1619 Project Creator Admits “It Is Not A History” But a Fight “to Control the National Narrative”
Critic: 1619 Project trying to have it both ways, “it’s presented as “history” when convenient, to give it credibility (as in the curriculum description) but deemed non-history when its lack of historical rigor has been challenged.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) thrust the New York Times‘ 1619 Project back into the spotlight when he threatened to defund schools that use it in the curriculum.
The discussion led creator Hannah Jones to admit the 1619 Project is not history, but a “work of journalism.”
The 1619 Project leads one to believe the founding of America happened in 1619 when the first slave ship arrived in Virginia. The introduction states: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.” The beginning explains:
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. 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.
Jones found a fascinating way to explain that her pet project is a work of fiction.
Oh, this is a fabulous, thoughtful thread. He is right: The fight over the 1619 Project is not about history. It is about memory. https://t.co/3Ji7SMUFo6
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020
I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020
The crazy thing is, the 1619 Project is using history and reporting to make an argument. It never pretended to be a history. We explicitly state our aims and produced a series of essays. Critique was always expected, but the need to discredit it speaks to something else.
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020
Further, the curriculum is supplementary and cannot and was never intended to supplant US history curriculum (which is pretty terrible but none of these folks seem concerned about that.)Teachers have used it in English, social studies, art, foods classes.
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020
The fight here is about who gets to control the national narrative, and therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself. One group has monopolized this for too long in order to create this myth of exceptionalism. If their version is true, what do they have to fear of 1619?
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020
Read that last tweet. Why not counter the other narrative with history if that narrative is wrong? Shouldn’t the nation’s shared memory be historical facts?
Jones also said they “explicitly stated” their aims in the piece. The last sentence of the introduction (my emphasis): “On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”
Truthfully. When I read “truthfully” I expect facts and history.
Even if Jones wanted the 1619 Project to be a “work in journalism” she chose the wrong term. Journalism, like history, should report the truth. Not your truth. Not alternative facts.
Distorted Curriculum
Jones tweeted that her project “was never intended to supplant US history curriculum.” She had to add that it “is pretty terrible but none of these folks seem concerned about that.”
Jones won a Pulitzer for the 1619 Project. The Pulitzer Center has a website dedicated to The 1619 Project Curriculum.
If she never “intended to supplant” the curriculum then we need her to explain why the website says the project “challenges us to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date.”
The tweets are part of a pattern w/the #1619Project in which it’s presented as “history” when convenient, to give it credibility (as in the curriculum description) but deemed non-history when its lack of historical rigor has been challenged.
— KC Johnson (@kcjohnson9) July 28, 2020
If you’re going to ignore July 4th, 1776, then you better go the beginning.
Sir Walter Raleigh began the English exploration of the New World about 100 years after Christopher Columbus. Raleigh founded the Roanoke Colony, but it did not last long.
Jamestown, VA, became the first established colony in 1607. Those people settled and did quite nice before the first slave ship came from Africa.
Oh, wait. Did I say the first slave ship? The Smithsonian Magazine published an article from Black Perspectives, which disputed the 1619 Project because the Spanish brought slaves in 1526:
Most obviously, 1619 was not the first time Africans could be found in an English Atlantic colony, and it certainly wasn’t the first time people of African descent made their mark and imposed their will on the land that would someday be part of the United States. As early as May 1616, blacks from the West Indies were already at work in Bermuda providing expert knowledge about the cultivation of tobacco. There is also suggestive evidence that scores of Africans plundered from the Spanish were aboard a fleet under the command of Sir Francis Drake when he arrived at Roanoke Island in 1586. In 1526, enslaved Africans were part of a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost on the North American coast in present-day South Carolina. Those Africans launched a rebellion in November of that year and effectively destroyed the Spanish settlers’ ability to sustain the settlement, which they abandoned a year later. Nearly 100 years before Jamestown, African actors enabled American colonies to survive, and they were equally able to destroy European colonial ventures.
The article stressed that to ignore those slaves “effectively erases the memory of many more African peoples than it memorializes.” The 1619 Project basically “silences the memory of the more than 500,000 African men, women, and children who had already crossed the Atlantic against their will, aided and abetted Europeans in their endeavors, provided expertise and guidance in a range of enterprises, suffered, died, and – most importantly – endured.”
You cannot ignore real history even if it does not fit your narrative. Go ahead and teach about 1619, but only if you present it with truth and not as a way to change the historical facts.
