Category: 1619 Project

The annals of the 1619 debacle at the New York Times

October 27, 2020 • 9:00 am

JAC: Greg has another installment in his continuing series on the New York Times’s 1619 project. Readers please note that this is Greg’s piece, not mine.

______________________

by Greg Mayer

As they have since it was published last year, the folks at the World Socialist Website (WSWS) continue to lead in the critique of the New York Times‘ 1619 Project. In doing so, they have highlighted not just the defects of the project as history, but the dissimulation and mendacity of the Times‘ editors and writers in their attempts to defend it. In doing so, they have performed a public service, and have put the lie to claims that criticism of “1619” is a right-wing project.

A few days ago the WSWS posted a damning summary of the Times‘ falsification of the history and intentions of “1619”: “It is all just a metaphor: The New York Times attempts yet another desperate defense of its discredited 1619 Project.” It’s a must-read. Some excerpts:

On October 16, New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein issued a new defense of the 1619 Project in which he now argues that its best-known claim—that the year 1619 and not 1776 represents the “true founding” of the United States—was a metaphorical turn of phrase not intended to be read literally. . . . according to [lead writer Nicole] Hannah-Jones and the Times, “true” history had been suppressed by dishonest “white historians” hellbent on maintaining their racist “founding myth” of 1776. After two centuries of a historical narrative centered on the false elevation of 1776, the 1619 Project declared that “it was finally time to tell our story truthfully.”

In spite of Silverstein’s deletion of the “true founding” claim and his other word changes, the Times’ essential position remains the same: The American Revolution was a retrograde event, in which the defense of slavery was the critical motivation. . . .

As for the Project’s quietly-deleted “true founding” thesis—which was emblazoned on the Times website and repeated again and again by Hannah-Jones on social media, in interviews, and her national lecture tour—Silverstein now claims that this was the product of nothing more than a minor technical error, the sort of snafu that is an inevitable outcome of difficulties for modern-day editors, such as himself, in managing a “multiplatform” publication and “figuring out how to present the same journalism in all those different media.” With all of these formats to tend to, the beleaguered editors of the Times just couldn’t get the story straight! Silverstein does not seem to grasp that the criteria of objective truth do not change as one moves from printed newspaper to website, or from Facebook to Twitter. What is a lie in one format remains a lie in another. . . .

This is the version that was sent out to school children. It read, with emphasis added:

1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?

He [Silverstein] then quotes the revised passage, that has been made to the online publication only:

1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?

Perhaps Silverstein hopes his readers will carelessly jump over this scissors-and-glue work. He writes that the difference in the two passages is “to the wording and the length, not the facts.” But actually, there to be read literally in black and white, the first passage refers specifically to an allegedly false “fact.” If a metaphor is being employed in the original version, it is very well concealed.

In an earlier piece, “Factional warfare erupts in New York Times over the 1619 Project“, the WSWS recounts the brouhaha at the Times over Bret Stephens’ criticism of 1619. Noting Stephens’ use of scholarly criticisms marshaled by the WSWS and others, the piece relates the “bitter conflict” at the Times. One detail I did not know was that the Times Guild has thoroughly disavowed the attack on Stephens from its Twitter account, not merely deleted it:

The Guild later deleted the tweet after a “furor” erupted among Times staff against this transparent demand for managerial censorship of a fellow journalist—to say nothing of its mangling of the English language. The Guild declared that whoever issued the attack on Stephens had done so without permission.

The 1619 affair has clearly revealed that wokeism is not a position on the left end of the American political axis. Rather, it forms an orthogonal axis, and racialists of all persuasions can espouse “identity” über alles; and opponents of wokeism can come from all along the traditional political spectrum. That is why we need to have terms such as the “liberal left” vs. the “illiberal left”. (The WSWS would be to the left of “liberals” on the traditional political axis, but I would identify them as “liberal left”, since “liberal” in this context refers to defense of civil rights and anti-racialism as the opposition to wokeism and racialism.)

