CHAPTER 1 âThe 1619 Riotsâ
By the summer of 2020, concerns about racism had reached a level of hysteria. While the vast majority of Americans believe in equal rights under the law and are opposed to racial discrimination, academics and activists often inappropriately obsess about race. In the summer of 2020, that obsession had gone far beyond the classroom or academic conference. It had entered Americansâ everyday lives, and seemingly 24/7. No longer could Americans be assured that they would be able to enjoy a meal at a restaurant without a mobâs screaming âBlack Lives Matter!ââor even get there without encountering a roadblock of protesters. Americans bought books in an effort to learn How to Be an Antiracist, as the title of Ibram X. Kendiâs book promised to teach. For those in denial that they needed to be taught not to be a racist, there was White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Both booksâ sales soared.1 Self-flagellation was conducted not only on a psychological level but literally, as young white American men in chains and with whip marks on their backs were led by black men in a role-reversed âslave demonstrationâ in Charleston.2 In Maryland, hundreds of white people obediently repeated after a black leader the vow not to âallow racism, anti-blackism or violence.â3
America was terrible, and white Americansâall of themâwere responsible. That was the prevailing new sentiment.4 White Americans themselves were accepting it as creed that racism was in their âDNA,â that all were guilty of the âoriginal sinâ of slavery, and that its effects were still all around, in everyday life, in the way innocent black men were hunted down by police in modern-day versions of slave patrols, in medical science that still used African Americans as guinea pigs, in polluted and unsafe minority neighborhoods, in African Americansâ over-consumption of sugar, and so on.
These injustices went back to the nationâs founding, it was charged. Furthermore, that very founding was a sham. America was not really founded in 1776, with our Declaration of Independence, but in 1619. That was âour nationâs true founding,â5 the date when America beganâas a âslavocracy.â6
The year 1619 had jumped into American consciousness the previous summer. Before then most Americans would not have been able to name, much less recognize, its significance.
That had changed in August 2019. From that point, vandals began adding â1619â to the graffiti being sprayed on statues.7
What had caused the shift? A special issue of the New York Times Magazine commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of what many take to be the beginning of slavery in the colonies and then the United States. But it was much more than a commemoration. Commemorations of the event appearing in other outlets attracted very little notice.
The special August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine was called âThe 1619 Project.â8 It was a âProject,â indeed. It took a bold step beyond where even the most âwokeâ historians and educators had gone. It turned American history upside down and replaced Americaâs origin date, and, with it, the American identity. As the original online version at the New York Times website said, the year 1619
was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British [sic]9 colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the countryâs original sin, but it is more than that: It is the countryâs very origin.
Out of slaveryâand the anti-black racism it requiredâgrew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.⊠The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nationâs true founding.10
It inspired a raging debate that continues to this day and shows no sign of abatingâand that is dividing Americans more by the day.
The 1619 Project helped inspire the hatred that fueled the riots that would rage throughout 2020. Rioters, in a Taliban-like fury, tore down and defaced any and all traditional representations of American history. Indeed, Charles Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, dubbed that mob violence âthe 1619 riots.â11 And Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter âfrom whose mind the project sprang,â agreed.12 In a tweet, Hannah-Jones proudly embraced the â1619 riotsâ label as an âhonor.â13 In a public radio interview she explained, âI think [The 1619 Project] has allowed many Americans, particularly white Americans, to connect the dots they werenât connecting before,â namely between âpolice violence and inequality.â14 And, as she insisted in a CBSN interview, the destruction of property is not really violence. âViolence is when an agent of the state kneels on a manâs neck until all of the life is leached out of his body,â she said, referring to the death of George Floyd.15 Hannah-Jones had nothing to say about the twenty-five or more individuals, black and white, who had been killed in the riots.16
2020: The Summer of Woke
The presentation of distorted American history is bound to have an impact. The vilification of our country erupted into riots in the summer of 2020, ostensibly in reaction to the deaths of African Americans at the hands of white police.17 The violence began, several weeks into an unprecedented lockdown due to a pandemic, after the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, an African American man, agitated and under the influence of drugs, who was held down in a knee restraint by a white police officer. In Atlanta, on June 12, after an intoxicated Rayshard Brooks resisted arrest and shot at officers with a taser he took from one of them, he was shot dead. The Wendyâs restaurant where he had fallen asleep in his car in the drive-thru lane, prompting the call for police, was subsequently burned down.18 Footage of a naked, handcuffed Daniel Prude from a snowy night in March in Rochester, New York, released in early September,19 led to rioting and rampages through restaurants by Black Lives Matter protesters.20 The anger over the March 13 shooting of Breonna Taylor was revived. Over a three-month period from May 24 to August 22, 2020, almost 570 violent demonstrations took place in 220 locations across the country. The two weeks of rioting across twenty states following the death of George Floyd produced upwards of $2 billion in damages.21 As we have seen, at least twenty-five Americans were killed.22
