At last, notes PJ Media's Bryan Preston, the New York Times admits its 1619 project was wrong (thanks to Ed Driscoll). But he points out some huge caveats, as do the World Socialists' Tom Mackinay and the Washington Examiner's Becket Adams.
PJ Media's Bryan Preston:
In August 2019, The New York Times launched a project it called the 1619 Project. Its aim was to locate the founding of America to that year, 1619.Why?Because 1619 was the year the first slave ships arrived in the New World.The Times explicitly sought to diminish America’s actual founding in 1776 by changing the focus from 1776 to 1619.Why?Because in 1776, the American revolutionaries laid out their “Why?” in the Declaration of Independence as they commenced the revolution to throw off the yoke of the British monarchy. The Times explicitly set out to re-write America’s answer to its central purpose. The Times set out to make liars of America's founders.The 1619 Project sought to re-write the American story. We would no longer be a nation built to protect the inalienable rights of all, as the Declaration states, but would instead become a nation forged specifically to enslave some. Who would, who could, be proud to be an American if our nation was founded specifically to protect and project the abomination of slavery? What would future Americans think, and do, if the Times' version of history stands?The Times launched its project, and historians criticized it immediately. Yet the Times persisted, assailing its critics as its 1619 Project was adopted and used by public schools all over the nation.Why?That’s a question the NYT should now be forced to address, in public, as it should retract the entire Project. The paper has made a very significant change to its core 1619 claim. But only when it was forced to do so by its own fact-checker.
… The 1619 Project deliberately distorted history to serve current political purposes. It must be removed from all school curricula immediately since its core claim is false and defamatory.In March 2020, notes the WSWS's Tom Mackinay, who interviewed several eminent historians about the 1619 project,
editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine Jake Silverstein announced that the 1619 Project would slightly amend its claim that the American Revolution was a racist endeavor undertaken to fight plans by the British Empire to end slavery.
… Silverstein’s “update” is nothing more than a cynical face-saving exercise necessitated by the revelation that the 1619 Project disregarded its own fact-checkers.
… This passage is still false. Protecting slavery could not have been a significant cause of the American Revolution, because, far from posing a threat to slavery, the British Empire controlled the slave trade and profited immensely from its commerce in people, as well as from its Caribbean plantations which remained loyal during the war for independence.
… The chain of events that led “toward” independence had already emerged with the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765, seven years before the Somerset ruling. “The British” did not seek to disrupt “American slavery” until Lord Dunmore’s proclamation of 1775—issued after the war of independence had begun—offered emancipation to slaves and indentured servants who took up arms against masters already in rebellion. The proclamation in fact explicitly preserved slavery among loyal British subjects, many of whom would live out their days under Dunmore in his final post as royal governor of the slave-rich Bahamas.
… In fact, it is the Times that has portrayed the American Revolution as an episode of “unanimity on the part of the colonists.” The 1619 Project presents the revolution as a simple conspiracy of white Founding Fathers waged to preserve slavery and create a sham democracy. The crowning achievements of this conspiracy, in Hannah-Jones’ telling, were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. On this question, Silverstein, Hannah-Jones and the historians they cite—Lerone Bennett, Gerald Horne, Woody Holton and David Waldstreicher—find themselves in alignment with John C. Calhoun and the other fire-eating defenders of slavery in the late antebellum. Though these historians draw a minus sign where fire-eaters drew a plus, all agree that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution founded a slavocracy, not a bourgeois democracy.
… They disregard Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists who found in the Constitution the legal machinery for slavery’s ultimate destruction, and in the Declaration their “sacred scripture,” in the words of the great scholar of American slavery, the late David Brion Davis. Indeed, what is most glaring about the 1619 Project’s falsification is that it disregards the fact that the American Revolution ultimately led to the destruction of slavery. Just “four score and seven years later,” as Lincoln counted the years backwards from Gettysburg in 1863, an institution that had existed since the ancient world, and in the new world for 350 years, was destroyed.