In ignoring its own fact checker, dismissing cogent criticism from respected scholars, and dissimulating about its actions, the Times has discredited itself. As the WSWS put it,

The 1619 Project is a travesty of both history and journalism that has humiliated the Times and undermined its self-proclaimed status as “the newspaper of record.”

I still read the Times, but I can no longer defend it.

h/t Brian Leiter

Bret Stephens is wrong about most things, but he is very brave

October 10, 2020 • 11:15 am

The title of this piece came from Greg Mayer, who was about to write a post on this same subject when he saw my draft. So, with permission, I’ve stolen his title, which was better than mine. And I agree with it.

Bret Stephens knew what he was doing when he called out the 1619 Project in his latest column (click on screenshot below). For he not only criticized the project, but the paper’s—his paper’s—journalistic integrity, verging at times on mendacity.  In fact, it’s a good piece, even if you don’t like Stephens’s conservatism, for what I know about his indictment is true. But how much of a career will he have at the NYT now? For what he did was far more serious than the “crimes” that made Bari Weiss’s life at the paper so untenable that she left. She was just anti-woke, which went against the paper’s editorial grain.

When Greg saw this draft (he’s followed the Project since its inception, he added this:

You mention Bari Weiss, but don’t forget the opinion page editor, James Bennet, who was defenestrated from the Times for insufficient wokeness. One thing about Stephens that might protect him is the fact that he is very visible, as the Times‘s premier conservative columnist. Both Weiss (who only occasionally was published by the Times) and Bennet were mostly behind the scenes players; Stephens is out in front, published twice weekly (including his duets with Gail Collins), and a “Columnist”, not a mere contributor.

In his column, Stephens says the 1619 Project, however good its motivations, was handled so duplicitously that it gave the paper’s critics “a gift.”

Let me say first that since the 1619 Project was not just journalism, but also an attempt to infiltrate American secondary education with its ideology from Critical Race Theory, it represents a victory for the Woke. Although Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the Woke haven’t won, I disagree. They control not only the two most respected liberal papers in America, and most higher education, but are now putting their tentacles into secondary-school education. Even the Chicago school system has adopted the 1619 Project as part of its curriculum.

But I digress. I described some of the paper’s questionable practices in earlier posts, and Stephens reprises how Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project’s director, simply lied about the project’s overriding aims, saying that she never tried to change the foundation date of America from 1776 to 1619. But she did make that claim several times, and it quietly disappeared from the paper’s website without an explicit correction. And despite trenchant criticism by historians about many of the project’s empirical claims, the paper and editor refused to accept, or even consider, the criticisms.  The Woke don’t do stuff like that.

Stephens finds other problems, like the new claim that 1776 represented the year of “defining contradiction” of America, that the founding principles were “false,” and that Jake Silverstein, the NYT Magazine editor, grossly exaggerated when he said this:

“Out of slavery—and the anti-Black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.”

Well, you can argue about the meaning of words like “contradiction,” “falsity”, and “nearly everything,” but the fact remains that noted historians on all sides of the political spectrum have argued that the Times‘s journalism simply distorted history. Stephens gives several examples of pushback by historians (e.g., here, here and here) and concludes, correctly, I think, that the 1619 Project is “a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around.”

The historical distortions and track-covering by the Times are not in doubt, at least not among those who’ve followed the controversy, but of course all criticism of the 1619 Project by liberals comes with the obligatory praise for its anti-racist intent.  And indeed, the intent was admirable. Who of good will can oppose anti-racism? But the execution has been deeply flawed, and will the paper really reduce racism by inculcating a generation of American children with Critical Race Theory? Further, Trump has already suggested that he’ll cut off government funding to any schools who adopt the 1619 Project in their curriculum. I oppose that autocratic decision as well, as the President should not be dictating what’s taught to children. School boards set curricula.