The 2020 protests differed from the BLM-instigated riots over the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. In 2020, the destruction went beyond businesses to icons of American history, including Thomas Jefferson. The targetsâunlike those of earlier years, notably in 2017 in Charlottesvilleâwere not just Confederates, but slave owners and nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures deemed to be racists, including Abraham Lincoln, Union officers, and Ronald Reagan. In their rage, rioters even attacked monuments to black Union soldiers and abolitionists, as well as a saint, the Virgin Mary, a pioneer mother, and an elk.23
And the rioters were not just the usual troublemakers, purposeless young men of the âunderprivilegedâ class. In fact, it sometimes seemed that the majority were from a multiracial group of college-educated young adults. Many were white âwokeâ millennials, part of a new left-wing cohort. They were the âonly demographic group in America to display a pro-outgroup bias,â that is, a preference for âother racial and ethnic communities above their own.â24 They seemed to be taking the new version of American historyâthe damning picture of our country as a âslavocracyââto the streets. They took their anger out on monuments and statuesâclimbing atop them, hitting them with axes, blowtorching them, setting them on fire, beheading them, spray-painting them, pulling them down with ropesâin a frenzy of rage that led to the death of at least one young person when the statue-toppling went wrong.25
A statue of Thomas Jefferson outside a Portland, Oregon, high school was pulled down with bungee cords and stray wires. On the empty base were spray-painted the words âslave owner.â It was one of âat least 150 statues and memorials that had been torn down or removed for safekeeping by local authorities in the aftermath of the May 25 death of George Floyd,â the Washington Post reported on July 7. Hofstra University student Rosario Navalta, who back in 2018 had begun a campaign to remove a statue of Jefferson on her campus, expressed the prevailing view. She told a reporter that there was âno pointâ in keeping statues of slaveholding founding fathers. âAll they do is remind everybody of the history of the United States and its role in perpetuating white supremacy and the institutionalization of anti-blackness.â The statue was moved by the administration from its position in front of the student center to a less prominent place across the street.26
In Decatur, Georgia, a statue of Jefferson seated on a park bench in front of the old courthouse, pensively holding a pen above a portable writing table, was removed for safekeeping on June 19, 2020, by the private citizen who had donated it. A neighborhood news site featured a photograph of a young woman holding a sign that read, âThomas Jefferson: Child Rapist & Slaveholder / her name was Sally Hemings.â The article claimed that Jefferson had âraped one of his slaves, Sally Hemings,â and that she âgave birth to six of his children.â It linked to the Monticello website, which authoritatively states that âThomas Jefferson fathered at least six of Sally Hemingsâs children,â but follows with a lengthy recount of the controversies that put the claim under serious question.27
In the summer of 2020, Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser had âBlack Lives Matterâ painted in huge letters on Sixteenth Street, which leads to the White House, and named a commission to look into renaming âdozens of structures in the nationâs capital, including federal monuments and buildings in addition to local public schools.â Denver public schools took up the issue, too. In December, the Falls Church, Virginia, school board unanimously decided to rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary School and George Mason High School. The reason given to reporters was that both men had owned slaves.28 Among the forty-four schools slated to be renamed in San Francisco in January 2021 was Jefferson Elementary (and those named after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln).29 Fortunately, after an outcry from parents the board rescinded its decision on April 6, 2021.30 Still, a year after the riots, school districts around the nation are facing demands to change school names and in the process wipe away chunks of local and national history.31
A petition drive inspired by the 2020 riots is circulating to change the names of three high schools in Montgomery, Alabama, because of the namesakesâ âtiesâ to the Confederacy: Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Sidney Lanier32âthe last a long-admired poet and composer who fought for the Confederacy. In Hampton, Virginia, a community college and elementary school named after the tenth president of the United States, John Tyler, are set to be renamed.33 Would anyone give a hearing to the late, great scholar of slavery, Eugene Genovese, who told the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1993, âThe slaveholders, however great their crimes against black people, mounted the first and only serious native-born critique of the totalitarian tendencies that have run wild in our centuryâ? The practice of dividing persons into demons and saints excludes the possibility of learning about the good our forebears did,34 whether in leaving us songs or a government that has made America the freest and most prosperous nation in the world for the last two-plus centuries.
The mania extended to the corporate world. A...