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I thought Carrot Top died.
He just been hiding in Nadler’s pants…..?
That thang also believes in the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin. It is actually frightened to death that they will try to eat it.
Carrot Top is alive and still performing. He should sue for plagiarism.
Obviously it is copyright infringement.
The 6 9 Project
Is what that thang is messaging.
They don’t think we can see through their transparent self serving greedy actions.
s
I heard she then yelled “WORLDSTAR!!!” and threw a brick
“Well, yes, it actually is all a pack of lies. We never claimed it wasn’t. We’re just trying to gaslight an entire nation to derail everything that has ever made it worthy of respect and admiration. How astute of you to notice!”
To hell with tar, feathers and a rail. This bunch needs pitch, kindling and torches.
The New York Times has been lying for at least 100 years. Remember Walter Duranty, its Moscow Bureau Chief, who wrote glowing stories about Stalin’s Soviet Union, covering up millions who died of starvation in the Ukraine and all the executions
Izvestia on the Hudson: It prints all the fake news that fits its views, especially if America it screws.
That was never intended to be history. It was an act of journalism …
She’s admitting it’s propaganda, while calling it ‘journalism’.
There you have it. It’s okay to use ‘journalism’ to spread propaganda. It should even be encouraged.
“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
“It’s okay to use ‘journalism’ to spread propaganda”
The NY Times, WaPo and CNN do it every day. Exhibit A is Brian Stelter (aka the “Missing Link”)
The Maoist State Media are no longer in the news business, but in the propaganda business.
Known as historical FICTION.
It’s not ‘history” or ‘journalism’ but a work of fiction. An attempt to “Control the National Narrative” sounds an awful lot like ‘propaganda’ to me. Against the backdrop of the current Marxist-led riots being justified as a response to historic racism and slavery, it might plausibly be described as seditious propaganda.
Would this qualify as yellow journalism?
I think this would qualify as red journalism.
‘Truthfully. When I read “truthfully” I expect facts and history.’
That’s because your definition of truth and theirs differ. This is the gist of Biden’s Kinsley Gaffe about choosing Truth over Facts. To them “Truth” is metaphysical and is not bound by the facts.
“Truthfully. When I read ‘truthfully’ I expect facts and history.”
Remember what Joe Biden told Iowans: “We choose truth over facts.”
Facts are indisputable. Everyone has their own version of the truth.
You don’t have to throw a rock far to find a racist.
Stumbled on this. Seems to make trouble for the 1/1024 of Liz Warren …
The 1842 Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation was the largest escape of a group of slaves to occur in the Cherokee Nation, in what was then Indian Territory. The slave revolt started on November 15, 1842, when a group of 20 African-American slaves owned by the Cherokee escaped and tried to reach Mexico, where slavery had been abolished in 1829.
OMG Mexicans had slaves, Indians had slaves!
When they are done with the White man, they are coming for you!
As many have been pointing out for some time now, the 1619 Project is a leftist fantasy, created by America-hating leftists to justify their contempt for the U.S.
The fact that these race-baiting sleazebags would make up this garbage and try to pass it off as history should not surprise anyone. But the fact that school districts across the nation have embraced this ludicrous propaganda and are teaching it as historical fact to impressionable school kids should outrage every American.
It’s also cleverly designed to exploit a Judaeo-Christian heritage which has preconditioned Americans to think of themselves as guilty sinners who need to repent.
I know you’re supposed to “not judge a book by it’s cover” and all that, but I’m having a hard time taking this person seriously when she looks like Bozo The Fucking Clown.
It’s not faked: it’s fiction. Many people, if not most people these days of entertainment choices, choose the fiction they want to live in.
Others read novels.
What’s new is fiction branded as news, but only to make the experience more enjoyable.
The 1619 narrative also leaves out how blacks were involved in the slave industry as owners themselves. In 1830 there were over 330k freed African slaves in this country. A small portion of them owned around 12k slaves, black slaves, themselves. The reason why black slaves became slaves for life was because a black slave owner, Anthony Johnson, went to court so he wouldn’t have to set his slaves free. All of this is easy to find even using Google. And from credible sources, like the Virginia slave laws.
While I’m at it, where does the word “slave” come from? Hint: not from Africa. How about “kidnap?” Wonder why people people took poor children off the streets of England and sent them here?
