The NY Times plans a revision of American history: all slavery, all the time
By now you may have read something about the NY Times’ 1619 Project to rewrite American history as the story of racism. Not just racism as a part of American history—racism as the story, the root of the story, the reductionist Theory of Everything Wrong With America, Past, Present, and Future.
I’m not making this up. If you read the link at my previous post about a talk Times executive editor Dean Baquet had with his staff, you may have noticed that a portion of Baquet’s remarks had to do with the 1619 project [emphasis mine]:
Baquet:[Keith Woods] wrote a piece about why he wouldn’t have used the word racist, and his argument, which is pretty provocative, boils down to this: Pretty much everything is racist. His view is that a huge percentage of American conversation is racist, so why isolate this one comment from Donald Trump? His argument is that he could cite things that people say in their everyday lives that we don’t characterize that way, which is always interesting. You know, I don’t know how to answer that, other than I do think that that race has always played a huge part in the American story.
And I do think that race and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story. Sometimes news organizations sort of forget that in the moment. But of course it should be. I mean, one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story. And I mean, race in terms of not only African Americans and their relationship with Donald Trump, but Latinos and immigration. And I think that one of the things I would love to come out of this with is for people to feel very comfortable coming to me and saying, here’s how I would like you to consider telling that story. Because the reason you have a diverse newsroom, to be frank, is so that you can have people pull together to try to tell that story. I think that’s the closest answer I can come.
In addition, that meeting featured remarks from staffers, one of whom had this to say:
I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.
And that is the basis of the 1619 project—that America began with the importation of slaves in 1619 into this country.
Well, I guess if you want to frame a narrative equating the American dream of liberty with slavery, that’s what you have to do:
Byron York describes it, and it’s not primarily about Trump [emphasis mine]:
In the Times’ view (which it hopes to make the view of millions of Americans), the country was actually founded in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to North America, to Virginia, to be sold as slaves.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of that event, and the Times has created something called the 1619 Project. This is what the paper hopes the project will accomplish: “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America — “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”…
The essays go on to cover the economy (“If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”), the food we eat (“The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery.”), the nation’s physical health (“Why doesn’t the United States have universal healthcare? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War.”), politics (“America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.”), daily life (“What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot.”), and much more.
The Times promises more 1619 Project stories in the future, not just in the paper’s news sections, but in the business, sports, travel, and other sections. The Times’ popular podcast, The Daily, will also devote time to it.
…A major goal of the 1619 Project is to take the reframing message to schools. The Times has joined an organization called the Pulitzer Center…to create a 1619 Project curriculum. “Here you will find reading guides, activities, and other resources to bring The 1619 Project into your classroom,” the center says in a message to teachers.
The paper also wants to reach into schools itself. “We will be sending some of our writers on multi-city tours to talk to students,” Hannah-Jones said recently, “and we will be sending copies of the magazine to high schools and colleges. Because to us, this project really takes wing when young people are able to read this and understand the way that slavery has shaped their country’s history.”
Make no mistake about what the Times intends to do. No more masquerading as a news organization. They are unashamed to be in the propaganda business now. And I suspect that school systems will leap to institute this curriculum and that most people will not even know it happened.
The left has been “deconstructing” American history for many many decades, and over time their vision has been inserted earlier and earlier in a child’s education.
This post is probably already enough to digest for today. But I plan to say a great deal more about the 1619 project and about American history some time in the next couple of days.
Who knew that vanguard of burning bra’s would end up this way…
[those that did have been scrubbed for content reasons]
And they had better start explaining that Africans being sold as slaves started with AFRICANS.
If some of the tribes in Africa did not capture and sell other Africans it is possible Africans being sold as slaves may never have left Africa.
The orientation of NYT was explained the day after The 1619 Project was published in a Slate article which this post references in context of framing the narrative: http://www.barrelstrength.com/2019/08/21/the-narrative/
But I thought that the communist Howard Zinn had already done that.
https://www.amazon.com/Fake-History-Generation-Against-America/dp/1621577732
Ray:
Yes indeed, but you can never get too much Zinnian revisionism. Plus, the Times has a sense of urgency to replace the collusion narrative with the racist narrative in order to defeat Trump. Zinn is no longer around.
“If some of the tribes in Africa did not capture and sell other Africans it is possible Africans being sold as slaves may never have left Africa.”
