy to blacks. How do we know that? The Civil Rights Movement. 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“Likewise, the interracial character of the abolitionist movement is blotted out. The names William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Elijah Lovejoy, John Brown, Thaddeus Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, do not appear in her essay. A couple of abolitionists are selectively quoted for their criticism of the Constitution, but 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.””
Other than the argument over slavery and the American Revolution, the writers have not provide any historical lies, so new they are bringing up omissions. If I write a paper on the greatest Chicago Cubs of All Time, no matter how many I mention, someone will point out someone I left out.
“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.” [5] [emphasis added]”
3/5ths Compromise. Slave Trade Commerce Compromise. Fugitive Slave Laws. Dred Scott decision. Plessy v Ferguson. Redlining.
“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.”
Again, no specific errors cited. No citation of a specific passage.
“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.”
Are the writers saying that pointing out racism is a problem, that the lessons should be America’s economic, political and social history instead? There has been an attempt to do this in textbooks for years. Don’t teach the Trail of Tears or Slavery.
“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.”
Class Struggle?
How did the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism help Black families? Where do mention the rise and fall of Black political participation post-Civil War to the Great Betrayal?
Black Leaders During Reconstruction
America’s Only Successful Coup d’Etat Overthrew a Biracial Government in 1898
“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.”
Spoken like a true Marxist Socialist. Any wage and a choice of how to live and were to live and work is far more superior to slavery. It would take the 1964 Civil Rights Act to make sure all have the same access to said wage labor.
“A reader of the 1619 Project would not know that the struggle against slave labor gave way to a violent struggle against wage slavery, in which countless workers were killed. There is no reference to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 which spread like wildfire along the railways from Baltimore to St. Louis and was only suppressed by the deployment of federal troops, nor to the emergence of the Knights of Labor, the fight for the eight-hour day and the Haymarket Massacre, the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, the Pullman strike of 1894, the formation of the AFL, the founding of the Socialist Party, the emergence of the IWW, the Ludlow Massacre, the Great Steel Strike of 1919, the countless other labor struggles that followed World War I, and finally the emergence of the CIO and the massive industrial struggles of the 1930s.”
How do any of the events you mention have anything to do with race?
Great Railroad Strike of 1877? The Year of the Great Betrayal?
Haymarket Massacre of 1886? What about
Seattle’s Anti-Chinese Race Riot—February 7, 1886: The Day Seattle Imploded
The Carroll County Courthouse Massacre, 1886: A Cold Case File
Homestead Steel Strike of 1892? What about
Henry and Ephraim Grizzard
“Several thousand people on the square were present when the mob emerged from the jail with Mr. Grizzard and most cheered at the spectacle of the triumphant mob with Mr. Grizzard dressed as a woman. Mr. Grizzard endured taunts, slaps and was even reportedly stabbed in the back with a pocketknife while the mob escorted him to the Woodland Street Bridge to be hanged.
At the halfway point across the bridge on the downriver side, a noose was formed from a ¾ inch thick hemp rope and Mr. Grizzard was gruesomely hanged and his body riddled with gunshot from a distance of about 18 inches where ~100 men stood above the hanging body. The mob reported violently jerked the lifeless body of Mr. Grizzard several times by the rope before leaving it to hang, bloodied and half nude from the waist down, for the remainder of the afternoon. The banner reported “The whole incident took about 15 minutes, and at no time were the police able to withstand the heavy rush of the mob”. By 3:30pm, a “large crowd of curious people were morbidly looking at the horrible spectacle” before it was removed.
Issues of the Nashville Banner from the days immediately following this report are missing from the archive at the Nashville Public library.”
Pullman strike of 1894?
Your photo of Pullman workers walking off the job looks like the diversity at a Donald Trump Rally
“Great Steel Strike of 1919, the countless other labor struggles that followed World War I” What about this?
