We cannot trust the 1619 Project

The much-anticipated book version of the New York Times’ celebrated 1619 Project was recently released, and it’s rocketing to the top of the bestsellers list. The 1619 Project, you will remember, claims that, in spite of the explicit justifications laid out in the Declaration of Independence, America’s real reason for being was the perpetuation of slavery.

There’s not much to be said about this anti-American and ahistorical nonsense that eminent historians haven’t already said, but if you need reminders that the woman responsible for conceiving and propagating the 1619 Project is a haughty conspiracist with no regard for facts, well, Nikole Hannah-Jones is happy to provide them.

“In this country, you can even kill white people and get away with it if those white people are fighting for Black lives. This is the legacy of 1619,” tweeted Hannah-Jones following Kyle Rittenhouse’s self-defense acquittal for shooting three rioters in Kenosha last summer. We can debate the wisdom of arming teenagers when cowardly politicians order cops to stand down during a riot, but all three of the men Rittenhouse shot had notable criminal histories. Hannah-Jones’s definition of “fighting for Black lives” is so expansive it includes giving the benefit of the doubt to a convicted pedophile who was on tape lighting things on fire and yelling the n-word in the middle of Kenosha’s riot.

Two weeks before that, Hannah-Jones was on Twitter saying Americans should feel shame for dropping atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. “This is American exceptionalism—justify anything, no matter how craven and barbaric, because America is the greatest country on the earth,” she wrote. Suffice to say, this was yet more ahistorical nonsense. Another ordinary Twitter user accused her of “poorly understand[ing] history” and pointed out that “a land invasion of japan would have cost millions of lives. And you want to know about horrific shame read about unit 731 or the Nanking massacre. Or the 3-10 million killed by Japan’s army between 1937-45.”

Hannah-Jones retorted, “You’re the one who poorly understands history. They dropped the bomb when they knew surrender was coming because they’d spent all this money developing it and to prove it was worth it. Propaganda is not history, my friend.”

Hannah-Jones was rightly pilloried for her inaccurate history by everyone from professional historians to, well, me. A bomb in Pearl Harbor hit the building my five-year old father was living in. My grandfather, a buck sergeant in the Marine Corps, spent the next three years fighting in the Pacific and almost certainly would have been part of the land invasion that Hiroshima and Nagasaki preempted.

Hannah-Jones eventually deleted her arrogant and misinformed tweet on WWII—hardly the first time she’s had to do that. Last summer on Twitter, she demanded her 600,000 Twitter followers read a lengthy conspiracy theory that “government agents” are setting off fireworks “to disorient and destabilize the #BlackLivesMatter movement” at a time when race riots were sweeping the country. She later issued a rare apology and deleted the tweet.

Speaking of last summer’s riots, she fanned the flames of their destruction by making excuses for violence. In June of last year, she went on CBS News and said, “I think we need to be very careful with our language. … Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things [violence and physical harm] is not moral.”

Just so we’re clear, the literal Merriam-Webster definition of violence is “the use of physical force to harm someone, to damage property.” The specific reason why we don’t tolerate wanton destruction of property is that it often leads to physical harm. For instance, this past July, investigators in Minneapolis found a man who was burned to death in a building that was lit on fire in the riots from the previous summer—his body went undiscovered for over a year.

Even if you do think there’s need to discuss how America can make amends for its ugly legacy of Jim Crow or chattel slavery, Hannah-Jones is uninterested in that discussion unless it’s wholly on her terms. Last year a prominent group of black scholars formed the 1776 Project to “uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values and challenge those who assert America is forever defined by its past failures, such as slavery.”

Despite publishing thoughtful essays rebutting the 1619 Project from heavyweight black intellectuals such as John McWhorter, Clarence Page, and Shelby Steele, Hannah-Jones tweeted “I want to say this is my response to the 1776 project,” followed by a picture of her pointing at her bottom row of gold teeth with her pinky, a rude hip-hop gesture. She followed that up with another tweet suggesting that the black scholars involved didn’t really care about the effects of slavery.

Again, she deleted those tweets—but they were consistent with her previously stated belief that “there is a difference between being politically black and being racially black. I am not defending anyone but we all know this and should stop pretending that we don't.”

As a general rule, in political arguments as in life, one should strive to put the best construction on our opponents’ arguments. But in the two years I’ve been watching public debates over the 1619 Project play out, I’ve seen Hannah-Jones make no serious effort to understand good-faith objections to her narrative, and she has frequently treated them with disrespect. I don’t doubt that Hannah-Jones has been the object of much unreasonable vitriol herself and I am sorry for that, but it’s no excuse for her own ignorance and contemptuous treatment of others.

Worse, Hannah-Jones’ behavior has been incentivized at every turn. In the last few years Hannah-Jones has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, and recently accepted a lavishly funded professorship at Howard University. Progressive institutions no doubt see her divisive attempts at shaming the country as useful to achieve a political agenda she explicitly spells out in her new book, including “a livable wage; universal healthcare, childcare, and college; and student loan debt relief” in addition to cash reparations for slavery. As such, they are desperate to imbue Hannah-Jones with credit she hasn’t earned as a journalist, much less as an historian.

I sincerely hope Hannah-Jones adopts a more evenhanded and rigorous approach to her critics and her work in the future. But so long as the 1619 Project continues to be pushed into school curricula and is taken seriously by major institutions, we need to be honest about what it is and equally honest about the mindset of those promoting it.