American schools often teach secular leftist fantasy to young children, in order to undermine their parents’ values. You may remember when teachers presented the oscillating model of the universe to children through atheist Carl Sagan, to get around the need for a Creator. The model was later disproved theoretically and experimentally. Now the schools are trying again with the 1619 Project.
The 1619 Project is a fantasy work, authored by Nicole Hannah-Jones, a person with no training or demonstrated ability in any discipline connected to the real world.
Who says so? The author says so, in this tweet, reported by Red State:
I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020
This article from the centrist National Review lists some of most fantastical parts of her work.
Here’s an excerpt:
The most dramatic and controversial assertion in Hannah-Jones’s essay was that, in 1776, “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Her essay cited nothing to support this, nor did it show even the slightest awareness of how radical a claim this is. She continued:
By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South . . . we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not . . . believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.
So, she’s claiming that the Britain ended slavery at some point prior to 1776, and that this ending of slavery applied to the colonies in America, and that the American Revolution was a response to this ending of slavery being pushed to the colonies. Is that true?
The first real strike against slavery was the 1772 Somerset judicial decision in Britain, which declared that slavery was alien to the English common law and thus could not exist within Britain without a positive act of Parliament. As Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz has noted, however, the reaction to the Somerset case, which did not apply to British colonies, was relatively muted even in the southern colonies; it provoked nothing even vaguely resembling the furious responses to the Tea Act the following year.
Early anti-slavery movements before 1776 had no effect on the “British colonies”, e.g. – America. But more importantly there was no UK ban on slavery until way after the American Revolution:
Organized, popular movements against slavery, and laws restricting or abolishing slavery and the slave trade, were considerably more advanced in the American colonies in the 1770s than in Britain, where Parliament would not ban slavery in Jamaica and other British colonies until 1833, after many years of failures by William Wilberforce and other anti-slavery leaders. The world’s first organized anti-slavery society was formed in Pennsylvania in 1774, and the first legal ban on slavery anywhere in the world was in Vermont in 1777. Five of the original 13 states followed suit either during or immediately after the Revolution, passing bans on slavery between 1780 and 1784. The first federal ban on slavery, in the Northwest Territory, was drafted in 1784 by Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787. Its language would later be adopted directly into the 13th Amendment.
If slavery was not banned in the UK and pushed on the colonies prior to the Revolution, then the Revolution cannot have been a reaction to slavery being made illegal. In fact, America was far ahead of the UK at banning slavery. And far, far ahead of the rest of the world.
I just want to emphasize this – this is the problem with so many on the secular left:
[…]Hannah-Jones openly scoffs that there is “no such thing” as objective history…
This is the person the secular left believes and celebrates. A writer of anti-American fantasy. A liar.
Should we teach BLM rioter fantasies in our schools?
Well, I’m not very impressed with her work, and fortunately for us we have a Republican president who won’t bender over backwards to appease shoddy scholarship.
Fox News reports:
President Trump said Sunday that the Department of Education is examining the use of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project in schools, and warned that institutions that teach this alternative narrative of American history could lose federal funding.
The project is based on the premise that American history began in 1619 — cited as the date African slaves arrived in Virginia — and that everything following this should be viewed through that lens.
[…]Trump responded to a tweet stating that California would be using it.
“Department of Education is looking at this,” Trump said. “If so, they will not be funded!”
Trump’s tweet echoes the sentiment of a bill Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., introduced in July. That bill proposed denying funds to any school that uses the 1619 Project in its curriculum. At the time, schools in areas including Chicago and Washington, D.C., had already amended their history curricula to reflect the project’s messages.
This will be the policy for the next 2 months. If Biden wins, that will almost certainly be changed. How would you like to see Nikole Hannah-Jones as Secretary of Education?
What’s really going on here?
Although Hannah-Jones’ work is filled with errors, it’s very appealing to the secular left. It tells them things that they want to hear. Specifically, it makes them feel superior to others, and it excuses their own poor decision-making by shifting the blame to other people. The 1619 Project is similar to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in that it affirms poorly-educated underachievers who blame their own failures on people of a different race. This is a very attractive message to socialists on the secular left, as it was in 1930s Germany. We should be careful about allowing racist rhetoric into our public schools to influence our children. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for our nation.
WINTERY KNIGHT 