Today on the homepage, I return to the 1619 project, to catalogue the dishonesties of the lead essay in detail:
. . . to portray the American experiment as all about slavery is perverse. The influence of this twisted view appears in the distortions, both subtle and blatant, in the 1619 essay by Hannah-Jones.
It’s worth delving into these in some detail. They reveal what makes the 1619 project not just an an effort to shine a light on a terrible part of our past but a much more ambitious, ideologically driven attempt to redefine our history.
There is much truth in the Hannah-Jones essay, and much to learn from it. One of her central points, that African Americans have been great American freedom fighters and are more American in this sense — and in their tenure in America — than many European Americans, is profoundly true, and movingly expressed.
Yet if you are advancing what purports to be a more accurate history, you shouldn’t distort the record and elide inconvenient facts.