Hundreds of black Americans were killed during ‘Red Summer.’ A century later, still ignored
Charleston “Race Riot” of 1919, 305 King Street
The Red Summer of 1919
Elaine Massacre of 1919
“The Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States. While its deepest roots lay in the state’s commitment to white supremacy, the events in Elaine (Phillips County) stemmed from tense race relations and growing concerns about labor unions. A shooting incident that occurred at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union escalated into mob violence on the part of the white people in Elaine and surrounding areas. Although the exact number is unknown, estimates of the number of African Americans killed by whites range into the hundreds; five white people lost their lives.
The conflict began on the night of September 30, 1919, when approximately 100 African Americans, mostly sharecroppers on the plantations of white landowners, attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a church in Hoop Spur (Phillips County), three miles north of Elaine. The purpose of the meeting, one of several by black sharecroppers in the Elaine area during the previous months, was to obtain better payments for their cotton crops from the white plantation owners who dominated the area during the Jim Crow era. Black sharecroppers were often exploited in their efforts to collect payment for their cotton crops. The union had contracted with lawyer Ulysses S. Bratton, whose son, Ocier, was at this meeting.”
“massive industrial struggles of the 1930s“
How 1930s Discrimination Shaped Inequality In Today’s Cities
“Three out of four neighborhoods marked “hazardous” by a federal agency 80 years ago are still struggling economically, a new study shows.
The study, by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, shows that racial and economic segregation of neighborhoods in cities today reflect discrimination entrenched in local housing markets in the 1930s.”
“In short, there is no class struggle and, therefore, there is no real history of the African-American population and the events which shaped a population of freed slaves into a critical section of the working class. 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.”
A class struggle and a race struggle. Red Summers. Redlining. Jim Crow Laws. Segregation. Discrimination in the work place. Farmers losing their farms.
“Nowhere do any of the authors discuss the Great Migration between 1916 and 1970 in which millions of blacks, and whites, uprooted from the rural South and flocked to take jobs in urban areas across the US, particularly in the industrialized North. James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, captured the revolutionary implications of this process, for both African-American and white workers, in his inimitable prose:”
“American capitalism took hundreds of thousands of Negroes from the South, and exploiting their ignorance, and their poverty, and their fears, and their individual helplessness, herded them into the steel mills as strikebreakers in the steel strike of 1919. And in the brief space of one generation, by its mistreatment, abuse and exploitation of these innocent and ignorant Negro strikebreakers, this same capitalism succeeded in transforming them and their sons into one of the most militant and reliable detachments of the great victorious steel strike of 1946.
This same capitalism took tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of prejudiced hillbillies from the South, many of them members and sympathizers of the Ku Klux Klan; and thinking to use them, with their ignorance and their prejudices, as a barrier against unionism, sucked them into the auto and rubber factories of Detroit, Akron and other industrial centers. There it sweated them, humiliated them and drove and exploited them until it finally changed them and made new men out of them. In that harsh school the imported southerners learned to exchange the insignia of the KKK for the union button of the CIO, and to turn the Klansman’s fiery cross into a bonfire to warm pickets at the factory gate. [6]”
When do you mention the Red Summers?
Red Summer: When Racist Mobs Ruled
“The massacres and lynchings that occurred during “Red Summer,” a term used to describe the blood that flowed in the streets of America, were sparked by disparate events, but the common denominator was racial hatred against a people who had recently risen out of enslavement and prospered.”
“As late as 1910, nearly 90 percent of African-Americans lived in the former slave states, overwhelmingly in conditions of rural isolation. By the 1970s, they were highly urbanized and proletarianized. Black workers had gone through the experiences of the great industrial strikes, alongside whites, in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Chicago. It is no historical accident that the civil rights movement emerged in the South in Birmingham, Alabama, a center of the steel industry and the locus of the actions of communist workers, black and white.”
