by ReviewEquivalent1266
For example, when errors/omissions are found in the 1619 Project’s US history book the author calls whoever discovered the issue(s) a racist or race traitor.
In August, history professor James H. Sweet wrote that the 1619 Project illustrated the problem of “presentism” in history. In an American Historical Association essay, “Is History History?” he argued The New York Times’s 1619 Project looks at “the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.”
Sweet almost immediately found himself attacked by a mob of historians for not adhering to the standards of “presentism.” He quickly groveled with a public apology and a walkback of his gentle initial observations.
Yet he wasn’t wrong at all. To make the case that all white people should pay black people for what the 1619 Project calls (white) America’s “Original Sin” of slavery, one needs to present all white people as complicit in the enterprise and all black people as innocent and blameless victims. Certainly, the false idea that slavery was unique to America and practiced only by white people is a commonly held belief.
1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones is not a historian, but a journalist specializing in race issues. So she might be excused for not knowing about the African role in the slave trade, the ubiquitous nature of slavery throughout history (in which no ethnic groups, races, or faiths are exempt), and the fact that many free black people also owned slaves. But Hannah-Jones does not accept correction; she attacks every critic as a racist or race traitor.
As I’ve learned from researching for my new book, “Debunking The 1619 Project,” Hannah-Jones knowingly presents falsehoods about American history and slavery, such as that all white people are morally culpable for slavery and that all black people are blameless. In this episode, she helped the Twitter mob pile onto Sweet, while making the very same point for which he was being attacked.