Some good news from the pandemic: “The 1619 Project” pushed by The New York Times has not turned into a drumbeat for slave reparations. Americans can no longer afford reparations.
Even a Pulitzer Prize awarded this month for “The 1619 Project” was muted by COVID-19. The New York Times’ attempt to rewrite history is no match for a virus.
Now that we are finally realizing how intertwined our economy is with China, it’s also fair to ask: Do the Chinese want to pay reparations to black Americans? Probably not.
“The 1619 Project” was published on Aug. 18, 2019 when the American economy was thriving. As recently as mid-February, Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones was on the hustings, pushing for reparations – the idea that descendants of slaves are owed money.
During one appearance at the University of Virginia, she told the audience, “If you’re really uncomfortable with that notion, you really have to ask yourself why.”
Perhaps she should ask herself why she thinks anyone is owed something that they haven’t earned.
Presumably, Hannah-Jones was well-paid for her inaugural story introducing “The 1619 Project.” Her editor at the Times, Jake Silverstein, acknowledged that the project “sprang” from Hannah-Jones’ mind. In summary, she believes that America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619 when 20 to 30 African slaves arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia. Hannah-Jones is convinced that slaves made America what it is today.
“(T)he United States simply would not exist without us,” she writes.
More likely, Hannah-Jones would not exist without America.
Africa, the continent of her ancestors, contains countries older than the United States. Any of them could have created a constitution like America’s. For whatever reason, African leaders chose not to, and their people did not rise up and demand it.
Like it or not, America’s constitution was written by white men, and this country evolved into a place that people of all skin colors, from countries across the globe, have freely immigrated to – in some cases, desperately sought to enter.
Hannah-Jones wanted her introduction to “The 1619 Project” to highlight the hypocrisy and contradiction of white men writing a document claiming equality of all while owning slaves. Hypocrisy is universal. She might examine her own hypocrisy.
She writes that 12.5 million Africans were “kidnapped” from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean.
For her own purposes, Hannah-Jones chose to ignore who kidnapped those Africans.
There is a graphic description in Zora Neale Hurston’s book “Barracoon” of one of these kidnappings. Former slave Oluale Kossola or Cudjo Lewis was kidnapped from the West African village of Bante when he was 19 and brought to Alabama. Hurston, one of the Harlem Renaissance writers, tracked him down as an old man in Alabama and spent months interviewing him.
Cudjo (as Hurston frequently refers to him) described how members of his tribe, the Takkoi, were asleep when a warrior tribe from Dahomey descended on them. Previously, the king of Dahomey had demanded crops from Cudjo’s tribe. The Dahomey tribe preferred to catch slaves instead of grow crops.
Hurston, quoting Cudjo in the vernacular he uses, writes: “De king of Dahomey, you know, he got very rich ketchin slaves. He keep his army all de time making raids to grabee people to sell so de people of Dahomey doan have no time to raise gardens an’ make food for deyselves.”
It was almost daybreak when the Dahomey struck. In a fascinating observation, Cudjo points out that in the most vicious warrior tribes even the women will cut off heads.
“I see de people gittee kill so fast! De old ones dey try run ‘way from de house but dey dead by de door, and de women soldiers got dey head. Oh, Lor’! … De women soldier ketchee de young ones and tie dem by de wrist. … Some dey snatch the jaw-bone while de people ain’ dead. Oh Lor’, Lor’, Lor’! De poor folkses wid de bottom jaw tore off dey face!”
Cudjo is tied with the others who have been kidnapped, and they are led away. The Dahomey warriors carry the heads of those they’ve killed.
“De heads … got ‘gin to smell very bad. Oh, Lor’, I wish dey bury dem! I doan lak see my people head in de soldier hands; and de smell makee me so sick! De nexy day, dey make camp all day so dat de people kin smoke de heads so dey don’t spoil no mo’. Oh Lor’ Lor’, Lor’! We got to set dere and see de heads of our people smokin’ on de stick.”
Hurston said that in recalling this, Cudjo’s agony was so acute he became inarticulate.
I include this extensive excerpt because in the Editor’s Note to “The 1619 Project,” Silverstein writes: “A word of warning: There is gruesome material in these pages. … That is, unfortunately, as it must be. American history cannot be told truthfully without a clear vision of how inhuman and immoral the treatment of black Americans has been.”