From a chronicle of a Portuguese slave raid on the west coast of Africa:
It is truly mind boggling that seemingly intelligent people can accept such corrupt interpretations of history. It requires serious cognitive dissonance–or corrupt intent–to view the trajectory of history since the 18th century and then declare that the United States has not been, on balance, a force for good in nearly every way. The country faced its own problems and worked to resolve those. It set the standard, and led the transformation of a world in which personal freedom and liberty were foreign concepts. It sacrificed lives and treasure many times to foster these concepts for people around the world. The critics should be forced to defend their negative narrative.
Personally, I just turned 84. I suspect I will be gone before all of this reaches its ultimate fruition. So, I would say, “so what?”; except that my grandchildren are vulnerable. Sadly they, and their parents, swallow much of the progressive swill, even though they do not share such a distorted view of America. They do not seem to recognize that they cannot pick and choose bits and pieces. The Left will not rest until they have the total package.
The Left NEVER rests. That is why we will lose.
They know if they keep picking at the scab, the wound will never heal. Qui Bono?
The very first slave owner in America was a black man. Almost all of the founding fathers are on record opposing slavery in America.
American Indians owned thousands of black slaves.
At the start of the civil war, there were thousands of black slave owners. Hundreds of thousands of white men died ending legal chattel slavery in America.
Black slavery is alive and well in the Muslim world and, the enslavement of any non-Muslim is fully supported in the Qur’an and Hadiths.
But the NYT doesn’t care in the least about the actual history of slavery in America, they simply see it as an invented narrative with which to bludgeon Trump and those who oppose them.
White supremacy and racism continues to be the dagger point of American democracy. I do believe that. I believed it then, I believe it now.
–Bill Ayers, 2004
I haven’t found a substantial cite to that quote, but I’m looking. However, I don’t doubt for a moment Bill Ayers said that or meant that at some point. I read the Weather Underground “Prairie Fire” communiques, more or less hot off the press, in dingy leftist bookstores back in the day.
As I see it, the “New York Times” has basically become a mouthpiece for the Weather Underground forty years later.
Astonishing.
NYT style guideline advises to form… force close associations, and indulge in liberal license… rabid diversity or color judgments to paint competing interests in monochromatic colors. #HateLovesAbortion
Cicero is right. The Lefties never stop…ever… and they will say anything…shamelessly tell any lie to get what they want.
And only now is the Right starting to fight back…probably to late.
hundreds of thousands of white men died ending legal chattel slavery in America.
An unprecedented reparation regime in blood and treasure to advance the conservation of individual dignity without diversity when color doesn’t matter. We’re still fighting for intrinsic value, which progressed with establishment of Pro-Choice.
More straw clowns. It must be fundraising time. Show us the principles… otherwise, stop indulging diversity. It’s not us, it’s you, you’re not viable. As a gesture of good faith, in accordance to your ethics, and with reverence to your god Stork, abort.
OT: I am now an official Degree-seeking student at UNM.
I was required to undergo an Orientation. I worried about it. I was afraid I would be required to render unto Caesar my “pronouns” before a peer group of newly-admitted students and their HR shepherd-person, as well as some self-flagellation for being a white supremacist. (I’m only a quarter-Chicano and I don’t think that lets me off the hook.)
Fortunately, due to transcript delays, I missed the walking orientation tours of campus and instead did the online version. I was warned there were would be a quiz at the end and so, rolling my eyes, I took notes.
Well, the quiz was only three questions, none of them PC. Paraphrased, the questions were: (1) Did I know I would owe money when I registered for courses? (2) Did I know I was legally bound to pay? (3) Did I know where on the website I could look up my bills and pay them?
I got a cynical laugh out of that. Bravo, UNM, for sticking to the essentials.
n.n.:
I’m not a Christian, as I’ve said many times before. But I went to school in the good old days when Christianity was talked about in public schools without any sense of irony or distaste. We also had to memorize the Battle Hymn of the Republic—and I mean four stanzas of it (minus the third one; see this). Because I was rather good at memorizing poetry and lyrics, I still remember it, and these words (in bold) from the 4th stanza as we learned it came to mind when I read your comment:
Those two lines still move me emotionally. They are a statement—written in 1861 by Julia Ward Howe and adopted as an anthem by the Union soldiers—of one of the explicit reasons men fought for the North. They were willing to die to “make men free.”
