You may recall a little of the uproar last year when the New York Times Magazine launched its “1619 Project,” claiming that our country’s founding was not 1776.
The project’s idea is that the country’s actual start should be assigned to 1619, the year the first known slave ship arrived in America from Africa. The premise is that the U.S. is hopelessly racist and ought better be known as a “slavocracy” rather than a “democracy” or a constitutional republic that more accurately describes it.
Such an idea should dissolve on the lack of its merits, but The Times is partnering with the Pulitzer Center to produce classroom materials based on the 1619 Project. In other words, its creators are doing their utmost to push an alternative history onto schoolkids that many prominent historians say is full of errors and represents “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”
The Times is also running ads on social media touting the Project as a way to sell subscriptions and ponied up for a pricey ad promoting the Project featuring R&B singer Janelle Monae during the Oscars.
Dr. Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma and the former SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said in an article for Commentary, “Considered strictly as an exercise in historical understanding, and in deepening the public’s understanding of a profound issue in our national past, the Project represents a giant missed opportunity. It passes over the complex truth in favor of an exaggeration bordering on travesty. And if it has any influence, that influence will be as likely as not to damage the nation and distort its self-understanding in truly harmful ways – ways that will perhaps be most harmful of all to Americans of African descent, who do not need to be supplied with yet another reason to feel cut off from the promise of American life.”