Slavery in this country wasn’t limited to black people. We are all in this together. There were millions of white slaves, we just called them indentured servants… and guess what? Indentured servitude was for life as the “owners” could basically move the goal posts to keep people indentured. And that was happening long before old Anthony Johnson went to court to keep his black slaves for life.
The full story of our country’s history has been hidden for far too long. The only way we can come together is to share the full story. It’s not about Democrat or Republican. It’s about the ideals this country was founded on. We can’t be equal until we all know the full history – good, bad, ugly… all of it. We need those shared experiences to bond, to come together. And that’s why all the details will be suppressed, censored, hidden and it’s why we get “narratives” instead of actual history.
Unfortunately, your version doesn’t carve out special status for a vocal group of salivating narcissists. Therefore, it will be rejected.
Her picture made me think of our son’s first day of college.
He dropped an English class the first day.
He was trying to find another class to replace it (so he would still have a full load of classes) when I asked him why he dropped the class.
He said that when the female black professor walked in and he saw her blue-dyed hair and funky clothes, he felt a little uneasy about how professional the professor would be.
His question was answered after she distributed the syllabus and told the students they would only be reading “authors of color.”
Right then he was outta there.
Sounds like you raised your son right.
Whatever you can say about this scummy freak, you can say about Oprah Winfrey.
Oprah Winfrey to Bring New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’ to Film and TV:
https://variety.com/2020/film/news/new-york-times-1619-project-oprah-winfrey-lionsgate-film-tv-1234700720/#!
The O has long tried to make you feel guilty. She has the money to do this and she will use it to indoctrinate anyone who is willing to watch. Sadly many will. Maybe she’ll win some kind of prize that again will legitimize this history fiction.
Oprah is a spook/ghost of her former self since she insisted on launching her Titanic of a channel.
Skip the opposite world propaganda paragraphs in this article and study the 2 tables.
Many shows have lost a third to 40% of their viewers compared to last year.
OWN TV Show Ratings (updated 7/22/20)
https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/own-tv-show-ratings/amp/
So she and The New York Times tell “American history” as it would be told if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War or if Nazi Germany had won World War II.
Hmm. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were America’s enemies. The New York Times sided with the Soviets. It makes you think.
I could be way off on this but I took an Anthropology course once and I’m pretty sure most residents of Africa in the 17th century were hunter gatherers.
Wonder what “expertise” they had to share with the Europeans.
We learned a lot about farming from locals and a variety of cultures. If you read about Jamestown, most of the people involved that had any say in the colony were “gentlemen” (which basically meant they had family wealth and were trying a get rich scheme of metal harvesting in the new world). Jamestown was almost an utter failure, and for a while, it was. That much is true.
At its nadir, some Jamestown residents resorted to exhuming recent graves to cannibalize the bodies. Others hired themselves out to the local native tribes in a work-for-food arrangement. The Powhatans eventually occupied the colony, half out of pity and half to protect their burial sites and hunting grounds. With their assistance, John Smith assumed command of Jamestown and began to turn things around.
This is true. I’m not sure why I was downvoted. I live here and know the history of the colony quite well being raised on it in a very conservative private school curriculum.
John Smith also bartered with Natives and fostered great relationships with the Powhatan, despite being somewhat of an outcast with his own people. Smith left, though, because he got injured and the colony went to crap for awhile again. A lot of the problems with Jamestown were too many “idea men” without those willing to work in both mind and body. John Smith having to leave only made that problem worse. It’s a minor miracle the colony survived at all.
1619 is Communist disinformation.
It’s really that simple.
I used to teach college-level journalism, and I usually had students read Kovach and Rosenstiel’s “The Elements of Journalism,” wherein they write that the journalist’s “first obligation is to the truth” and that the essence of journalism is “a discipline of verification.” And that’s what I taught in the course as well.
So Ms. Hannah-Jones has a rather curious definition of “journalism.”
“One group has monopolized this for too long in order to create this myth of exceptionalism.”
OK, so the slaves built an awful country that’s not even mediocre. In fact, it’s a stinking pile of racist shit.
That’s what you built? Seems black people suffered an awful lot for nothing if they country they helped build isn’t exceptional – or worse.
One has to wonder why she’s not claiming “Black people built this exceptional country, and are responsible for its exceptionalism.” If you’re taking credit for something, isn’t that the usual narrative? It would be understandable if she were trying to assert the part played by black Americans in the building of an exceptional country. But she hates the country so much she’s blinded to the narrative she is creating – that the country built by black Americans didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
Touche!
