Project 1619: Where is Truth?

2021-06-15

Contemporary America (USA) is internally divided along several axes of division. One of them is Project 1619 created by New York Times. The aim of the project is the introduction of the history of slavery in America into the centrum of national consciousness as one of the basic currents of the American past and contemporary society. The project awakens deep resistance in the country, especially in the form of new laws about what can and cannot be taught in public schools.

1. We present text of the Project 1619 in full and we invite everyone to study the document, offer comments.

PDF with commentary at pulitzercenter.org

 In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort,
a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than
20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was
not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of
the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250
years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful
moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

It 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 its defining contradictions
first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact
date has been lost to history (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20),
when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of
Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival
inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for
the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's
original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin.
Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew
nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic
might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and
popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its
astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example
it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang,
its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that
continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted
long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as
our founders formally declared independence from Britain.
The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New
York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to
Reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation's birth year. Doing so requires us to
place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black
Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about
who we are as a country.
Perhaps you need some persuading. The issue contains essays on
different aspects of contemporary American life, from mass incarceration
to rush-hour traffic, that have their roots in slavery and its
aftermath. Each essay takes up a modern phenomenon, familiar to
all, and reveals its history. The first, by the staff writer Nikole Hannah-
Jones (from whose mind this project sprang), provides the intellectual
framework for the project and can be read as an introduction.
Alongside the essays, you will find 17 literary works that bring
to life key moments in African-American history. These works are
all original compositions by contemporary black writers who were
asked to choose events on a timeline of the past 400 years. The
poetry and fiction they created is arranged chronologically throughout
the issue, and each work is introduced by the history to which
the author is responding.
A word of warning: There is gruesome material in these pages,
material that readers will find disturbing. 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. By acknowledging this shameful history, by trying hard to
understand its powerful influence on the present, perhaps we can
prepare ourselves for a more just future.
That is the hope of this project.

2.We present news from Epoch Times, one of more conservative journals, generally diametrically opposed to NYT.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/trumps-1776-commission-to-reassmble-tackle-critical-race-theory-in-history-education_3825673.html?utm_source=News&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-05-22-1&mktids=fc982fc418901a6fad7397a213879c1e&est=MenT41xsNSWtQbZsVEZjNiF9K0rJRgHHy9Um4ZqSYfljH%2Fo%2FwsPvnHrCiio2kkC%2FuG0%3D

Before we plunge into the debate it's important to clarify new term Critical Race Theory, which appears in many of the resisting the project statements.

So what is the Critical Race Theory?

I will allow myself to use the metaphor reminding that in old Poland we had the mature exam finishing high school when we had to write different essays for the exam in the Polish language. Some essays were descriptive essays addressing the stated theme, some other topics were of critical nature requiring the critiques of a certain statement from a certain point of view. Critical Race Theory is precisely such an endeavor that critically analyzes the American legal system from the point of the race, showing the existence of racism in American past and contemporary history as one of the central qualities of American society.

Elements of the debate from excerpts in the Epoch Times. At present several states such as Oklahoma, Florida, Utah, New Hampshire noted the official resistance to the school curriculum offered by the Project 1619:

• Members of the 1776 Commission, which President Joe Biden disbanded on his first day in office, are reportedly set to meet again with a renewed focus on combating the teaching of U.S. history based on the Marxist critical race theory.

• The advisory commission was established by the Trump administration in November 2020 to celebrate and promote the principles enshrined in the nation's founding documents. It's commonly seen as a response to The New York Times' controversial 1619 Project, which argues that the United States was founded as, and remains today, a racist nation.

 • Nearly four months after its dissolution, the commission regained attention when a leading member spoke against a Biden administration's proposal to prioritize funding education programs that promote the 1619 Project and critical race theory, an ideology rooted in Marxist class struggle but with an emphasis on race, with the goal of dismantling all institutions of American society, which it deems as tools of racial oppression.

• "Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them," the document reads. "While not as barbaric or dehumanizing, this new creed creates new hierarchies as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South, making a mockery of equality with an ever-changing scale of special privileges on the basis of racial and sexual identities."

3. CNN interview with Nicole Hannah-Jones, the author of the endeavor:

 4. We Ask: WHERE IS THE TRUTH?