I’m a year late, but I’ve finally had the time and motivation to read the New York Times Magazine’s 2019 compendium called “The 1619 Project.”[1] As you may know, nearly the entire 100-page issue on Sunday, August 18, 2019, was devoted to the project. Its astonishing goal was—and is—to reset the true founding date of this country to 1619 rather than 1776.
In August 1619, the arrival of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans to the British colony of Virginia inaugurated slavery in this country. As the Times writes in its introduction, chattel slavery “is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.”[2]
Times staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who organized the massive project, sets the stage by writing poignantly about her father, who always flew an American flag in his yard. “No matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead,” she says, yet “that flag always flew pristine”; when it showed the least bit of wear, he replaced it. Young Nikole was puzzled and disturbed by his patriotism. “I had been taught in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that . . .we had contributed little to this nation.”
But in fact, she argues, black Americans were the foundation of the country. Today, she thinks she understands her father’s insistence on that flag. Not only did slaves build the homes of the founding fathers and the headquarters of government in Washington, D.C., the cotton they picked helped fuel the Industrial Revolution. And, perhaps more important, “Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.” For that reason and others, says Hannah-Jones, “no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.”[3]
So, the 1619 project is summarized by a sweeping statement:
“Out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made American exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system, and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day.”[4]
This is, indeed, a new way to think about slavery. I tend to think of slavery as a gash in the country’s history, a wound in the body politic that has never quite healed. But Hannah-Jones’s image is a deeply felt alternative.
Her ambitious claim is hard to support with details, though. For example, Times writer Mehrsa Baradaran claims that cotton and Caribbean sugar “accelerated worldwide commercial markets in the 19th century, creating demand for innovative contracts, novel financial products and modern forms of insurance and credit.”[5] That seems to downplay the process of contract development that had been going on since the end of feudalism. Yet there is much to be said about the economic impact of cotton, a key factor in the growth of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trade.
In another story, sociologist Matthew Desmond links slavery to many elements of modern capitalism. Among other claims, he quotes historian Edward Baptist as saying that the use of slaves as collateral for mortgages brought about a “new moment in international capitalism, where you are seeing the development of a globalized financial market.”[6] Again, this seems excessive, but there may be truth in it.
I’ll discuss outside historians’ views of the project in my next column, but now I want to illustrate the magazine’s scope, keeping in mind that the Times’ project itself is larger than the magazine. In cooperation with the Smithsonian, the Times also published what it called a broadsheet with stories about African-American history, illustrated with curated artifacts. And the Times is marketing the issue to schools with lesson plans that “challenge historical narratives, redefine national memory and build a better world.”[7]
The August 2019 issue consists of 13 major essays, each covering a modern topic such as capitalism, medical inequality, and massive incarceration, all subjects viewed as having been caused or profoundly influenced by slavery. In addition, there are six sidebars and 17 short commentaries by black writers. These latter writings, about historical events such as the 1770 death of Crispus Attucks and the 1963 deadly bombing of a Birmingham church, take the form of poems, essays, and imaginative reconstructions.
Almost everything about this magazine compendium is grim, sometimes grisly. There are a few exceptions. The last article, “Hope,” features several young Howard University law school graduates. One painful poem by Kiese Laymon about a 1984 speech by Jesse Jackson also ends with hope. There is one joyful story—about a summer street hip-hop party in 1979.
Even Wesley Morris’s essay about music is sad.[8] It does not celebrate the contributions of black Americans to contemporary music; rather, it describes American music as having been stolen from African-Americans. It particularly features the nineteenth-century appropriation of black music by black-faced white minstrels, and it makes clear how hard it was for black people to be viewed as legitimate minstrels, even though their music was being copied (and often distorted).
Morris’s piece suggests that the theft continues. In 2019 black hip-hop singer Lil Nas X’s song “Old Town Road,” which Morris calls a “cowboy fantasy,” became a wild hit on YouTube and TikTok. It was no. 1 on Billboard’s Top 100 Hits chart for weeks and even reached Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. But then Billboard took it off the country chart. Why? Morris quotes the producers: it “did not ‘embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” In Morris’s words, “The song is too black for certain white people,” italics his.[9]
Now that you have a rough picture, my next post will discuss what historians have said about “The 1619 Project.”
[1] “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, Aug. 18, 2019. All subsequent citations are from this issue.
[2] “Introduction,” 4.
[3] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Idea of America,” 16, 17.
[4] “Introduction,” 4.
[5] Mehrsa Baradaran, “Fabric of Modernity,” 36.
[6] Matthew Desmond, “Capitalism,”37.
[7] “The 1619 Project in Schools,” 99.
[8] Wesley Morris, “American Popular Music,” 62-67.
