Have you read the materials in the 1619 Project? The original article? The new book? The Educational materials? The children’s book? Listened to the podcasts?
They’re really a little shocking. Underneath is a scaffold of solid research: a network of facts that are actually good to know. But the fetid flesh added to those factual bones is all narrative. A narrative of oppression and victimization, and (dare I say it) kinda racist in an anti-White way.
The project starts off with this bold statement, linking “capitalism” to racism. It is inaccurate and almost nonsensical, but it tells us a lot about what the authors are up to:
So much to unpack, so much implied in this accusation...
America is brutal. Capitalism is bad. American capitalism is particular and one assumes worse. It’s the white people’s fault. It’s the Southerners’ fault. Slavery was not isolated, but is the very DNA of America. It’s all bad, all the time, and 1619 just goes on (and on, and on and on…) from there.
First, some quotes to establish 1619 as drivel
Each of the many stand-alone pieces in the 1619 project appears to be rife with nonsense like this:
and here is some of the racist “white Americans” part:
For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve the “Negro problem.” They have dedicated thousands of pages to this endeavor…
Even the positive about America is “re-framed” to be negative by 1619:
“For centuries, black music has been the sound of artistic freedom. No wonder everybody’s always stealing it.”
(Let me “re-frame” that the right way: America is an unprecedented melting pot of influences and traditions, taking the best from dozens of cultures. Black American music, from blues to jazz to soul, is some of the best there is, and has transformed music as it has been joyously adopted here in America and around the world.)
These are not cherry picked quotes — they are the first things I found as I scan the materials for quotes.
The entire set of writings is rife with questionable statements which take a bit of actual fact and spin it into a web of victimized complaint, establishing the intractable oppression of Black people and squarely blaming other Americans, often racially identifying “white” perpetrators.
The real problem with 1619
But 1619 is not quite inaccurate scholarship, either. It has lots of useful facts. The problem with the 1619 project is that it simultaneously presents this work as Journalism, History and Educational curricula. Yet it is terrible at all three:
From a Journalistic Perspective, 1619 is a Lie
There are some modern, fringe-y historians who consider slavery and racism as the defining central facts of America. But not very many. The 1619 project reports this fringe view as a new historical consensus, or simply “the truth.” I find no citations or references suggesting that historians generally agree with 1619 — only information that there is a new, radical re-interpretation of history in some departments. Such a radical view that lacks consensus and is therefore not “history” as defined by historians.
From an Educational Perspective, 1619 is Indoctrination
The 1619 project is reported to be taught, now, in 4,500 schools. The Pulitzer center (not affiliated with the prize) has a raft of educational materials for grade schoolers up through Law students. The NY Times has slick multimedia, podcasts, videos and (for whichever students still read), the author has new written text curricula.
But if it is not established historical truth and does not reflect the full set of factors and forces and battles that make history worth learning — why is it being taught? (Answer key: political motivations.)
From the Perspective of History, 1619 is Amateurish and Political
The author, Nicole Hannah-Jones, and her co-conspirators, are not historians and do not claim to be. (She considers herself a journalist.) Nor did they consult with a wide variety of historians, and when they did reach out to actual historians, they ignored their input.
Some of it is so simple, it boggles the mind. Hannah-Jones and others claim the Revolutionary war was a war to preserve slavery (and not much else). But there were a dozen different reasons, and the British still allowed Slavery in the New world (e.g. in the Caribbean) so placing the South under partial control of the Northern States rather than the Brits likely helped end slavery faster — with US laws freeing children of slaves first, in 1780, and then ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807: decades before the British ended slavery in their own parts of the New World.
Nicole Hannah-Jones are not, and never were historians, and did not listen to those who are.
So what is it?
It’s not history, nor do historians generally agree with it. It not journalism as it violates the primary purpose of journalism which is to inform about the facts and goings-on of the day. It is not good education.
It’s politics folks. And particularly, the Critical Race Theory brand of politics that seeks to replace the old (ostensibly corrupt) culture with a new, woke culture. I write about CRT and the use of narrative here:
As the Times herself states:
“It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative…Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.”
Unpack it….Ideals are never false, and also never attained, so a false ideal is oxymoronic from the start. This linguistic sleight of hand suggests that American Ideals were never there, by pointing out they were not fully attained on the day they were announced, even as these ideals have guided the country and the world to do better and better for over two centuries. Another drop of truth justifying a bucket of ideology….
It’s not just 1619 — it is a Bigger Issue
The shocking thing about 1619 is how fast the gears of the media-academy-political complex meshed and spun to build this colossal mediocrity into a colossal re-education machine.
The Pulitzer Center built new educational curricula around it.
The New York Times re-formatted and enhanced it with podcasts, slick multimedia, and more materials (including quietly retracting, without comment, some of the most egregious mis-statements)
1619 was turned into a book, “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.” (meaning the “origin” of America, of course)
The obligatory NPR interview tour.
A children's book was created: “The 1619 Project: Born on the Water”
And of course, the Pulitzer Prize committee (ever political) awarded it a prize.
Modern Media Gives Us Distortion, not Outright Lies
There is so much media, and so many facts, that finding a few data points to support any crazy theory is not too hard.
Do you read Fox News? MSNBC? WSJ? OANN? NYT? Did you know that vaccines can cause blood clots? Did you know that the events around the KKK rally in Charlottesville included “some good people?” Totally wrong yet technically correct.
People no longer need to outright lie. It is enough to cherry pick convenient facts, spin them into a new narrative web, and leave out anything that contradicts the new false narrative. The spin is worse than a lie because it makes them harder to catch them or explain what they are doing.
We read this media, we accept it uncritically, and so we get the distorted media we deserve.