In the end, Stephens knows he’s even more of an apostate with his NYT colleagues now, but you have to admire him for the courage of his convictions. He didn’t have to write this column, which includes criticisms of the paper’s journalistic practices like this:

Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.

As fresh concerns make clear, on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

Nor did he have to end his piece this way, but I’m glad he did:

For obvious reasons, I’ve thought long and hard about the ethics of writing this essay. On the one hand, outside of exceptional circumstances, it’s bad practice to openly criticize the work of one’s colleagues. We bat for the same team and owe one another collegial respect.

On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

All the more so as journalists, in the United States and abroad, come under relentless political assault from critics who accuse us of being fake, biased, partisan and an arm of the radical left. Many of these attacks are baseless. Some of them are not. Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift.

In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal has reported on a futile effort: a letter to the Pulitzer Committee signed by historians (including Glenn Loury), asking them to take back the 1619 Project’s Pulitzer Prize (that Prize was ridiculous from the get-go, awarded not for quality but wokeness). You won’t be able to read the WSJ article, which is paywalled, but you can see the beginning by clicking on the screenshot below. (Judicious inquiry may yield you a copy of the piece.)

The WSJ repeats some of the earlier criticism, but also links to the Pulitzer letter, which you can read by clicking on the screenshot below:

Of course the Pulitzer folks won’t retract the prize; I don’t know if it’s ever done that, but it surely wouldn’t retract an award for an antiracist piece in these times.  Here’s a short extract from the longish letter which includes lots of material we’re familiar with by now:

The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit. A “sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay,” as the Pulitzer Prize Board called it, does not have the license to sweep its own errors into obscurity or the remit to publish “deeply reported” falsehoods.

The Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to Hannah-Jones’s profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that, despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and patently false assertions. To err is human. But now that it has come to light that these materials have been “corrected” without public disclosure and Hannah-Jones has falsely put forward claims that she never said or wrote what she plainly did, the offense is far more serious. It is time for the Pulitzer Prize Board to acknowledge its error rather than compound it. Given the glaring historical fallacy at the heart of its account, and the subsequent breaches of core journalistic ethics by both Hannah-Jones and the Times, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written” does not deserve the honor conferred upon it. Nor does The 1619 Project of which it is a central part, and which the Board seeks to honor by honoring Hannah-Jones’s essay. The Board should acknowledge that its award was an error. It can and should correct that error by withdrawing the prize.

The letter is signed by 21 original signatories and 7 additional ones from “the Independent Institute.” I can’t be arsed to look most of the scholars up and, as most Woke people do, try to discredit them. I’d never heard of any of them save Glenn Loury, who, as I recall, identifies as a liberal. It doesn’t matter, though, as Pulitzer won’t revoke the Prize. But the original award to the 1619 Project is, I think, a travesty, motivated much more by ideology than by quality.

h/t: Cate, Enrico

Chicago public schools adopt the 1619 Project

September 9, 2020 • 12:30 pm

I’m not a big fan of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, though I think its aims—letting people know that the aftereffects of slavery still weigh down America—are admirable. But I’m wary of its historical inaccuracies, called out by several prominent historians, of its main message that America is affected in nearly every aspect by “systemic racism”, and, above all, by the efforts of the paper to propagandize American schoolchildren with its own unvetted view of history. (What other bit of NYT journalism has been explicitly designed to be part of a school curriculum?).  In view of this, I thought it was a travesty that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Project’s creator, got the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay on the Project. It seemed to me that the Prize was given not for quality but for wokeness.

On the other hand, it’s out of line for Trump to de-fund school districts who adopt the project into its curriculum, as school curricula are the ambit of local school districts, cities, and states—not the President. Here’s his Big Threat.

But I was surprised to hear that in fact the Chicago Public Schools, as reported in this Tribune article (click on screenshot) have quietly adopted that curriculum, for I’d heard no intimations of it previously. And I don’t know how it got adopted.

The report of Chicago’s ideological curriculum came in one short sentence (my bolding):

Mayor Lori Lightfoot fired back at President Donald Trump’s weekend threat to cut federal funding for public schools that teach the “1619 Project,” calling it “more hot air.”

. . .The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” looked at slavery and how it shaped America. Although widely celebrated, the Pulitzer Prize-winning project has drawn criticism from some conservative politicians and scholars. [JAC: It’s not just conservatives who have criticized the project, so this sentence is editorializing.]

But Chicago Public Schools has adopted it as part of its curriculum, which Lightfoot defended on Tuesday by saying it’s important for students of all backgrounds to understand slavery. Lightfoot also said Trump has “no power to try to take funding from any school district.”

“If he does, obviously, we will see him in court,” she said.

Now I like Mayor Lightfoot: she’s tough and a straight shooter, and she even called out violence and looting when they occurred as part of the demonstrations in Chicago. But I wonder if she was able to get that curriculum adopted on her own. For it’s not just an understanding of slavery that the project teaches, but also some aspects of Critical Race Theory, including the prevalence—indeed, ubiquity—of racism in every aspect of American life. It’s also historically inaccurate, but neither Hannah-Jones nor Lightfoot seem to care too much about that.

 

h/t: Cate

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

July 29, 2020 • 6:30 am

It’s Hump Day, except we had the hump in February and everything’s been downhill since then. It’s July 29, 2020:  National Lasagna Day. It’s also National Chicken Wing Day and International Tiger Day. 

Here, have a tiger (from One Green Planet):

 

News of the day: Take my word for it—the news is all bad. First, a 63-year-old woman, swimming 20 yards offshore in southern Maine, was fatally bitten by a great white shark—only the second shark attack in that state since 1837.

Trump continues to lie about the coronavirus, sharing a video touting the use of hydroxychloroquine as a palliative for the virus, a video which was removed by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  He also claimed that large portions of the country were “corona free.” I’d like to know where they are so I can travel there.

There’s a rise in viral infections in parts of Europe as well, including Spain, Germany, and Belgium.

The discovery of what appears to be van Gogh’s last painting (not “Wheatfield with Crows”) casts doubt on the recent hypothesis that he didn’t shoot himself but was shot by two young ruffians. Read the details here. Here’s the painting: “Tree Roots”:

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 149,767, an increase of about 1300 deaths over yesterday’s report. The world death toll now stands at,659,273, an increase of about 6700 deaths from yesterday.

Stuff that happened on July 29 includes:

  • 1565 – The widowed Mary, Queen of Scots marries Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Duke of Albany, at Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, Scotland.
  • 1567 – The infant James VI is crowned King of Scotland at Stirling.
  • 1818 – French physicist Augustin Fresnel submits his prizewinning “Memoir on the Diffraction of Light”, precisely accounting for the limited extent to which light spreads into shadows, and thereby demolishing the oldest objection to the wave theory of light.
  • 1836 – Inauguration of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France.
  • 1921 – Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
  • 1948 – Olympic Games: The Games of the XIV Olympiad: After a hiatus of 12 years caused by World War II, the first Summer Olympics to be held since the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, open in London.
  • 1973 – Greeks vote to abolish the monarchy, beginning the first period of the Metapolitefsi.
  • 1976 – In New York City, David Berkowitz (a.k.a. the “Son of Sam”) kills one person and seriously wounds another in the first of a series of attacks.

Berkowitz who killed six and wounded seven, is serving three consecutive 25-years-to-life sentences in the Attica Supermax Prison. Amazingly, he was eligible for parole in 2003, though he’ll never get out. Here he is:

Al Aaronson/NY Daily News/Getty

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1805 – Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian and philosopher (d. 1859)
  • 1869 – Booth Tarkington, American novelist and dramatist (d. 1946)
  • 1883 – Benito Mussolini, Italian fascist revolutionary and politician, 27th Prime Minister of Italy (d. 1945)
  • 1898 – Isidor Isaac Rabi, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize Laureate (d. 1988)
  • 1905 – Clara Bow, American actress (d. 1965)

Here’s “the It girl,” the biggest sex symbol of the Roaring Twenties:

Those who started playing the harp on July 29 include:

See above for some news of van Gogh. Here’s one of my favorite of his paintings: “Noon, Rest from Work” (a copy from Millet):

. . . and the original:

 

 

  • 1974 – Cass Elliot, American singer (b. 1941)
  • 1979 – Herbert Marcuse, German sociologist and philosopher (b. 1898)
  • 1994 – Dorothy Hodgkin, Egyptian-English biochemist and biophysicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1910)

Here are two headlines from British papers when she won the Prize.  How things have changed! Crikey, as if “wife” were her distinguishing characteristic. Would they have said, “Nobel prize for a husband from Oxford”?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili read the news today, oh boy:

Hili: Did you read the morning papers?
A: Yes.
Hili: Irritating. Bad news and bad journalism.
In Polish:
Hili: Czytałeś już poranną prasę?
Ja: Tak.
Hili: Irytujące, Złe wiadomości i złe dziennikarstwo.

And you get a treat today: six photos of the new kitten Kulka, who still weighs less than half a kilo (one pound). And she looks pretty much like baby Hili did.

Caption:  This little monster is everywhere. (In Polish: Ten mały potwór jest wszędzie.)

Kulka and Szaron

And Hili as a kitten:

An exchange from reader Bruce:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Bad Cat Clothing, a handy fix:

A tweet from Titania:

A tweet from Simon:

From cesar: Nikole Hannah-Jones better decide whether The 1619 Project is history or not history:

From reader Barry. This is adorable; does anybody know the lizard species?

From reader Ken, who says, “Way to stay classy, Donald!” Indeed.

Tweets from Matthew. Eleven? I had 23 this year!

Ducks 1, Pigeon -10:

Two antlion larvae making their cocoons.

“The ‘1619 Project’ is filled with slovenliness and ideological ax-grinding”

May 11, 2020 • 9:15 am

by Greg Mayer

The New York Times‘ ‘1619 Project’, and the critical reaction to it, has drawn attention here at WEIT a number of times. The diversity of the sources of criticism has been notable, ranging across the traditional political spectrum from left to right. In another salvo from the right, conservative political commentator George Will attacks the project in a new column in the Washington Post. The occasion of Will’s critique is that, incredibly, the lead writer of the project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize! (As Brian Leiter notes, the Pulitzer people have not covered themselves with glory in their awards for “Commentary”.)

As his headline (in the title above) shows, Will attacks both the historical account given by the project, and its motivations. He selects “three examples of slovenliness, even meretriciousness, regarding facts”. The examples chosen are the significance of a British offer of freedom to slaves who would flee to the British army; Lincoln’s views on emancipation and enfranchisement; and the role of whites in “the long struggle for freedom and civil rights”. (With regard to the latter, one of the things that seems to me to be most ahistorical about Hannah-Jones’ account is its elision of the Civil War. What is most striking about slavery in America is that it was ended by a war in which hundreds of thousands died—”every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword“. And the Union Army– with full credit to the free blacks and escaped slaves that rallied to it, and whose martial exploits had such salubrious effect on enfranchisement– was overwhelmingly white.)

While noting the Times‘ loss of journalistic credibility for embarking on a “political project”, and its “ideological ax-grinding”, Will mostly addresses the historical facts (or lack thereof). In a commentary at New Discourses, the claim is made that “facts” are not at all the point of the 1619 Project. (New Discourses is a new website by the “grievance studies” scholars, which Jerry has previously noted.)

From the New Discourses article on the ‘1619 Project’ (first sent to me by reader cesar):

Of some note, understanding the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project more or less necessarily begins by observing that it is not history, but the kind of pessimistic and hyperbolic historiography that is typical of critical race Theory. This makes it necessary to observe that a fundamental pillar of critical race Theory is historical revisionism—the rewriting of history in a way that tells it from the preferred and cynical narratives of critical race Theory. This renders the 1619 Project firmly within the realm of seeking to rewrite history (especially American history) to promote its cynical, anti-liberal agenda. Indeed, the project posits the history of the United States as little more than a long series of strategic moves by which white racism—especially anti-black racism—was established and has been and remains maintained as an ordinary and permanent feature of (American) society (see also, interest convergence). Indeed, critical race Theory sees racism and white supremacy as integral components of the very fabric of society (particularly American society) that is therefore urgently in need of deconstructing, disrupting, and dismantling (see also, liberationism and Neo-Marxism).

The importance of the point about the 1619 Project not being a serious attempt at historical understanding but a project within critical race Theory is beyond calculability. This is because the standard approach to challenging the 1619 Project’s bogus claims and attempt to roll itself out into our society and educational system is to challenge its historical legitimacy, and this is unfortunately a necessary part of engaging with it. The trouble is, because the 1619 Project neither is history nor claims to be history, this necessary activity is ultimately severely limited in its purposed utility.

Will’s tactical error, by this analysis, is that he challenges the project’s historical claims, while the project’s promoters do not even acknowledge that facts and argument count. New Discourses goes on:

Under critical race approaches, established historical methods, having largely been devised by white people working in a “white” cultural context are understood as merely “white history.” This will be understood to be imbued with all of the biases of whiteness, including failing to understand its own bias (see also, white ignorance and willful ignorance) and thus unconsciously working to maintain itself and its dominance (see also, internalized dominance and privilege). Thus, according to the worldview that informs the 1619 Project, there is no way to adjudicate between one historical narrative and another except by referencing the identity politics of systemic power and determining how one’s positionality has led to the creation or adoption of any particular narrative (see also, Foucauldian).

Under the critical approach characterizing the 1619 Project, there is also no need to hold oneself to rigorous academic methods or procedures, including peer review, for these would be assumed to be corrupted by “white” biases as well. Therefore, it is not only consistent with the critical ethos of the 1619 Project to exist outside of academia, it is strongly advantageous to it because it calls into question the entire process by which it can be authoritatively criticized.

The 1619 Project suffers from this “anti-epistemology”— instead of a theory of how we know things, it is a theory of how we can’t know anything.  (Such theories are always hoist by the petard of self-reference, but that’s for another day.)

Interestingly, in this week’s New York Times Magazine, their ethics columnist, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, comments on another dysfunctional epistemology, that of anti-vaxxers. He writes:

This doesn’t work with epistemic dissidents. Whether they fixate on climate change, the moon landing or vaccines, they distrust authority, including scientific authority. (Maybe they think that the medical establishment has been suborned by big pharma or bamboozled by ideology.) They know that beliefs have changed in the past and think they have a special insight into which of our current mainstream beliefs are the next to go. They have invariably rabbit-holed into a detailed counterreality.

I love the term “epistemic dissidents”—it’s a nice way of capturing that the argument isn’t about whether this or that is true, but about whether “facts” or rational arguments are even relevant. (It also is very close to “epidemic dissidents”, which is very appropriate, perhaps unwittingly, for the world’s current pandemic.) Note that Appiah, correctly, associates views primarily from both the left (vaccines) and the right (climate change) with this dysfunctional epistemology. Although we’ve had occasion to note the affinity of the Republican party for anti-science, I’ve also argued that wokeism (of which the 1619 Project, a sort of anti-history, is an exemplar) is conceptually perpendicular to the traditional left-right axis of American politics, and Appiah’s choice of examples makes the same point for the larger phenomenon of “epistemic dissidents”.

NYT backs off a bit on some claims of the “1619 Project”

March 15, 2020 • 12:00 pm

by Greg Mayer

The New York Times is backing off just a little from some of the claims they made in the “1619 Project”. Interestingly, as both an online and paper subscriber, I found out about it not from the Times, but from Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine! [JAC note: Jake Silverstein, the author of the “correction” below, is the head editor of the New York Times Magazine. If you want to read a correction that is not a correction, this is a masterpiece of slipperiness.]

I find little to quibble with in Andrew’s piece, “A Welcome Concession by the New York Times“, so I’ll quote a few bits.

It took them many months, but it’s a good thing that the editor, Jake Silverstein, and primary author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, of the New York Times’ 1619 Project have finally conceded that they did make a mistake in claiming that the retention of slavery was a primary reason for the American revolution. . . .

Silverstein’s concession is a marked shift from his position back in December, when he was adamant that he would not concede anything to the many historians who had criticized the project, especially over Hannah-Jones’s assertion about slavery’s centrality as a motivation for the Revolution. . . .

All of this is welcome, and Hannah-Jones and Silverstein did the right thing. . . . But it seems to me that the real tension here was not between journalistic inclinations and history but between ideological inclinations and history. The entire point of the 1619 Project, after all, was to “reframe” American history, to make 1619 its core beginning. And it was to buttress that argument that Hannah-Jones and Silverstein wildly overstated the salience of white supremacy to American independence.

And look, educating people about the brutal horrors of the slavery regime . . .  But the upping of the ideological ante, the decision to call the issue a “project,” the placing of slavery at the center of the revolution, and the intent to deploy it as simple, incontrovertible, historical truth to schoolkids takes things much further.

It is, in fact, history as filtered through the ideology of critical race theory, which regards the entire American experiment as an exercise in racial domination, deliberately masked by rhetoric about human freedom and equality.

Andrew, who still calls himself a conservative, also writes the following:

[F]actual, honest journalism . . . imply a liberal view of the world, in which the race of authors is far less important than the cogency of what they have to say, in which history is not predetermined by analyses of “structural oppression,” but by fact and contingency. [emphasis added]

The sentence must be read carefully: he is accusing the Times of not exemplifying a liberal world view. With this I heartily agree. The paper has, in this project as in other places, fallen to the anti-liberal and racialist doctrines of wokeism.

Although making this concession in a way that let Andrew became aware of it, to its subscribers and readers the Times is still tub-thumping for the Project. It was touted in part of a March 12 in-the-paper-ad (i.e. an ‘internal’ ad), and in an email to subscribers:

The word in the middle of the emailed image rotates among “Music”, “Traffic”, “Health care”, “Capitalism”, “Democracy”, “Education”, and “Prisons”.

A quick look at today’s issue of the Times Magazine shows no sign of the “clarification”, either.

“1776” throws down the gauntlet to NYT’s “1619 Project”

February 28, 2020 • 12:00 pm

by Greg Mayer

We’ve noted here several times at WEIT the New York Times‘ “1619 Project”, a racialist program to rewrite American history. The notices have been largely critical, and we’ve pointed out that much of the criticism has come from the World Socialist Website (WSWS), an organ of the International Committee of the Fourth International. While the WSWS is a Marxist (and specifically Trotskyist) website, and their own writers have heavily criticized the 1619 Project, what has been most notable about the WSWS’s coverage is the series of interviews they have done with scholars whose own views range widely, including avowed Marxists, but consisting mostly of “average” center-left academics.

Now another center of criticism of the 1619 Project has arisen, this one originating from the right wing of American politics, but, like the WSWS, including a fair diversity among its contributors. The “1776” website states its mission as

“1776” is an assembly of independent voices who 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. We seek to offer alternative perspectives that celebrate the progress America has made on delivering its promise of equality and opportunity and highlight the resilience of its people. Our focus is on solving problems.

We do this in the spirit of 1776, the date of America’s true founding.

Here’s a video introducing 1776 featuring its founder, Bob Woodson, in which he refers to slavery as America’s “birth defect”. (Notice that they use the same antique font for “1776” as the 1619 Project uses for “1619”!)

The group has a clearly conservative cast to its contributors. Of the eight featured essays on its home page, I was familiar with only two: Clarence Page, a well known columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University. Both I would regard as “centrist”, following the usual way of divvying up American political attitudes. Looking at the provided biographies, and a little googling, shows the others to be generally conservative (e.g. Woodson, Jason Hill), although some I’m unsure about (e.g. Stephanie Deutsch). The Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative site, has also posted a long critique by Cathy Young.  I mention these political leanings to neither praise nor condemn, but to point out the breadth of critical response to the 1619 Project.

Unlike the WSWS, which featured academics and historians, only three of the 1776 front page essayists are academics, and none are historians. (The WSWS did have critiques by its own contributors, who were also neither academics nor historians, but I have focused on the eight interviewees/essayists at the WSWS that garnered the most attention.)

1776 has drawn some notice, including in a commentary entitled “The New York Times Goes All In on Flawed 1619 Project” at Real Clear Politics by Mark Hemingway:

One interesting rebuttal is coming from the newly formed 1776 Project, which seeks 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.” The group of predominantly black scholars and writers was organized by anti-poverty crusader and MacArthur “genius grant” winner Bob Woodson, and features thoughtful essays rebutting the 1619 Project from heavyweight intellectuals such as John McWhorter, Clarence Page, and Shelby Steele.

And in Quillette, one of the 1776 essayists, Wifred Reilly, a political scientist at Kentucky State University, introduces the group in an essay entitled “Sorry, New York Times, But America Began in 1776“:

The United States of America began in 1776, not 1619.

That one sentence is the thesis statement of “1776”—a non-partisan black-led response to the New York Times’s “1619 Project” initiative, which launched last week at D.C.’s National Press Club. I am pleased and proud to be a part of 1776, along with founder Bob Woodson, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Jason Hill, Carol Swain, John Wood, Taleeb Starkes, Robert Cherry, and many others. From my perspective as a member, 1776 has three core goals: (1) rebutting some outright historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project; (2) discussing tragedies like slavery and segregation honestly while clarifying that these were not the most important historical foundations of the United States; and (3) presenting an alternative inspirational view of the lessons of our nation’s history to Americans of all races.

He goes on in this essay to cite the work of a number of the historians featured by the WSWS.

The reaction to 1776 by Nikole Hannah-Jones, leader of the 1619 Project, has been, as one would expect, negative. She tweeted this image as a response (Ida Bae Wells is Hannah-Jones’s Twitter name):

Mark Heminway parsed this response for those (like me) who didn’t know what she was getting at with this gesture:

Earlier this week, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine staff writer and the driving force behind the 1619 project, took note of the rival effort. “I want to say this is my response to the 1776 project,” she tweeted, followed by a picture of her pointing at her bottom row of gold teeth with her pinky, a dismissive and deeply unserious hip-hop gesture. She followed that up with a “serious” tweet where she suggested that her African-American critics at the 1776 Project didn’t actually care about the enslaved children at the time of America’s founding. (She later deleted the tweets.)

The political diversity of the critics of the 1619 Project shows what I think is a broader point, which is that wokeness is a political axis that is conceptually perpendicular to the traditional left-right axis of American politics. “Anti-wokeness” is found all across the political spectrum. Although wokeness— the fetishization of group identity, with group identity arrayed along a “scala homi“, and position on this scale determining a person’s worth and (allegedly) behaviors— is currently more identified with the political left, I think this is only contingently true in America; the blood and soil populists that contend for power or rule in Europe are the right wing of wokeness.The only difference is that Viktor Orban and his ilk place groups at different places in the scala homi: Hungarians (or whoever) are the most worthy, and at the same time the most oppressed.