How Public Schools Paved The Way For Americans To Believe The 1619 Project
In a time of social strife and ahistorical grievance narratives, a properly informed patriotism is sorely needed to restore our national sense of unity.
Auguste Meyrat
By Auguste Meyrat
July 30, 2020
In response to numerous schools adopting a history curriculum based on The New York Times’s 1619 Project, Sen. Tom Cotton proposed a bill that would deny them federal funding. The 1619 Project is a series of essays asserting that the United States was founded on slavery and that its institutions continue to discriminate against black Americans. The curriculum is designed to introduce these arguments and themes to the classroom.
Several prominent historians have criticized the 1619 Project’s inaccuracies and obvious narrative-peddling. To introduce this into the classroom would give students a warped view of America and completely misrepresent of history as a discipline.
Most of the writers of the 1619 Project are not historians with expertise, either, but journalists offering biased and uninformed takes on American history. They are not doing the hard work of synthesizing historical data into a coherent vision of the past; they are pulling stories out of thin air.
To her credit, the project’s leader Nikole Hannah-Jones is quite open about her intentions, which, first and foremost, is to guilt Caucasian Americans into paying slavery reparations. As Hannah-Jones exclaimed, “If you read the whole project, I don’t think you can come away from it without understanding the project is an argument for reparations.â€
By itself, the 1619 Project fulfills Hannah-Jones’s purpose since her audience, mostly educated white liberals, can properly assess her argument and act accordingly. If the project is presented as a supplement to K-12 curriculum, however, it is difficult to see these essays as anything other than leftist indoctrination.
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/30/how-public-schools-paved-the-way-for-americans-to-believe-the-1619-project/