[9] Morris, 67.
Second only to Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project receives the prize for grievance mongering and negatively distorting American History.
African American commentator Jason L. Riley hits the 1619 Project head-on in his article, “A Bid to Revise the New York Times Bad History.” His criticism of the 1619 Project appears in the Wednesday, February 19, 2020, issue of The Wall Street Journal.
Riley brings to our attention a more balanced counter-narrative, the “1776 Project,” instituted by a black conservative, Robert Woodson. Joining Woodson’s effort are African American scholars including Glenn Loury, who points out that slavery predates Western Civilization. Loury writes: “Slavery is a fact of human civilization since antiquity. Abolition is the new idea. And that is a Western idea not possible without the democratic institutions that were built in 1776.”
Indeed, one wonders why the progressives have latched so firmly on the idea that utopia will be achieved if only their white countrymen and women are made to be abjectly ashamed of themselves for the sins of people long ago—minimizing the good things that happened such as the abolition of slavery, the erection of democratic institutions, and the expansion of civil rights for all from speech to voting.
Yes, in an age where–on the average–whites in the United States do not enjoy the highest incomes, do not have the highest levels of education, and comprise in the aggregate the greatest number of people in poverty, one wonders why The New York Times cannot encourage Americans to turn to one another and not turn against one another?
Since my ever so-great-grandmother (Cicely Reynolds) came to Jamestown in 1610 as an indentured servant, I propose that year as the founding of our country. Her descendants live on in varying degrees of prosperity.
The 1619 Project is a premier example of junk history.
First, the claim that slavery and slaves had the overwhelming role asserted by the 1619 authors requires tunnel vision. Using similar tunnel vision, you could claim central roles for many other groups and institutions. Thus, it could be argued that the REAL builders of America were the persecuted Irish and Italians who came to America and built our cities. Or that the REAL builders were persecuted Jews who made possible America’s power and influence through their inventions and scientific insights (e.g., the atomic bomb) and their role in popular culture (e.g., Hollywood). Or that the REAL builders were British Americans (including Scots), who gave us our political system and initiated our world-wide commerce.
You can play similar games with any of a number of ethnic groups and/or institutions.
Second, many of the claims commonly made for slavery’s impact are simply inaccurate. For example:
* The Constitution was said to be a product of slavery and slaveholders. But among the 1648 state convention delegates who ratified the Constitution, only a small percentage were slaveholders. And among the public who voted for those delegates, the percentage of slaveholders was vanishingly small.
* Ah, but weren’t many of the Constitution’s framers and leading advocates slave holders? Yes—but so were many of its leading opponents: Patrick Henry, George Mason, and Richard Henry Lee, to name a few. And many of the Constitution’s most conspicuous supporters were strongly anti-slavery: James Wilson, John Dickinson (who emancipated the slaves he inherited), and Alexander Hamilton, to name three. The fact is that support for (and opposition to) for the Constitution simply didn’t follow slavery/anti-slavery lines.
The summary of the 1619 Project offers other examples of demonstrable falsehoods. We are told that slavery was responsible for America’s “economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system…” But such ethnic groups as the Irish, WASPS, and Jews were clearly more important for America’s economic and industrial power than either slaves or slave holders; on the contrary, slavery actually retarded our economic and industrial growth—as shown by the comparative growth rates of free and slave states. As for America’s “electoral system,” most of its important characteristics were imported from Britain.
Of course, when the authors said “electoral system,” they probably forgot about Britain and were thinking only of the Electoral College. But the claim that slavery dictated creation of the Electoral College is almost pure myth. Possibly the single most influential Founder behind the idea of indirect popular election of the president was James Wilson, who was fiercely anti-slavery. During the Constitutional Convention’s discussions of the presidential election system, the framers balanced many significant considerations, but there were few references to slavery. FAR more important were such considerations as (1) avoiding dominance by any one region, (2) ensuring that the person elected could do the job, (3) protecting federalism without giving the states undue influence over the president, and (4) ensuring that the person elected had significant popular support.
Interestingly, in the final convention vote over the EC, the states most committed to slavery (SC and GA) both voted against it!
Even the 3/5 compromise, which certainly was influenced by slavery, was driven largely by the belief that slavery was an inefficient economic system—not by the notion that it was a good idea. For the history, see Robert G. Natelson, What the Constitution Means by “Duties, Imposts, and Excises”—and Taxes (Direct or Otherwise), 66 Case Western Res. L. Rev. 297 (2015).
People talk a lot about “white privilege” these days, but what is privileged among academics is “scholarship” that serves politically correct purposes (such as tarring America as irredeemably racist), no matter how shoddy it may be. That’s the stuff that often gets the grant money, fuels promotions and hiring, and gets published in the New York Times.