Talking about not knowing your US History and the Civil Rights Movement! The Civil Rights Movement didn’t emerge in Birmingham, Alabama! It emerged because of two events. Brown v Board of Education in 1954 and the Murder of Emmett Till in 1955. It emerged in Little Rock, Arkansas and Montgomery, Alabama and Clinton, Tennessee, and Parchman Prison in Mississippi, Selma, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee. It is amazing how you got “communist” in there since a lot of people accused the Civil Rights Movement of being a Communistic Plot. It emerged again on the 8th anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder with Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington and Birmingham was called Bombingham long before the sad 1963 Church Bombing soon after that March On Washington.
“The struggle of wage labor against capital at the point of production united workers across racial boundaries. And so, in the fevered rhetoric of the Jim Crow politician, the civil rights movement was equated with communism and the fear of “race-mixing”—that is, that the working masses, black and white, might be united around their common interests.”
Nothing in this paragraph is remotely true. MLK’s March was a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom “By 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, most of the goals of these earlier protests still had not been realized. High levels of black unemployment, work that offered most African Americans only minimal wages and poor job mobility, systematic disenfranchisement of many African Americans, and the persistence of racial segregation in the South prompted discussions about a large scale march for political and economic justice as early as 1962.” MLK’s “I Have A Dream” Speech was about lack of jobs (not the same complaint whites had of wages and benefits) and poverty and segregation and racism.
Freedom’s Ring
King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech
“Just as it leaves out the history of the working class, the 1619 Project fails to provide political history. There is no accounting of the role played by the Democratic Party, an alliance of Northern industrialists and machine politicians, on one side, and the Southern slavocracy and then Jim Crow politicians, in consciously pitting white and black workers against each other by stoking up race hatred.”
Talking about twisting history! A passage from “1619 Project”,
“Anti-lynching laws and some pro-labor legislation died at the hands of lawmakers from the ‘‘Solid South’’ who took advantage of Senate rules like the filibuster to effectively enact Calhoun’s idea of a concurrent majority against legislation that threatened the Southern racial status quo; the spirit of nullification lived on. When Northern liberal Democrats added a civil rights plank to the party platform at the 1948 presidential convention, in an effort to break the Southern conservatives’ hold on the party, 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out in protest: the prologue to the ‘‘Dixiecrat Revolt’’ that began the conservative migration into the eventual embrace of the Republican Party.
When do mention Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”? Reagan’s visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi? You are talking about the Dixiecrats of George Wallace (“Segregation Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever!”)
George Wallace won 13% of the votes in 1968 (1 out of 8 Americans nationwide voted for “States Rights”) and was the last Third Party candidate to win states Electoral College votes.
1968 Presidential Election Interactive Map
I hope you are not a Dinesh D’Souza fan!
“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. King did not condemn the American Revolution and the Civil War. He did not believe that racism was a permanent characteristic of “whiteness.” He called for the integration of blacks and whites and set as his goal the ultimate dissolution of race itself. Targeted and harassed as a “communist” by the FBI, King was murdered after launching the interracial Poor People’s Campaign and announcing his opposition to the Vietnam War.”
You must have never read MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”? The “White Moderate”. You mention the “Poor People’s Campaign” without seeing the irony of claiming blacks and whites were in picket lines together yet the need of a “Poor People’s Campaign”? King’s opposition to the Vietnam War was because of the number of young black men dying and how money was being spent on war and not helping people in or country. “Beyond Vietnam”
“King encouraged the involvement of white civil rights activists, several of whom lost their lives in the South, including Viola Liuzzo, the wife of a Teamsters union organizer from Detroit. His statement following the murders of the three young civil rights workers in 1964, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman (two of whom were white) was an impassioned condemnation of racism and segregation. King clearly does not fit into Hannah-Jones’ narrative.”
CIVIL RIGHTS MARTYRS
The “1619 Project” is 100 pages. Did they want it to be even more pages, to cover the Civil Rights Movement, a movement AGAINST racism? We have yet to see (1) lies about history or (2) discusses gender, (3) sexual preference or (4) ethnicity.