Who doesn’t already know how bad the institution of slavery is? It has existed since ancient times. Is some slavery worse than others? Would you rather be owned by the king of Dahomey or Thomas Jefferson?
Hannah-Jones chose to ignore the fact that some slaveowners, like Anthony Johnson, were black. He owned both black and white slaves. There were white slaves and indentured servants – many of them Scots-Irish. My last name is Fitzsimmons. Am I owed reparations?
In her vast exploration of the year 1619, perhaps Hannah-Jones missed the well-researched book “White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America” by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh. (Among its positive reviews was one from the Times after its American publication 12 years ago.)
The chapter on black slave owner Johnson includes this line: “The ‘twenty and odd Negroes sold’ in Point Comfort in 1619 were no more or less enslaved than the free-willers or convicts they would have encountered on the shore.”
The Times’ “1619 Project” is more deceptive than The Washington Post’s infamous “Jimmy’s World.”
Janet Cooke, a black reporter at The Washington Post, won a Pulitzer for “Jimmy’s World,” a story about an 8-year-old boy who was a heroin junkie. It would later turn out that there was no Jimmy, that Cooke created the story after hearing about a youngster hooked on heroin. Since she couldn’t find him in her reporting, she created him in her imagination.
She gave the story authenticity by quoting various experts – real people – commenting on the drug culture.
Undoubtedly, there were and still are heroin users who are children so Cooke’s story had a kernel of truth. The Washington Post denounced the story as a fraud and returned the Pulitzer.
“The 1619 Project” is a sham in service to The New York Times’ embrace of advocacy journalism as a moneymaker – not just for black Americans but for the paper’s own bottom line. The Times called the project “a major initiative.” The paper’s managers likely envisioned “The 1619 Project” would be their next “Marshall Project.”
The latter began in 2014 and has produced story after story pushing to end mass incarceration and promoting progressive concepts such as justice reinvestment. Neil Barsky, a former reporter who pursued a career in finance, founded The Marshall Project, and Times former editor Bill Keller initially ran it.
At its founding, Barsky said The Marshall Project had raised about 60 percent of its $10 million target for two years from groups like the Ford Foundation. He envisioned using journalism to create a way to blend a nonprofit with a commercial enterprise.
“Once you amass an audience, once you have built a brand, why can’t we get corporate sponsorship, why can’t we have conferences, why can’t we have ads?” he said in the Times. “I think that’s the way to be sustainable.”
It sounds a lot like the intent of “The 1619 Project.” Among the generous donors contributing to it are the Fund II Foundation (whose mission is to preserve the African-American experience) and the NAACP.
Even before the inaugural set of stories was published last August, the Pulitzer Center had entered into an agreement with the Times to widely circulate the project for free among schools, complete with a lesson plan “to challenge historical narratives, redefine national memory and build a better world.”
So Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer, awarded May 4, was practically a foregone conclusion. Perhaps among the curriculum questions that could be explored is: If “The 1619 Project” is supposedly factual, why did it win the Pulitzer under the Commentary category?
If you look at Hannah-Jones’ essay in the original Times print edition or online, there is no “Commentary” bar or designation anywhere in the layout.
Perhaps the Times thought it could avoid further controversy by calling it commentary after the fact. In March – seven months after “The 1619 Project” was inaugurated – editor Silverstein offered a strange, long-winded “clarification.” Instead of a straightforward correction, he notes that a passage has “sparked a great deal of online debate. The passage in question states that one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery.”
He goes on for several paragraphs. Buried inside one of them are these weasel words: “We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists.”
This controversy wouldn’t be enough to stall the profits and products to be generated by “The 1619 Project.” For that, blame COVID-19.
Trying to make hay out of a historic event that occurred 400 years ago is tough in a global community. Pandemics are a reminder that the world is full of human suffering.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
I believe Hannah-Jones once worked at The Oregonian.
History is not something that “springs” from somebody’s mind. I have not read “The 1619 Project” and will not. However, I do read and respect history. It should never be confused with fantasy.
She did work at The Oregonian. I believe she came and spoke to a class at my school.
