We covered the response of historians to the 1619 Project extensively here--most of it occurring on the World Socialist Website, one of the few venues willing to seek out distinguished historians for comment. The "Project" and its reception is the subject of this instructive essay by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz; some excerpts:
I began feeling uneasy a few minutes into reading the lead essay, by the project’s chief contributor, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, and then I read a key paragraph so fallacious and dogmatic that it hit me between the eyes. With a tone of absolute assurance, flagging the matter as crucial, the essay informed readers of what it called a „fact“ – a fact „conveniently left out of our founding mythology“ – specifically that „one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence“ from Britain „was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.“ I instantly wondered how anyone even lightly informed about the history of either slavery or the American Revolution , could write that sentence….
Instead of trying to instruct the public about the significance of the year 1619, and hence of the foundational importance of slavery and racism to American history, the project promoted a narrow, highly ideological view of the American past, according to which white supremacy has been the nation’s core principle and chief mission ever since its founding….
Although surprised that the New York Times would lend its name and credibility to such a crude and falsified account of American history – a history with more than enough brutality, racism, and systematic oppression to require no falsification – I put the magazine aside. Responsible historians, I assumed, would come along soon enough to praise the project’s stated goals while debunking its skewed and sometimes warped history, just as historians had done decades ago in response to the writings of Lerone Bennett and others – and seen their refutations prominently published in, among other places, the New York Times. As for the outright factual errors, I imagined that some bright young historian who could use the attention would write a letter to the editor of the Times Magazine, asking for corrections – corrections that, I thought, the Times, adhering to its longstanding professional standards, of course would make.
When no letter appeared and no other historians spoke up, I decided to address the matter myself in a public lecture I delivered in November, which would later appear on-line in the New York Review of Books. Only after the lecture did I learn that four highly distinguished historians – three of them old friends and colleagues, the fourth a scholar I greatly respected – had already been giving interviews to an online forum called the World Socialist Web Site, a Trotskyist venue, taking The 1619 Project seriously to task for its false statements about the Revolution and much more.
It struck me as a little odd that these well-known historians – none of them socialists as far as I knew, let alone Trotskyists – would appear in such a relatively obscure place. Surely, I thought, one of the leading academic journals would have given them a platform. As it happened, only the intellectually honorable Trotskyists…had the nerve to undertake a systematic critique of The 1619 Project….
[I]t is…an open secret that many historians are simply intimidated about saying anything too loudly, too publicly, lest criticizing in any way The 1619 Projects or its offshoots invites being labelled and „mobbed“ as a racist on Twitter, thereby endangering their careers. Race relations, at least as perceived by the intelligentsia and the press, have become so embittered, and the promoters of supposedly anti-racist racialism have been so successful, that skeptics risk, or believe they risk, excommunication or being „cancelled“ if they break with the new orthodoxy. The intimidation is especially powerful, for understandable reasons, among younger professors and graduate students braving a miserable job market.
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