By Henry Fowler, Stevensville
With The New York Times “1619 Project,” every month is now Black History Month.
The Project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” Instead of 1776, 1619 (the year the first African slaves arrived in North America) is the “true” founding; instead of a democracy, a “slavocracy” was founded; and instead of liberty and equality against monarchy, America was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy.
This politically motivated falsification of history has been debunked by several of America’s leading historians, Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, and Victoria Bynum, whose interviews are published at www.wsws.org. These four plus another prestigious historian, Sean Wilentz, wrote a letter to the Times in December demanding the paper correct the falsehoods.
The Project presents and interprets American history entirely through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory in an attempt to delegitimize the American nation. The intended effect is to convince Americans that everything about their traditional way of life is illegitimate and that they have no right to resist the radical social transformations that the liberal elite is engineering for us.
This Project is implementing the slogan in George Orwell’s book “1984”: “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” The liberal elite, who already control the present, are attempting to control the past (by changing our view of it) to ensure their control in the future.
That’s the reason the Times is sending the 1619 Project material all over the country, to schools, libraries, and museums, and is developing a proposed teaching curriculum for teachers to use in their classes.
The 1619 Project is part of the culture war to destroy Middle America. The liberal elite wants to destroy traditional America because they hate it and the people who created it.
David Welch says
You have grossly misrepresented both the 1619 Project and the letter you cite which is critical of some aspects of the project. In the words of Dr. Wilentz, published in the The Atlantic in December of 2019:
“Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it’s just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and racism to American history is a wonderful idea.”
“Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.”