Over at the Washington Examiner, Becket Adams does not let Leslie Harris get off lightly:
The head of the New York Times’s much-hyped 1619 Project concedes she got it wrong when she reported that “one of the primary reasons” the colonists revolted against England was to preserve the institution of slavery.Indeed: to add that couple of words while retaining the premise — the phrase "Conveniently left out of our founding mythology" — has now become clearly fallacious, obviously deceitful, and plainly deceptive. Not to mention retaining Hannah-Jones's title with not a single change, "small" or otherwise, as Becket Adams points out below.
Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones claims now that she meant to say “some of” the colonists fought to preserve slavery, not all of them.
The admission comes seven months after her faulty assertion first appeared in the New York Times’s package of essays arguing that America’s founding is defined by chattel slavery. The admission also comes after Hannah-Jones mocked and debased the many academics who directed mild and good-faith criticisms at her bogus statement.
And, yes, the New York Times reporter admitting she got it wrong comes only after a 1619 Project fact-checker published an op-ed revealing she explicitly advised the paper against printing the erroneous claim that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery.
It cannot be stressed enough that Hannah-Jones’s since-corrected version of historical events was key to the entire project, the premise of which is that America was founded upon, built upon, and primarily formed by slavery.
But, hey, better late than never!
“Yesterday,” Hannah-Jones tweeted, “we made an important clarification to my #1619Project essay abt the colonists' motivations during the American Revolution. In attempting to summarize and streamline, journalists can sometimes lose important context and nuance. I did that here.”
In her original essay, she writes:
That passage now reads:Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
“The clarification is small — just two words — but important,” Hannah-Jones said on Twitter.Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
Along with not understanding the difference between “all” and “some,” it appears the New York Times reporter struggles also with the definition of the word “small.” Because amending her essay to say that some of the colonists revolted to preserve slavery, as opposed to asserting it was a driving force behind the entire revolt, is a hell of a lot more than a “small” clarification.
Then again, there is always the possibility that she is merely being disingenuous, which would not be surprising considering she has not conducted herself as a good-faith operator since the 1619 Project’s debut in August 2019.
In fact, there are a few things suggesting Hannah-Jones and the New York Times corrected the record not for a love of truth and accuracy but begrudgingly and half-heartedly. First, there is the lengthy editor’s note the paper published this week arguing her original error was, essentially, fake but accurate. There is also the fact that her article’s title still reads, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”
Also, there is the rather uncomfortable fact that the correction comes only after a 1619 Project fact-checker revealed last week that her recommendations were explicitly ignored by the editorial staff. The timing of the fact-checker's allegation and the New York Times's correction leaves one with the distinct impression that the paper’s admission of error was more or less forced. It cannot go on simply dismissing critics as ignorant, possibly closeted racists when one of those critics is its own fact-checker. At that point, they have to own up to the mistake. Hence the resentful, mealy-mouthed correction.
… Hannah-Jones deserves no praise for at long last correcting an error fundamental to her entire project, which had been brought to her attention almost seven months ago by multiple academics whose objections any intellectually serious, humble person would have heeded.
RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History
• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery
NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT
• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never
disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project
• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project
• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"
• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619
• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret
• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”
• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"
THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?
• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"
• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice
• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"
• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism
• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin
• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)
• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?
• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print
• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"
• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more
• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!), An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")
• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory
• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans
• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive
• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind
• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise
• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"
THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s
• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No
one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of
the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that
slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of
everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the
same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an
inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a
hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)
• Mary Beth Norton: In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent
• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves
• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")
• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s
• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it
• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century
• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833
• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier
• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"
• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth
TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.
• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding
• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1
• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"
• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes
• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere
• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith
• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were
• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"
LAST BUT NOT LEAST…
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding
of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled"
Opposition to "Hate Speech"
• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"
• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks
• The Secret About the Black Lives Matter Outfit; In Fact, Its Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD
• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History
• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …
• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619
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