Also:
I find the Times more repugnant than I can express in words.
Ann, there’s something screwy with the translation of Moors as blacks. Moor was the name given to Muslims of Iberia and North Africa by the Europeans. I’d say that the article you quote is suspect.
The slaves from West Africa were brought out of the interior by African slavers who had conquered neighboring tribes and took them to ports on the coast where they were sold to the Portuguese. White men didn’t go into the interior.
The slave trade in East Africa was (and is!) entirely run by the Muslims.
The Muslims carried on a large slave trade in the Mediterranean and Europe going as far back as the 800s. The Vikings, before becoming Christians, would raid the Slavic regions and bring them south for sale to the Muslims. The Muslim slavers themselves would raid coastal villages of the Northern Mediterranean and as far north as Ireland. A red haired green eyed young girl was very valuable. This went on into the early 1800s.
The Marine hymn line “to the shores of Tripoli” commemorates the first US foreign war, which was against the Arab pirates who were capturing US ships by piracy and holding the crews for ransom or enslaving them.
The first very successful agra-business in America was tobacco farming. I suppose that slaves were used at some early point. I’ve read that slavery didn’t really ramp up in the U.S. until the cotton gin made cotton farming very profitable.
The patent for Whitney’s gin was finalized in 1807, but the gin for high quality long staple cotton, the McCarthy gin, came out in 1840. The left likes to talk about hundreds of years of slavery in the U.S., but the major quantities of slavery only lasted decades.
I’ve also read that at its peak, the Caribbean islands taken as a whole had triple the number of slaves compared to the U.S., and the same was true for Brazil. So the U.S. had maybe 1/7 of the slaves in the western hemisphere, or less. But the NYTimes spell checker probably doesn’t contain the word “favela.”
Not to emulate the Left but “What about the CHILDREN??”
Any parent who drives his child to a government school to be indoctrinated with garbage like this and more is guilty of child abuse. The only reliable solution is home schooling. Private school teachers go to the same colleges as government school teachers and get indoctrinated the same.
The good thing is that there is now tremendous high quality material available for home schooling. Hiring tutors for material that the parents do not feel competent to teach is affordable to most.
The tough news is that, while children are vulnerable, the family will have to get by with one income. Overwhelmingly the mother is going to stay home to do the teaching. If women are not willing to make this sacrifice, they should not have children.
To paraphrase an old Southern proverb: To the Left, everything is racist.
Ann Coulter drills down on the NYTimes’ race obsession.
I agree with Neo about how nauseating this 1619 propaganda campaign is. A great-grandfather of mine wore a Union uniform for four years, sang that battle hymn, and endured privation and a serious wound. I do understand that most soldiers on both sides were not fighting specifically for or against slavery per se. But the conflict was born out of the argument over the institution, and the nation paid for the wrong of the institution in blood. To ignore the changes, including the changes in my own lifetime, is willful ignorance and spite.
Yes, well, we simply cannot escape our guilt. Guilty of exclusivity, guilty of self-interest, guilty of not caring enough, guilty of setting interpersonal boundaries, and insisting that you are the owner of your talents and virtues, and entitled to them.
Well European-American, “you didn’t build that”, as you were famously told once before.
All that you are and have been and ever can be … even if you migrate hence to the stars … is the unearned and undeserved result of the unpaid labor of billions and billions of Africans stolen and transported to the western hemisphere. And don’t mention that the vast majority went to Brazil or the Caribbean, you damned exploiting capitalists.
Airplanes, repeating firearms, automobiles, machine tools, the combustion turbine and painless dentistry … all due to the unpaid labor of innocents run down and dragged off into captivity by men wearing silk pantaloons and powdered wigs.
1619 … everything and everyone after bears the taint.
Ahem. Fortunately, in my case, one at least of my ancestors can be proven to have arrived some years before that.
So I guess Dean Baguette or whoever, can, with all respect due, go f**k himself after all.
Paul in Boston:
That’s not in an article but is an excerpt from “The Beginnings of the Portuguese-African Slave Trade in the Fifteenth Century” by Gomes Eannes de Azurara, written at the time of the Portuguese slave raids.