“But, in its most significant and telling omission, the 1619 Project says nothing about the event that had the greatest impact on the social condition of African-Americans—the Russian Revolution of 1917. Not only did this arouse and inspire broad sections of the African-American population—including countless black intellectuals, writers, and artists, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson and Lorraine Hansberry—the Revolution undermined the political foundations of American racial apartheid.”
Again, a complaint about something left out. Let’s look at the Table of Contents, the topics the project does cover,
So the argument is “It should have been longer, with MORE history in it.” Other than a disagreement on slavery and the American Revolution, we haven’t seen any argument of lies about history in “1619 Project” yet.
“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.” Hannah-Jones does not note this fact in a manner that is at all critical. She does not condemn the creation of a “volunteer” army whose recruiters prey on poverty-stricken minority youth. There is no indication that Hannah-Jones opposes the “War on Terror” and the brutal interventions in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria—all supported by the Times—that have killed and made homeless upwards of 20 million people. On this issue, Hannah-Jones is remarkably “color-blind.” She is unaware of, or simply indifferent to, the millions of “people of color” butchered and made refugees by the American war machine in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.”
From “1619 Project”: “Page 79 ……. Joshua Bennett on the Black Panther Party” and “Oct. 15, 1966: In response to police brutality against African-Americans, the Merritt College students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale create the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The organization, declared an enemy of the government by J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I., holds that ending the economic exploitation of black people
is central to achieving racial equity”
Wow! Attacking someone attached to the Project for not being an antiwar dove. How many other authors, that do not right about the military, have been attacked for not being antiwar?
“The toxic identity politics that underlies this indifference does not serve the interests of the working class in the United States or anywhere else, which is dependent for its very survival on unifying across racial and national boundaries. It does, however, serve the class interests of privileged sections of the American upper-middle class.”
This review has been far more toxic and political, calling out the Democratic party. Where does the 1619 Project do this?
“In a revealing passage at the end of her essay, Hannah-Jones declares that since the 1960s “black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.” She is speaking here not for her “race” but a tiny layer of the African-American elite, beneficiaries of affirmative action policies, who came to political maturity in the years leading up to and through the administration of Barack Obama, the United States’ first black president.”
Wow! Talking about being irrational! I saw “black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans” first hand. My Little League team when I was 11 in 1971:
My Little League team when I was 12 in 1972:
Why the difference?
Looking back at the legacy of Alabama’s ‘other’ historic game with USC, 50 years later
“For the return engagement with the Trojans, Bryant’s team had two new elements, one a total secret, the other completely above-board, but no less historic. Alabama unveiled the wishbone offense on unsuspecting USC that Friday night, building an early lead before holding on for a 17-10 victory.
More importantly, Alabama had African-American players on its varsity roster for the first time. John Mitchell, a junior-college transfer who had signed with the Crimson Tide the previous winter, started the game at defensive end, while Wilbur Jackson, a sophomore halfback, watched from the bench. (Jackson had played for Alabama’s freshman team in 1970, and would make his varsity debut in the second game of the 1971 season against Southern Miss.)”
“A 2017 analysis of economic data found extreme levels of wealth inequality within racial groupings. Among those who identify as African-American the richest 10 percent controlled 75 percent of all wealth; during Obama’s tenure the wealthiest 1 percent increased their share of wealth amongst all African-Americans from 19.4 percent to 40.5 percent. Meanwhile, it is estimated that the bottom half of African-American households have zero or negative wealth.”
Really? Perhaps that bottom half is because of the history of redlining and housing discrimination? (Some dirty words, HBO)
Income inequality? Race?
