Amid a national debate over history curricula and the importance of racism and slavery in shaping the American past, the 1619 Project has returned in an expanded book form as an immediate bestseller.
With its new and longer essays packing sweeping claims about the character of our national origins, the book expands upon the project’s initial, central argument: a transhistorical White supremacy defines American society.
But this is pseudo-history, according to James Oakes, a preeminent scholar of slavery and 19th century U.S. politics at the City University of New York.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Mr. Oakes escalates the scholarly attack on the 1619 Project’s “egregious errors” as well as its larger purpose, which is to advance an interpretation of American history through a cynical, racial lens.
Thus the new book, like its magazine form released two years ago, fundamentally misunderstands the very issues it purports to shine light upon, namely slavery and its relationship to capitalism. (Mr. Oakes wrote an essay criticizing the 1619 Project that will appear in leftist journal Catalyst).
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“It rewrites history through a thoroughly racialized lens … it makes [White supremacy] this undeviating commitment by virtually all Whites all the time, and it argues from a nationalist perspective that any progress Blacks have made, they’ve made alone,” Mr. Oakes said.
“It erases antislavery from American history. It thereby erases the antislavery history of the American Revolution. And for all practical purposes it erases the Civil War from American history,” said Mr. Oakes, who said the book’s introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s racial views to the exclusion of his policies and attitudes toward slavery.
To listen to the entire conversation with James Oakes, download this episode of History As It Happens. For a more favorable view of The 1619 Project, download this episode of the podcast featuring a conversation with historian Alan Taylor.