Hello. I’ve been following some of the heavy hitters on this 1619 Project business. It occurred to me at one point that its endpoint is to make the USA look essentially like South Africa in the mind of Joe Average, that is, to be comprehensively delegitimized in such a way as to require or compel a couple of fairly specific policy conclusions. I’m going to indulge in a bit of speculation on what those are or could be:
One, an international crackdown in the sense of a boycott, if you will, like that to which S. Africa was subject – athletes barred from the Olympics, things like that; economic sanctions, even. Now, don’t laugh so hard – if the entire rest of the world could be convinced to grit its teeth and embark on such a course, we could be put to the screws over the long term – we’re not an autarky, after all.
Two, as happened/is happening in S. Africa, a sort of disenfranchisement of the ‘evil Boer’ – a principled act of political revenge, in my view. I can understand the reasons, I guess, but 2 wrongs != 1 right, after all. In our case, the place of the ‘evil Boer’ in this program would be filled by its obvious domestic equivalent, the average white American, and particularly the non-Progressive variety. With what specific results? Well, I suppose one obvious one would be the breakup of the country. Another could be the physical removal of the (uncooperative portion of the) white population either out of the country entirely or maybe some type of internal exile, kind of like what happened to the Tatars or Khalmyks or something.
This is in addition to the other effects that such a program as they propose, carried to its logical conclusion, would produce, which have been covered by commentators elsewhere.
I’m just thinking out loud here because this potential parallel fell into my head. I think these kinds of things would be too radical for even most non-European-descended in this country to digest, but given enough time for this project to percolate and all, who knows how matters will look in twenty or thirty years?
We are a freaking tapestry of people, about 15 years ago when my aunt, the remaining of six children in my mothers family had her 90th birthday we had the last large family gathering. Cousin married to an Asian doctor, cousin to a nice young black man, lots of mixing of folks with beautiful children and total acceptance because they were family, a big old freaking family of about 50 honoring our old maid Aunt who had been a college dean. It was a happy celebration and yes we had some Jewish cousins too, three generation of intermarriage.
I know what the folks on the left are trying to do because you can’t make an omelet without breaking a lot of eggs and you can’t take over a group of people who are happy and successful and proud of their country. My family on my mom and dad’s side starts way back in the 1640’s in Massachusetts where where a many times over grandmother was let out of Newgate prison to come to the New World as an indentured servant.
As the years went by we had heritage with Germans in Pennsylvania, Scots coming through Baltimore in the 1740’s and later into Kentucky, we fought in all sorts of wars including the Civil war on both sides and I had a great grandfather who returned to Arkansas, my grandma was born in the 1870’s and never saw her father smile. Lots of people lived and fought and suffered a great deal when our nation did away with slavery. By the way on my mom’s side they did own slaves in Virginia in the early 1700’s, some of them moved to Missouri where there are still black families with the same last name, so there’s that.
What the hell are we doing trying to go after regular old, go along, get along white people for the sins of our great grandparents? This thing de-railed in the 1960’s when I joined the Army in ’66 and ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’ was a hit song and so many young black men were going Airborne that the 82nd Airborne was teasingly called the All African because of their AA shoulder patch and they were hard working strong proud soldier with military leadership that was leading the nation in integration of NCO’s and Officers who were very capable black men. I know, I served with them for four years and watched the moral of the black troops being undermined why the left wing movement and the press. For me that was the turning point and it was despicable the way race has been used ever since.
I was raised to treat every person with respect and do my best to help every person I came in contact with move forward with their life if there was any way I could help and as a manager and employer I hired a lot of folks of different color and background over the years and kind of made a difference from time to time. That’s all we can really do and if we think the government can do some sort of weird stuff to fix people, and the left folks think that way, then we are in for a hard landing if they achieve enough power.
Philip above says: “endpoint is to make the USA look essentially like South Africa in the mind of Joe Average, that is, to be comprehensively delegitimized in such a way as to require or compel a couple of fairly specific policy conclusions.”
(My emphasis.) I think this is right on. I don’t necessarily think those are the specific policies aimed at, but that is the basic outline of what’s being done. If/when the delegitimizing succeeds, the still-powerful residual sense of Joe Average that structures and institutions such as the Constitution are quasi-sacred and more or less untouchable will fade away and cease to be obstacles in the way of progressive goals.