World billionaires by race
“Blogger n/a analyzed the ethnic background of Forbes 2013 listing’ of “The World’s Billionaires“:
| No. | % | |
| Northwestern European | 415 | 29.10 |
| Asian or Pacific Islander | 313 | 21.95 |
| Jewish | 249 | 17.46 |
| Middle Eastern or Central Asian | 120 | 8.42 |
| Eastern European | 95 | 6.66 |
| Southern European | 84 | 5.89 |
| (New World) Hispanic or Brazilian | 75 | 5.26 |
| South Asian | 69 | 4.84 |
| Black | 6 | 0.42 |
| total | 1426 | 100 |
So even though blacks are 15% of the World’s population, they are only 0.42% of the World’s richest. Thus their representation among the super rich is only 2.8% of their population share.“
Billionaires got 54% richer during pandemic, sparking calls for “wealth tax”
“While a very narrow layer of black millionaires and billionaires has been deliberately cultivated in response to the mass unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, the conditions for working class African-Americans are worse than they were 40 years ago. This has been the period of deindustrialization, which saw the systematic shutdown of auto, steel and other factories across the United States, devastating working-class cities such as Detroit, Milwaukee, and Youngstown, Ohio.”
That “Giant Sucking Sound”
US Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its Potential Future
All Employees, Manufacturing
Since manufacturing jobs impact everyone, regardless of race, how is this pertinent to critiquing the “1619 Project”?
“The major social gains won by workers in the bitter struggles of the 20th century have been rolled back so that an immense amount of wealth could be transferred from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top. Poverty, declining life expectancy, deaths of despair and other forms of social misery are drawing together workers of all racial and national backgrounds.”
Income inequality impacts everyone,
Where is the condemnation of the 2017 GOP/Donald Trump Tax Cut?
The 2016 GOP platform promised to balance the budget.
https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/media/documents/DRAFT_12_FINAL%5B1%5D-ben_1468872234.pdf
2017 – GOP and Donald Trump gave Berkshire-Hathaway $29 Billion (with a B!)
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2017ar/2017ar.pdf
“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.”
Talking about being irrational, “the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party
and the privileged upper-middle-class layers it represents“. It isn’t the New York Times fanning the hate in the United States.
“Earlier this year, auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico called on their American counterparts, white and black, to join them in wildcat strikes. Across the South, black, white and Hispanic workers took strike action together against telecommunications giant AT&T. In Tennessee, black and white neighbors defended an immigrant working class family against deportation. Now, the multi-racial and multi-ethnic American auto industry labor force finds itself entering a pitched battle against the global auto giants and the corrupt unions.“
All of this is true and has absolutely nothing to do with the “1619 Project”.
“At the same time, opinion polls demonstrate growing support in the population for socialism—that is, the conscious political unity of the working class across all boundaries and divisions imposed on it. Under these conditions the American capitalist elite, Democrats and Republican alike, are terrified of social revolution. They are joining with their ruling class counterparts around the world in deploying sectarian politics, be it based on race, religion, nationality, ethnicity or language to block this development.”
Again, what has this got to do with the “1619 Project”? The word “socialism” appears zero (0) times in the project.
Socialism is the latest GOP Mantra because “Wall!” and “Repeal and Replace” and “Drain the Swamp” and “Coal Miners Back to Work” and “Lock Her Up!” and “Balanced Budget” won’t work.
That Time the FBI Scrutinized It’s a Wonderful Life for Communist Messaging
Did Harry Truman Denounce the Use of ‘Socialism’ as a ‘Scare Word’?
“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.”
No, and it took a calendar year for Chris Rufo, Foxnews and Donald Trump to make “1619 Project” an issue in response to Black Lives Matters protest marches. Democrats had no reaction to the “1619 Project”. Republicans did, a year after it came out!
“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.”
“Baquet declared:
[R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story … one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story.”
He was right:
“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. The central role of race in the politics of fascism was explained concisely in Trotsky’s analysis of the ideology of German fascism:”
“In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support of the race. History is viewed as the emanation of the race. The qualities of the race are construed without relation to changing social conditions. Rejecting “economic thought” as base, National Socialism descends a stage lower: from economic materialism it appeals to zoologic materialism. [7]”
Trump and Race?
