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Big Lie:
‘The consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans are a new origin story, the very center of our national narrative.’ The 1619 Project |
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The first problem with the 1619 Project is that it isn’t history, it’s journalism. Worse, it gets key facts wrong. Facts are fundamental to history. Regrettably, the 1619 Project is marketed to schools as history, when it’s really just lousy propaganda. It is so bad that entire books are published detailing the errors, omissions, and bias of the 1619 Project. Eminent liberal historians staked their reputations on their published criticisms. Here’s where the 1619 Project is wrong about U.S. History:
- It argues we declared our independence from Britain to preserve slavery, but there is no evidence of this. There is no historical record of any patriot saying or writing slavery was the reason for the American Revolution.
- It asserts that Abraham Lincoln was a “racial colonizer”, not an egalitarian abolitionist. That asserts Lincoln’s comment about sending Blacks back to Africa was his only position. Lincoln evolved issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and recruiting Blacks in the Army.
- It claims America’s capitalism and economic growth were driven by slavery when, in fact, it was the industrial revolution and foreign investment that grew the economy. For example, it falsely attributes modern business practices to accounting methods used on 19th- Century plantations.
- It reaches the grandiose and completely unsupported conclusion, “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism.” Slavery, indentured servitude, and transported criminals were responses to colonial labor shortages. None were permanent.
- It mischaracterizes the first decades of slavery in America, which were significantly different from how slavery evolved over the following 200 years.
- It transplants 21st Century grievances about tax and healthcare policy into what is supposed to be a discussion of historical events. For example, it characterizes a recent vote on a light-rail project in Atlanta as an exercise in racial prejudice and self-segregation.
- It falsely portrays America as a simple dichotomy of black versus white and simple binary choices of exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed. It omits other minorities.
- It ignores the fact that the racial conflicts in American history are not unique to the United States. It ignores the world history of slavery. It omits how America was the first nation expressly founded on principles incompatible with slavery. No mention is made that the world’s first anti-slavery society was established in Philadelphia in 1775. And there is no discussion of America as a refuge for the oppressed from the Huguenots to refugees today.
- It doesn’t mention the many causes of secession in 1861.
- It highlights black American contributions while minimizing white American contributions, especially the most iconic ones, such as the achievements of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
- It fails to mention that Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and other Founders consistently maintained that all people, including black people, possessed natural rights. It never quotes Jefferson’s affirmation of the justice of black liberation.
The 1619 Project inspired The 1776 Report on true history by the Trump administration, the stated purpose of which is to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”
