In 2021. Nikole Hannah-Jones published The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story in the New York Times Magazine and book form. She and the Times were committed to, and were committing, an amazing exercise in lying and slandering.
They said that 1776 was not the key date in American history. Rather, the significant date in our history was 1619 when a group of settlers came here searching for a place where they would be allowed to enslave other people.
To pull this off, they needed to have a public that would buy anything they were told about history and not be confused by facts. It would help if people with fancy degrees went along.
Let’s look at facts. In 1619, slavery was universal. You didn’t have to go anywhere to do it. Slavery, indentured servitude, and family members sold to pay off debts were universal. People owned people of the same color, the same tribe, or any other group. The word “slave” comes from “Slavic” because so many Slavic people were enslaved by the Ottomans. In fact, slavery still exists. An organization called Walk Free produced a Global Slavery Index 2023 and determined that there were fifty million enslaved people in the world in 2023.
I keep referring to Thomas Sowell. He is a Black man who was born in 1930 in Gastonia, North Carolina. His book Black Rednecks and White Liberals has a chapter called The Real History of Slavery. The book was written before the 1619 exercise in slander. The chapter is sixty pages. In the first few hundred words, he puts the lie to the notion that slavery in America was a unique evil. He also describes the hypocrisy and motives of people who make this argument.
Why would anyone wish to arbitrarily understate an evil that plagued mankind for thousands of years, unless it was not this evil itself that was the real concern, but rather the present-day uses of that historic evil? Clearly, the ability to score ideological points against American society or Western civilization, or to induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population today, are greatly enhanced by making enslavement appear to be a peculiarly American, or a peculiarly white, crime.
Slavery wasn’t unique to Western Civilization, or even Britain and America. They stood alone in developing a revulsion to it and paid dearly to end it. One of the early leaders, William Wilberforce, was born in 1759, 140 years after 1619. By that time, there was growing discomfort with the slave trade. Britain led and enforced a ban.
Many problems can be made simple, but only by leaving out the complications which those in the midst of these problems cannot so easily escape with a turn of a phrase, as those who look back on them in later centuries can.
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Among the other examples of anachronistic moral principles being applied in our own times to earlier times have been the many complaints that the Constitution of the United States did not abolish slavery. This was never a viable option because the South would not have remained united with the North if there had been such a clause. The clause would have been an empty symbolic gesture, leaving millions still enslaved in the South, but jeopardizing the existence of a vulnerable new country by splitting it in half at the outset.
Freeing the slaves, either by their owners (manumission) or by law, was seen as more complicated to those at the time than we think of it now. There were two major dangers. The first was the threat of a race war. Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted were among those who saw the need to end slavery but also recognized a danger in the sudden freedom of many slaves.
The other concern was about the lack of economic skills of the newly emancipated. They were illiterate and inumerate and had no property or assets.
[Congressman John] Randolph could not simply free his own slaves legally, since he had inherited a mortgaged estate and the slaves were part of that estate. Only after he had removed both financial and legal encumbrances was freeing his slaves possible, and only after he made some provision for their economic viability as free people did he consider it humane.
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Thomas Jefferson likewise regarded emancipation, all by itself, as being more like abandonment than liberation for people “whose habits have been formed in slavery.”
In earlier times, The 1619 Project would have been laughed off and scorned by a public that understood actual history. Sadly, there have been too many decades of propaganda posing as education. When Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been used as your history textbook, you’re in trouble. A fascinating word was used to explain the 1619 Project’s “minor fault” that shouldn’t prevent its acceptance. We were told it caught America’s true nature, even though it was “ahistorical.” Ordinary folks thought it was simply wrong or a lie. They lacked the sophistication and years of education to call it ahistorical.
Three Atlantic Coast Conference basketball teams are in the Raleigh-Durham Triangle area of North Carolina. Duke, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina (UNC) are the sources of those teams. People in the region have different views on the universities associated with those teams. It is sometimes asked in jest if the schools match the quality of the teams. In 2021, Nikole Hannah-Jones was offered a tenured position on the UNC faculty. There was a furious backlash. She decided to decline the UNC position and take a similar post at historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C. instead.
Many North Carolinians decided that the UNC basketball team was far more respectable than the faculty, especially the History Department. When we see in surveys that young people favor Socialism or even Communism over Capitalism and have no appreciation of America’s government and freedoms, we suspect their education is a major part of the problem.