They are equating slavery with capitalism? Do these facts mean anything to them?…
– Slavery was the norm for the majority of the population in the world from about 3500BC, long before Capitalism.
– SOP for most of human history was for the victorious culture in any conflict to enslave the vanquished one.
– It was Capitalism that led to Mercantilism and Industrialization that finally made slavery unprofitable.
– Humans of all races were made slaves at different times and places.
– Slavery was a feature of the larger pre-Columbian American cultures.
It appears like they want to make it seem like it was a uniquely American invention.
During the colonial era in Africa Ghana was called the Gold Coast, Liberia was called Wood Coast, Côte d’Ivoire was the Ivory Coast, and what was known (at independence) as Dahomey was Slave Coast. Hundreds of thousands of black slaves — more precisely, people who were captured during tribal wars — were imprisoned and sold to Portuguese slavers for transport to the New World. Most of them ended up in South America (predominantly Brazil) and the Caribbean; a few made it to North America. Dahomey traditions and cultural practices, such a voudoun (called Voodoo in Brazil, the Caribbean and southern USA) are directly traceable to Dahomey. I served there from 1975-1977, and read a lot of history of the region and the era, mainly in French.
I also served in the Central African Republic and studied pre-colonial history along the Ubangui River. Slave raids (including those led by Tippu Tib) took many slaves from that region north to the Sudan and east to the Indian Ocean ports of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, where Arab traders bought ivory and slaves. This trade is also well documented by early English and French explorers.
Slavery is only marginally a North American custom. It is more significantly a black African and Arab custom. The Times is missing a lot of very important history by looking only at slavery in the American colonies.
I believe I will start a one-person boycott of the NYTimes. Its level of dishonesty has just climbed too high. I have known a number of NYTimes correspondents overseas, and respected them all. But I cannot respect the dishonesty of their current editorial staff.
I’m waiting for the Babylon Bee to muddy the waters on this story so Snopes can reassure all their confused readers, but in the meantime…
https://babylonbee.com/news/concerning-survey-finds-too-many-people-think-snopes-is-a-real-fact-checking-website
https://babylonbee.com/news/under-mounting-pressure-from-snopes-babylon-bee-writers-forced-to-admit-they-are-not-real-journalists
https://babylonbee.com/news/prodigal-son-kicked-back-out-after-old-tweets-surface
https://babylonbee.com/news/six-year-old-saying-why-dont-we-just-give-everything-away-for-free-surges-to-top-of-democratic-polls
https://babylonbee.com/news/republicans-question-trumps-loyalty-to-party-values-after-he-actually-does-something-to-help-defund-planned-parenthood
(h/t PowerLine for the first one, and wisdom from some of their commenters).
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/08/is-snopes-a-satire-site.php
Unfortunately most people under 40 now have been sufficiently indoctrinated so that they will be willing, and in some cases eager, to accept this interpretation of our history. We may try to push back but time is not on our side. Our numbers inevitably will dwindle. When a people come to believe that their nation is illegitimate eventually they’ll feel it’s no longer worth sustaining. This has always been the left’s ultimate objective.
This is the story PowerLine riffed off of — it is no wonder to me that people have difficulty telling satire from actual news when the actual news is so bizarre these days, but there seems to be a simple solution, as our intrepid reporters discover.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/16/readers-think-satire-is-real/
You can’tmake this stuff up — but journalists apparently can.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/20/trump-is-fighting-the-battles-no-one-was-willing-to-fight/
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/21/minorities-dont-believe-trump-is-a-racist/
Which may explain why the NYT is going full-throttle to “correct” that failure.
Philip
Leftism is a death cult, and that is what they desire – the death of the nation.
Kate
Same here. On my living room wall is a frame containing a daguerreotype of my husband’s great, great, grandfather, his war record (all four years of the war – wounded twice) and the sword he carried throughout the Civil War.
Bob
Absolutely. Anyone who loves their children AND this country should be home schooling.
I read somewhere that the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean had a much, much higher slave death number and rate than in the US. There they were worked to death in a harsh environment.
Ironic then that Caribbean slavery is merely a footnote compared to the evils of US slavery.
The contemporary American Left is poison.
The New York Times is the principal vial in which it resides.
Here is an interesting take on the “1619” topic.
I believe that would have been the tobacco farming business.