According to her Wikipedia page, she is also a MacArthur genius. She could consider that a form of reparations!
I have the Sunday Times magazine that launched the 1619 Project. The idea of this being part of the curriculum is troubling, especially in Portland. We have a problem with underperforming black students, especially males. Telling them they’re victims won’t help.
An argument could be made that the magazine helps blacks see the good things they have contributed to American culture. The problem is that most Americans (whatever their race) already know that. Of course, blacks have made contributions. So has every racial or ethinic mix that makes up this country. We are a nation of mutts — not purebreds.
Ultimately what Hannah-Jones is pushing is separatism and segregation: American blacks are special; their suffering was/is unique. I can see why some black Americans want that to be so, but it isn’t true.
They give Pulitzers for propaganda?
Evidently, Dexter.
I cannot reply to this stuff anymore. On its face it is such rotten and bigoted pseudo-schlarship one would think no adult would countenance it. But, …
These days there is a push on to recognize and honor teachers, but this 1619 curriculum and the white privilege brain washing and…
Slavery is common in today’s world, quite often or perhaps most often in the Islamic world. Communists have been pretty stern enthusiasts of the untermensch principle, too.
The Cherokee, the Aztecs and on and on . . .
Yes, these people, our fellow citizens, are pushing for revolution and race war.
Where’d it start, this embrace, this pursuit of self-destruction? The 60s when the colleges and universities rolled over for the radicals?
I do not know.
As an aside I knew “hate crime” laws were wrong when the were first proposed and we are now seeing them pretty close to fruition, to fatality: I listen to you speak. I interpret your speech according to my convenience and you are now and forever condemned.
Look at the smughappy comments on this dreck at the WaPo or NYT. Our betters love it.
Recall how Oberlin treated Gibson’s Bakery. That school still insists of the rightness of its actions. The Ivies are no better and often worse. Yet they are the schools from which we draw our leaders.
I believe that the complacent and complaisant elites, regardless of party, did seek to overthrow the last presidential election.
I was a young and rather inattentive and indifferent Republican during Watergate.But, I get and got the crime of the coverup.
This monstrous action against Trump beggars that of Nixon and his troupe of plotters. Remember Journolist?
Vote by mail? Voter fraud?
Perhaps I repeat myself. I used to live where the Minneapolis Strib was the major daily.
Stories from the Front:
Black male holding black female w/knife to throat. Standing atop her bed. Starts to slice – cops shoot.Guy drops dead gal safe.
The female and the black community outraged – dead guy shot too many times.
Black male 60s civil rights activist cum head of street kid reclamation org.
Found dead w/KKK written in blood on wall. Cop posit red herring. Cue black outrage. KKK did this. Bust child murderer in dead guy’s Cherokee. Killer is black kid murdered hero picked up for sex. Was well known and frequent activity of corpse guy.
Strib headlines funeral of martyred hero: no mention anywhere of his screwing street kids, in article and obit.
Well, I can see leaving homosexual child rape out of the obit.
My favorite Strib race story:
Fed up old black guy shoots dead black kid cutting across his lawn on his bike. White college activists hit Kinkos and distribute flyers. Riot ensues. Hotty white news anchor out there feeding the flames on live TV. Black kid with a brick steps into frame, brains her. Splits.
I could go on. But, screw these Minneapolis people.
I should leave out the lesbian fire chief who was jumped ahead of qualified males, operated office on a gimme sex for position and favor basis.
She gets busted. Demoted. The least punishment possible.
How’d it work out for the Somali that murdered the Aussie woman? A little affirmative action with your lead?
I could go on.
I’ve been reading more of the foreign press lately, and I found this amusing observation a couple of days ago in the UK Spectator: America is returning to normal; they’re rioting again.
Unlike our own media, the foreign press isn’t as consumed with hatred towards Trump. Their coverage seems more reliable even if it’s just as negative. And they know history. I can’t imagine a European paper running a story like the one in The Washington Post a few days ago: Millenials are “the unluckiest generation in U.S. history.”
Nothing has hurt the American media’s credibility like their coverage of race. They’re afraid of the subject. They may ignore the stories you’ve mentioned here, but it doesn’t keep them secret. Millions of Americans know these stories, and they know what the media leave out.
