1619 Project
Discussion
A critique from the left
Tom Mackaman:
"The New York Times 1619 Project ... seeks to impose a new narrative of American history in which all is to be explained by white racism. In its own words, the Project, “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 [the year the first slaves were brought to colonial Virginia] as our true founding.” The lavishly funded campaign includes a glossy magazine that is being distributed by the hundreds of thousands, free of charge, to museums, libraries and schools, including, so far, every high school in Buffalo, Washington DC, Winston-Salem and Chicago, where the public school workers went out on strike last week.
...
There is also agreement between Trump and his ruling class opponents that the working class should be divided. For the Democratic Party, this entails the promotion of various forms of identity, including gender, sexuality, and, above all, race, as the decisive social category.
This is the political essence of the 1619 Project. Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones sets the tone in the project’s lead essay. She insists that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” that slavery is its “original sin” and “the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day,” and that “the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.” Against all of this, “black Americans fought back alone.” [Emphases added]
What are the political implications of this approach to history? If we grant as true that “white America” can never overcome its racism, it follows that there exists no possibility for political cooperation and genuine solidarity among working class people and youth in America, let alone the world, to confront the crises that threaten all of humanity. Black workers and youth should subordinate themselves to the African American wealthy and upper-middle class, people like Ms. Hannah-Jones, and organize as an identity group inside the Democratic Party—for which, of course, the New York Times is a primary mouthpiece.
There is nothing progressive about this in the slightest. Indeed, in its insistence that race—which has no basis in science—is the determinative category of both the present and past, the 1619 Project shares the most basic premise of the white supremacists and fascists that are being set into motion by the Trump administration.
This is dangerous politics, and very bad history. Hannah-Jones mixes anti-historical metaphors pertaining to biological determinism (that racism is printed in a “national DNA”) and to religious obscurantism (that slavery is the uniquely American “original sin”). But whether ordained by God or genetic code, racism by whites against blacks serves, for the 1619 Project, as history’s deus ex machina. There is no need to consider questions long placed at the center of historical inquiry: cause and effect, contingency and conflict, human agency and change over time. History is simply a morality tale written backwards from 2019.
...
There is also agreement between Trump and his ruling class opponents that the working class should be divided. For the Democratic Party, this entails the promotion of various forms of identity, including gender, sexuality, and, above all, race, as the decisive social category.
This is the political essence of the 1619 Project. Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones sets the tone in the project’s lead essay. She insists that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” that slavery is its “original sin” and “the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day,” and that “the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.” Against all of this, “black Americans fought back alone.” [Emphases added]
What are the political implications of this approach to history? If we grant as true that “white America” can never overcome its racism, it follows that there exists no possibility for political cooperation and genuine solidarity among working class people and youth in America, let alone the world, to confront the crises that threaten all of humanity. Black workers and youth should subordinate themselves to the African American wealthy and upper-middle class, people like Ms. Hannah-Jones, and organize as an identity group inside the Democratic Party—for which, of course, the New York Times is a primary mouthpiece.
There is nothing progressive about this in the slightest. Indeed, in its insistence that race—which has no basis in science—is the determinative category of both the present and past, the 1619 Project shares the most basic premise of the white supremacists and fascists that are being set into motion by the Trump administration.
This is dangerous politics, and very bad history. Hannah-Jones mixes anti-historical metaphors pertaining to biological determinism (that racism is printed in a “national DNA”) and to religious obscurantism (that slavery is the uniquely American “original sin”). But whether ordained by God or genetic code, racism by whites against blacks serves, for the 1619 Project, as history’s deus ex machina. There is no need to consider questions long placed at the center of historical inquiry: cause and effect, contingency and conflict, human agency and change over time. History is simply a morality tale written backwards from 2019." (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/01/amer-n01.html)