According to the 1619 Project, America’s truefounding was when 20 to 30 enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Va., leading to a “slavocracy” whose legacy of racism and oppression has been encoded in the nation’s DNA.
The 1619 Project is the work of the New York Times’ creative team led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning journalist, who in 2017 received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for her reporting about segregation and racism in America’s educational systems.
Hannah-Jones, who suggested the 1619 Project to her editors, oversaw its execution. She also wrote the lead essay, “The Idea of America,” which now famously asserts the United States’ founding ideals of equality and liberty, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, were a “lie” to the founders who created them, but ultimately realized by African Americans who embraced those ideals and fought for them, largely alone.
Hannah-Jones has spoken extensively about the 1619 Project in recent months. As the project’s chief ambassador, Hannah-Jones, has taken to Twitter to explain and defend it against detractors, as well as to challenge their motives and question their credentials.
On a national speaking tour, she has elaborated on the project’s intent and how it should be understood. Her message consistently aims to connect past to present, tracing a moral complicity that she says white America refuses to recognize.
“If you read the whole project, I don’t think you can come away from it without understanding the project is an argument for reparations,” she told the Chicago Tribune in October.
On the Karen Hunter talk program in December, she expounded on that theme.
“You cannot read the entire magazine and not come away understanding that a great debt is owed and it’s time for this country to pay,” she said. “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.”
Now regardless of your opinion on reparations, here is my greatest concern.
Since its publication in August of 2019, the 1619 Project has been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states, according to the 2019 annual report of the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project.
Five school systems, including Chicago and Washington, D.C., have adopted it district-wide.
Now folks, my students will tell you that I am not afraid to tackle controversial subjects. But when it comes to teaching pure propaganda to further a cause, count me out.
We talked about this several weeks ago when I warned you that online learning was taking the power away from our teachers in developing their own lesson plans.
Now I found a great article in the editorial section of The American Revolution Institute titled, The Revolutionary Dishonesty of the “1619 Project”
It states, The New York Times is engaged in a full-scale assault on the memory of the American Revolution, alleging—without foundation and over the objections of some of the country’s leading historians—that the aim of the Revolution was to perpetuate slavery.
It goes on to say the “1619 Project,” is an interpretation of American history as a tale of racial oppression and criminal exploitation, conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist who demonstrates no acquaintance with scholarship and less regard for honesty.
What began as a series of essays in The New York Times Magazine has been reconfigured as a series of lessons to be distributed, free, to teachers anxious to help their students understand the protests and riots we are currently experiencing in major cities throughout the U.S.
The editors of The New York Times, demonstrating no more regard for truth than Ms. Hannah-Jones, are working to make sure their destructive falsehoods about the American Revolution get taught to students in every school in the country.
The American Revolution was not conducted to defend slavery.
The Revolution secured our independence, established our republic, created our national identity and committed our nation to ideals of liberty, equality, natural and civil rights, and responsible citizenship.
It expressed ideals fundamentally at odds with slavery, and set that terrible practice on the path to extinction.
Opposition to slavery was rarely expressed prior to the American Revolution. The Revolution threw slavery on the defensive. Its commitment to universal natural rights inspired the growth of abolitionism across the Atlantic world.
In fact, the British abolitionist movement took off after the American Revolution, drawing inspiration from the principles of the American Revolution and the abolition of slavery in the northern states.
Brilliant scholars—men and women of good will at the forefront of the history profession—have called on the New York Times to correct its errors.
Those scholars want Americans to understand the history of slavery and racism and their influence today, but insist that the cause of social justice is not served by making false claims about the American Revolution or other periods of American history.
The New York Times has ignored them and persists in its grotesque attempt to recast the American Revolution as a sinister movement and the revolutionaries as monsters whose primary aim was to perpetuate slavery.
The editors of the newspaper and their allies are now promoting lesson plans to spread their unfounded assertions, banking on the newspaper’s vast circulation and even wider reach to persuade young Americans to despise the men and women who secured our national independence and created our republic.
Ms. Hannah-Jones, whose previous work includes praise of Castro’s regime in Cuba, has expressed delight at the looting and vandalism that has swept the country which she is happy to call the “1619 riots.”
She’s made it clear that historical understanding is of no concern to her. Her aim is to persuade Americans to hate the nation’s founders as a step toward dismantling their work.
No American—least of all teachers and their students—should embrace this crude, distorted interpretation of our shared history.
The American Revolution challenged a world that was profoundly unfree.
The principle of natural rights asserted by the Revolution led ultimately to the overthrow of slavery and now challenges every form of oppression, exploitation, bigotry and injustice.
The ideals of the American Revolution empower us to hunt down and destroy human trafficking and every other vestige of slavery in the world today.
The American Revolution was the most important moment in modern history, and its ideals are still the last, best hope of our world, where too many are still denied their natural rights.
The New York Times asks Americans to reject the Revolution and claims that the men and women who sacrificed, struggled and died for American independence are unworthy of our respect.
As teachers get ready for the fall, thousands will be tempted to make use of the 1619 Project curriculum offered online by the Pulitzer Center, which has formed a partnership with the New York Times to distribute lesson plans built around the essays in the 1619 Project.
Teachers and school administrators should resist this temptation, since academic reviewers, including some of the nation’s leading historians, have been unyielding in their criticism of the 1619 Project, pointing to numerous errors of fact and interpretation and rejecting its fundamental claim that the nation is defined by racism and was conceived in oppression.
There are better ways to teach students about the history and ordeal of slavery—an important subject that deserves our finest efforts.
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.
The simplicity of the radical lesson plan—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.
But 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.
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 thinking to its claims—particularly Hannah-Jones’ claim that the purpose of the American Revolution was to perpetuate slavery.
But we cannot reasonably expect middle school and high school students, to whom we ought to be teaching critical thinking 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 students 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 1619 curriculum is that the 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.
“What examples of hypocrisy in the founding of the United States does Hannah-Jones supply?” is the lead—and leading—question. That the founding of the United States was an exercise in hypocrisy is taken for granted—because Hannah-Jones says so.
The follow-up question is contorted to require students to recapitulate Hannah-Jones’ errors about the Revolution as if they were facts: “What evidence can you see for how ‘some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slaveocracy’?”
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.
A generation of historians from Edmund S. Morgan and Bernard Bailyn, to Gordon S. Wood have made clear, the American Revolution was a pivotal moment in the development of human freedom. Under no circumstances do the creators of the 1619 Project curriculum suggest students entertain this possibility.
Gordon Wood, a leading historian of the American Revolution and emeritus professor at Brown University, in a recent article told RealClearInvestigations the Times material “is full of falsehoods and distortions.”
In its current form, without corrections, which the Times has declined to run, the only way to use it in the classroom, he said, would be “as a way of showing how history can be distorted and perverted.”
So there you have it folks. I encourage you to do your own research on the 1619 Project. I have tried to find out if it is being included in our local schools, but have been unsuccessful.
Bottom line, I am totally opposed to its inclusion.