Carrot Top and Oprah must be “forced” answer that.
Spinning yarns, speaking truth to facts, 50 shades of lies by omission, commission, and invention is how plausible, perhaps viable, causes lose their lead.
It’s one huge excuse.
American black culture is all about excuses. And far too many want nothing more than the cult of excuses to last forever. Can’t seem to get anywhere? Can’t compete with whitey or those pestilential Asians? Can’t even compete with people who themselves couldn’t compete in Mexico? Can’t manage something simple, like moving out of your shithole home town so you don’t have to waste your life scrabbling around an urban desert? Well, here’s the excuse. It’s several centuries old, but with this exclusive offer, you too can get your own packaged excuses to blame it all on . . . well, basically, England, which is an unfortunate detail, but anyone who doesn’t agree to ignore it must be a racist.
In Nikole Hannah-Jones mind fiction = journalism.
Remember when Sloppy Joe said to Iowans, exhorting them, last summer:
“There is nothing we’ve ever decided to do we’ve been unable to do,” he said. “Period. That’s not hyperbole. We have never, never, never failed when we’re together. And ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to get up.
“Everybody knows who Donald Trump is. Even his supporters know who he is. We got to let him know who we are. We choose unity over division. We choose science over fiction. We choose truth over facts.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/truth-over-facts-biden-fumbles-during-iowa-speech
I can just imagine a majority of the people there looking at each other quietly and slowly, mutually but discreetly uttering an unmistakably communicated ‘huh’? Unless, of course, you’re one of the woke in the crowd and, like, really get it. In that case, I say, keep it. Please.
What do precolonial-, colonial-, and postbellum-era college and university seals bearing in their motto the Latin “veritas” mean by the term? In the end, does Biblical truth differ in substance from scientific truth? Is there a hierarchy of truths? Is the truth equivalent to facts; and does the one contain the other, or even vice-versa?
Doesn’t 1619, after its author’s major correction of history and its surrogate-apologists’ major clarification as to its real job as a work of neo-narrative advocacy (a subsidiary of community organizing?), fail completely as a work of ordinary history or journalism, containing really nothing of either historical or journalistic truth as we understand it today — an allowable but limited take or impression of a set of indisputably understood, verifiable facts? It does, I believe, and seems to be made entirely of something else, and quite intentionally so.
I know from a passage in its beginning pages, as excerpted above, that 1619 doesn’t employ the meaning of words and their higher, whole, collective purpose as parts of a unitary sentence in a way that the ordinary reader would properly interpret the whole sentence when its creator-author writes:
“The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. . . .”
With respect to “August 2019” being “the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery,” and so, in reference to the project’s stipulated starting point of 1619, we already see the kind of truth-telling that awaits the soon-to-be, if not already sufficiently woke reader: ambiguous, distorted, unreflective and indirect, and grossly misleading. In thus really missing the ordinary marks, I’ll add and say, in sum, it’s sinful; but that’s just me, a quasi-purist of sorts.
Did the creator-author forget about the slavery-interrupting and -ending American Civil War? I don’t think so. Doesn’t the sentence mean, via its selected words and chosen syntax, slavery’s been going on continuously since 1619 and, thus, for 400 years? It does. I guess, then, you’re supposed to feel like it has, even though historically it certainly has not — if not yet, then maybe during, but certainly by the time the book and its time-warping aura’s been thoroughly read, absorbed, and appreciated.
If that’s your honey, I say, lick it off the spoon and enjoy it. Just don’t tell me how to look at the known, hard-studied and concluded, seriously reflected histories on precolonial America as it relates to the slave trade and the later-born nation’s determination to implicitly and, eventually, effectively rid itself of the pestilence-like, loathsome economic crutch and addiction of slavery once and for all, four score-and-nine, -twelve, and -fourteen years later — once the Constitution is thrice amended, respectively, as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
Blame — go ahead, by being focused, accurate, and honest — the same militant, insurrectionist, traitorous Democrats who created the Dixie-flagged CSA — which, as a newly constituted political entity, attacked Fort Sumter, SC, to proximately start the Civil War, almost similarly to those who today tacitly and otherwise support the arsonists and vandals’ assault on the US Courthouse and its federal staff and protective US Marshalls, in Portland, OR; so blame the still-constituted Democrat Party for the postbellum Jim Crow laws, related customs, and all the evils and ills that fully derive from the segregated society they intended and installed, and which endured, hurting and hardening the hearts of an already thoroughly oppressed, mistreated people, too many of whom had been whipped, beaten or killed over the two hundred-forty-six years of forced bondage in America — ended as an institution, in case it matters as fact, by Lincoln-led Republicans in 1862 via declaration (Executive Order) and in 1865 via Constitutional amendment.