“The Democrat controlled media talks race, race, race for political reasons. And they always have, but never like this. But it’s hurting our country, and more than anyone else, our great minority communities. It’s hurting them very badly.“
It is the GOP and FoxNews and Breitbart that talks about race a lot:
Breitbart lied about not having a Black Crime Tag
“There are many scholars, students and workers who know that the 1619 Project makes a travesty of history. It is their responsibility to take a stand and reject the coordinated attempt, spearheaded by the Times, to dredge up and rehabilitate a reactionary race-based falsification of American and world history.”
What History Professors Really Think About ‘The 1619 Project’
“Although lauded by many and awarded the Pulitzer for Hannah-Jones, the project immediately drew criticism from scholars and politicians. However, the greatest objections emerged when “The 1619 Project” began to be taught in grade school and college history courses with some state government’s threatening to revoke funding from schools using it in their classrooms.”
“A few well-known historians have been critical of “The 1619 Project,” but not because it centers slavery in U.S. history. In a letter to The New York Times they wrote: “None of us have any disagreement with the need for Americans, as they consider their history, to understand that the past is populated by sinners as well as saints, by horrors as well as honors, and that is particularly true of the scarred legacy of slavery.” They are critical because they feel “The 1619 Project” “offers a historically-limited view of slavery” and “asserts that every aspect of American life has only one lens for viewing, that of slavery, and its fall-out.””
A short list, Historians Roast the 1619 Project
“At the end of the year, the Times published an extraordinary letter from McPherson, Oakes, and Wood, as well as Sean Wilentz of Princeton and Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, demanding “prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in the 1619 Project.””
Victoria Bynum called me out on twitter,
Back to What History Professors Really Think About ‘The 1619 Project’
“At the same time, many history professors are using “The 1619 Project” in their classrooms and feel strongly about the importance of its use. Christopher Span, a history of education professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, thinks that “’The 1619 Project’ should be added to every undergraduate course surveying American history.” He sees it as essential and notes that “it centralizes the longstanding role race, racism, and slavery played in the making of this nation and illustrates how their tenets predate those of freedom and democracy by at least one year.” Span teaches “The 1619 Project” in both his undergraduate and graduate courses. For Span, “the history of African Americans is the history of America” and educating Americans to appreciate and understand this history “affords opportunities for healing and reconciliation.”
Jonathan Zimmerman, an educational historian at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that teaching “The 1619 Project” alongside other interpretations of history “represents a huge opportunity to teach students what history actually *is*: an act of interpretation.” He also plans on teaching “The 1619 Project” in his courses. History changes over time as historians uncover and analyze new data. Penn State University history professor Crystal Sanders believes it is essential to include Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project” in history courses. In her words, “I think it is important for students to see that our understanding of the past is not frozen in time.”
Politicians criticizing “The 1619 Project” believe that the work is dangerous to the nation, and that it misrepresents U.S. history. They argue that it denies the principles that the nation is built upon and is racially divisive. Politicians have introduced bills banning the teaching of the project in public institutions in Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, Mississippi, Texas, and Missouri. And, most recently, in late April 2021, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging him to refrain from advocating for the use of “The 1619 Project” in curricula. McConnell wrote: “Our nation’s youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps. Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push radical agendas that tear us apart.”
Critical Race Theory is the latest GOP Mantra because “Wall!” and “Repeal and Replace” and “Drain the Swamp” won’t work.
“According to Zimmerman, not teaching about “The 1619 Project” and the debates that historians have with it is a “gigantic lost opportunity.” More importantly, he explains that history courses – in schools and in college classrooms – are intended to teach students how to think and question, not what to think.”
“Above all the working class must reject any such effort to divide it, efforts which will become ever more ferocious and pernicious as the class struggle develops. The great issue of this epoch is the fight for the international unity of the working class against all forms of racism, nationalism and related forms of identity politics.”
The only ones trying to divide are Republicans through voter suppression and spreading lies about Critical Race Theory.
A Lesson on Critical Race Theory
“CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation.”
“In the weeks and months to come, the World Socialist Web Site will publicize and report on lectures that will be organized by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), in which the reactionary anti-working-class politics and historical falsifications promoted by the 1619 Project will be exposed.”