I don’t like the way George Floyd died, but that doesn’t mean I have to deify him and believe he was a “gentle giant” (so was Rodney King, even though he once took a tire iron to a Korean store clerk).
The antidote to the media’s racist coverage of racism is more stories like Central Park’s infamous Amy Cooper who was caught on camera threatening to call the police on an “African-American man” who told her to leash her dog. She had all the progressive credentials. Yet in an unguarded moment she was caught acting like a “racist” and called out.
Let the progressives and their friends in the media slap scarlet letters on one another.
https://youtu.be/-XpMkNKsaJw
Here’s another 1619 reference. Meanwhile we have the revolting development of thousands of progressives marching on Portland spewing virus and platitudes. Governor Brown says this morning we are ready for Phase II. That train has left the station Kate. We just opened up and it wasn’t because of a few gun toting right wingers storming Salem and demanding haircuts. We are so fucked.
Nicely put.
Thanks for the link. Imagine a typical workday for Markisha Smith, director of the Office of Equity and Human Rights — soliciting grievances, examining wounded feelings and riding herd on everyone’s language. Now she has “The 1619 Project,” which she probably keeps on her desk like a bible. I made a point of not checking her salary. Even in flush times, those jobs are a waste of money.
Does that Salem Salon owner still need to pay her 14,000.00 fine for opening early or was that dismissed?
I just checked, and it looks like she’s still on the hook for that. However, she has an attorney and is challenging it. She also has GoFundMe page. If the state pursues her, they will look foolish. Of course, that has never stopped state bureaucrats before.
Around 1989 as a freshly minted college English instructor with an M.A. I started teaching in the University of Minnesota system.
I was so new to this world (I’d been dragging a chainsaw around the woods in Montana, Idaho, and NE Washington just a couple years previously) that I thought these diversity officers were there to be of help.
I introduced myself and looked upon them as a resource. Two years later they’d chewed through my life and I was cut loose. Every visit I had made to their office, even if for those few initial chats was marked as a political conflict with whichever identity group. It was a nightmare. It was also how these political officers justified their salary.
I’d asked for tips on working with a WMA who told me that he suffered from some mental health problems (I can’t recall which ones) and I received a letter of reprimand for addressing issues with which I hadn’t any training. They didn’t have any expertise at all; they had political power.
A gay kid, biggish fellow about my size, was my most fun student. God knows he was irregular in doing the readings and attendance but the guy was sharp and funny as hell. Good natured kid. One day before class one of the class athletes who was ‘roided out gave him a hard time.
I didn’t learn of this until the gay political officer got hold of me and asked why had I permitted this? I asked Richard, the gay kid why he hadn’t talked to me. He hadn’t wanted to bother me and really hadn’t thought about it much before going to the politicals.
He and I always got along and had coffee together. Continued to do so. I never permitted that ugly sort of public abuse of anyone in a class of mine. Still and all, I was in a world of shit for tolerating homophobia and re-education was on my horizon.
Years and years later I was taking a course to be a Portland Park Ranger. The city’s chief diversity officer came in and among other things boasted of how she had secured a women’s only swimming hour out of what had been an open swim time. The point was to make Somali women more comfortable. I raised my hand and asked if I understood her to say that she had re-introduced segregation? Boy, that was kicking over the card table.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/378009/
“We are facing one public health crisis within another,” County Chair Deborah Kafoury said in a letter accompanying the application. “The County recognizes that an effective, equitable response to the pandemic that first touched our community four months ago requires us to actively address the disease that has been endemic to this country for 400 years. “Addressing the inequitable disease burden on communities of color is a critical part of our response and our path forward,” she added in a news release. According to the plan submitted Friday, Multnomah county can now meet — or has a plan to meet — all the state prerequisites, plus its added criteria. The biggest hurdle is adequate contact tracing resources. Officials say they have 63 trained contract tracers, and 70 will be on staff by June 8. Their plans is to reach the governor’s threshold of 122 in June. Forty percent of planned case contact tracing positions with bilingual skills are currently filled. Todays Oregonian When I was finishing college in 1975 I worked for a Y afterschool program and a young Deb Kafoury was one of the kids in the program. She was full of herself even back then. Good luck with that contact tracing.