The 1619 Project and the Attack on the American Revolution - World Socialist Web Site

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The 1619 Project and the attack on the American Revolution - World Socialist Web Site:

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Two years ago this month the New York Times published its 1619 Project.

The Times made grandiose claims for its flagship project. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist-celebrity who was its public face, said that the 1619 Project would reframe all of American history as a race struggle waged by whites against blacks. This “new narrative” would supplant social studies curricula for students who, allegedly, had been denied real history through a racist monopoly of white historians. It was finally time to tell the truth: The year 1619, when the first slaves were brought to Colonial Virginia, was the “true founding” of the United States, and not the Revolution of 1776, which was in fact a counterrevolution waged to defend slavery against the abolitionist British Empire. Beginning with that “original sin” in 1619, anti-black racism has been lodged “in the DNA” of “white Americans.” So much so, that today the inescapable racism of whites is the root cause of every conceivable social ill in America, from obesity to traffic jams.