Debunking the 1619 Project

Mary Grabar

• Editore: Regnery History
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781684512119
• Argomento: Storia
• Categoria: Primordi della storia americana

It's the New "Big Lie" According the New York Times 's "1619 Project, " America was not founded in 1776, with a declaration of freedom and independence, but in 1619 with the introduction of African slavery into the New World. Ever since then, the "1619 Project" argues, American history has been one long sordid tale of systemic racism.Celebrated historians have debunked this, more than two hundred years of American literature disproves it, parents know it to be false, and yet it is being promoted across America as an integral part of grade school curricula and unquestionable orthodoxy on college campuses.The "1619 Project" is not just bad history, it is a danger to our national life, replacing the idea, goal, and reality of American unity with race-based obsessions that we have seen play out in violence, riots, and the destruction of American monuments—not to mention the wholesale rewriting of America's historical and cultural past.In her new book, Debunking the 1619 Project, scholar Mary Grabar, shows, in dramatic fashion, just how full of flat-out lies, distortions, and noxious propaganda the "1619 Project" really is. It is essential reading for every concerned parent, citizen, school board member, and policymaker.

CHAPTER 1 “The 1619 Riots”

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 Americans’ 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 mob’s screaming “Black Lives Matter!”—or 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. Kendi’s 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 books’ 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 “slave demonstration” in Charleston.² In Maryland, hundreds of white people obediently repeated after a black leader the vow not to “allow racism, anti-blackism or violence.”³

America was terrible, and white Americans—all of them—were responsible. That was the prevailing new sentiment.⁴ White Americans themselves were accepting it as creed that racism was in their “DNA,” that all were guilty of the “original sin” 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 Americans’ over-consumption of sugar, and so on.

These injustices went back to the nation’s 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 “our nation’s true founding,”⁵ the date when America began—as a “slavocracy.”⁶

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 “1619” 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 “The 1619 Project.”⁸ It was a “Project,” indeed. It took a bold step beyond where even the most “woke” historians and educators had gone. It turned American history upside down and replaced America’s 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 country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.

Out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew 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 nation’s true founding.¹⁰

It inspired a raging debate that continues to this day and shows no sign of abating—and 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 “the 1619 riots.”¹¹ And Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter “from whose mind the project sprang,” agreed.¹² In a tweet, Hannah-Jones proudly embraced the “1619 riots” label as an “honor.”¹³ In a public radio interview she explained, “I think [The 1619 Project] has allowed many Americans, particularly white Americans, to connect the dots they weren’t connecting before,” namely between “police violence and inequality.”¹⁴ And, as she insisted in a CBSN interview, the destruction of property is not really violence. “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body,” 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 Wendy’s 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 targets—unlike those of earlier years, notably in 2017 in Charlottesville—were 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 “underprivileged” class. In fact, it sometimes seemed that the majority were from a multiracial group of college-educated young adults. Many were white “woke” millennials, part of a new left-wing cohort. They were the “only demographic group in America to display a pro-outgroup bias,” that is, a preference for “other racial and ethnic communities above their own.”²⁴ They seemed to be taking the new version of American history—the damning picture of our country as a “slavocracy”—to the streets. They took their anger out on monuments and statues—climbing atop them, hitting them with axes, blowtorching them, setting them on fire, beheading them, spray-painting them, pulling them down with ropes—in 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 “slave owner.” It was one of “at 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,” 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 “no point” in keeping statues of slaveholding founding fathers. “All 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.” 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, “Thomas Jefferson: Child Rapist & Slaveholder / her name was Sally Hemings.” The article claimed that Jefferson had “raped one of his slaves, Sally Hemings,” and that she “gave birth to six of his children.” It linked to the Monticello website, which authoritatively states that “Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six of Sally Hemings’s children,” 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 “Black Lives Matter” painted in huge letters on Sixteenth Street, which leads to the White House, and named a commission to look into renaming “dozens of structures in the nation’s capital, including federal monuments and buildings in addition to local public schools.” 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 namesakes’ “ties” to the Confederacy: Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Sidney Lanier³²—the 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, “The 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 century”? 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...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: “The 1619 Riots”
• Chapter 2: The Project Is Launched
• Chapter 3: Canceling Thomas Jefferson—and 1776
• Chapter 4: Declaring Independence “to Protect the Institution of Slavery”?
• Chapter 5: “Unlike Anything That Had Existed in the World Before”?
• Chapter 6: A History Neither New nor True
• Chapter 7: A Not So Simple Story
• Chapter 8: The Wolf by the Ears
• Chapter 9: Colonization and Freedom
• Chapter 10: Taking Down Abraham Lincoln
• Chapter 11: Choosing Resentment—or Freedom?
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright