Everything you were taught in school is a lie, thunders the NYT’s “1619 Project;” America is, and always has been, an evil empire, not a shining city on a hill. It was conceived in slavery, brutality, and sin, not a quest for freedom. The Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites. The Constitution was nothing more than a device to keep black people down. After a few brief hopeful moments during Reconstruction, the apartheid system was recreated, and was scarcely better than before; in fact, it was the model for Nazi Germany. Virtually all of the wealth enjoyed by white people today was created by, and stolen from, black people. The only bright spot in this gloomy narrative is the noble, patient struggle of the African-American for freedom and equality. It is the one thing that even begins to redeem this cesspool of a nation.
Naturally, this narrative leaves out a few inconvenient facts. Most notably, it ignores the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers who died fighting to free the slaves, and it doesn’t recognize any difference between the Jim Crow South and the milder forms of segregation in the North. The narrative isn’t fake news, or a footnote, and it needs to be told; it also, however, needs to be put in perspective.
I would ask two questions:
- COMPARED TO WHAT? Was the story of America somehow uniquely racist and oppressive? The European colonial powers, after all, were complicit in the creation of slavery, and continued to profit mightily from it even after they abolished it in their own empires. Most of the rest of the world was ruled by autocracies for most of the period covered by the “1619 Project.” Was life in, say, the Russian or Chinese Empire better for peasants than life in America? I think not.
- WHERE’S THE REST OF THE STORY? The “1619 Project” narrative puts African-Americans at center stage, and views the rest of American history as a footnote. That would have been news to the people who built the most powerful and prosperous nation in history, and the vast number of immigrants who poured in from all over the world in search of a better life–were they all mistaken, or were they just seeking an opportunity to be oppressors, too?
The legacy of slavery is an extremely important theme in American history, and yes, we are still dealing with it to this day. While it shaped our country, however, it does not define it.