In the end, 1619 must lie as a matter of authorial and editorial policy to make its case (no less its sales). I’m hardly impressed by that accomplishment and fear the effects of its likely widespread acceptance and appreciation, especially its eventual totalistic imposition on the unwoke among us.
The systematic planning for 1619’s forced spoon-feeding has already begun, so it’s just a matter of time, it seems, until the opposing forces in the field are joined, one way or another.
Having watched the Democrat-led, Jerrold Nadler-Chaired House Judiciary Committee Hearing of AG Bill Barr’s requested testimony yesterday on TV, and feeling pained for my country’s and thus my own loss of so much of our nation’s soul and character, I can only look to the stars as I pray earnestly for help. Perhaps and hopefully, unforeseen blessings await us.
Bozo the Clown lives…
One aspect of the fraud that is the 1619 Project is the role of Columbia University president Lee Bollinger–who was a member of the board that awarded its Pukelitzer prize.
What part of “slavery” doesn’t this project “1619” understand? Slavery was common in North America before any Europeans showed up. Why concentrate on slavery involving Africans? How is being a Cherokee slave better than being a European slave? Or and African one? Slavery is virtually a universal social institution – it certainly was in Africa for millennia, as in the Middle East.
This hindsight-ism is not helpful in resolving a) the problem of modern slavery especially in Africa, and I am not talking about the sex trade, I am talking about the slave markets that still exist and slaves traded and inherited as property, or b) the dreadful social and economic consequences of racism in the US of A.
If people want to talk about, deal with, and get past racism in the USA, fine. If they want to talk about slavery, let’s get more support to the UN’s anti-slavery office to try and free the many thousands of slaves still owned and traded in the Sahel from Mauritania to Sudan. Is everyone aware that the fight going on right now in the Sahel is intended to create a slave-owning country encompassing the Sahara? If not, why not? That is what people are being killed for in Mail and Nigeria. They already have the slaves, now they want a country to rule.
Let’s our priorities right. Overcoming racial prejudice is good. Ending the slave trade will also be good.
You don’t have to be a starry-eyed patriot to hold that it is entirely ridiculous to suggest that an obscure (if heinous) interaction involving no more than a handful of people (plus 20-something Africans) in a tiny hamlet in Virginia ought to be more consequential than revolutionary laws of the land (such as the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787) implicating every single one of the millions of souls inhabiting the former 13 colonies.
Check out No Pasarán’s 1619 collection. At the end of each post, there is a compilation of the most consequential opinions on the New York Times project of the past 12 months
https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2020/05/1619-slaverys-fatal-lie-it-is-more.html
1619 & Slavery’s Fatal Lie: “it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn’t slavery but the effort to abolish it”
So, just what is the current Founding Myth that we all believe as Americans, that the 1619 Project attempts to displace? Isn’t it this?
That all Men are created Equal, and have the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that while the Country started out with these ideals, they had cultural baggage with attitudes towards slaves and women, and that the differences between the promises and the reality almost destroyed this country in a horrible, bloody Civil War; and that even decades after that War, we still struggled to live up to those ideals, we continue to struggle to live up to them, and we probably will always struggle to live up to them — but that the goal itself is worthwhile, and something we must always strive for.
What does the 1619 Project offer in replacement of this? We were founded on slavery, we prospered due to slavery, and we will always be, in our heart of hearts, a nation that values slavery.
I can’t help but conclude that, in its attempt to repudiate the Founding of the United States, the 1619 Project literally wants to re-institute slavery. And what’s worse, rather than provide historical evidence that this is the case, they invent evidence out of whole cloth.
Even if my Founding Myth is false, I would sooner embrace it than embrace the truth, if embracing the truth meant rejecting freedom, and replacing it with slavery!
It is for this reason I reject the 1619 Project; the fact that it’s horribly inaccurate makes it all that much easier to reject it.