By Ryan Williams and Matthew Peterson
It isn’t an overstatement to describe The New York Times’ 1619 Project as a journalistic declaration of war against America. Many of the project’s historical claims are downright fabrications — but in the most decisive respect, that’s besides the point.
The project’s leader, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has tried to brush off the criticism of many distinguished historians by claiming that such disagreement is how historiography always proceeds — as we learn progressively more, a new “narrative” challenges old ones.
The 1619 Project, however, isn’t about new historical scholarship, and insofar as journalism is about the quest for truth, it isn’t quite journalism, either. As eminent scholars and stalwart liberals, such as Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz, have pointed out, the project makes utterly preposterous claims — above all, the notion that protecting slavery was a central motivation in launching the Revolutionary War and thus the American project.
Make no mistake — 1619 is a political project, aimed at piercing the heart of the US regime by overturning the American understanding of justice. As James Madison said, “Justice is the end of government,” it is “the end of civil society.” We seek justice “until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” To transform America, you have first to destroy its understanding of justice.
American justice is based on the understanding that while we are all unequal in many respects — talents, beauty, strength, discipline and so on — our fundamental equality as human beings means that all citizens should be treated equally under the law. And law should be ordered toward the common good of all, rather than classes or groups.
That understanding is embodied in the principles of the Declaration of Independence of 1776. The hideous stain of slavery, which stamped this country in 1619, doesn’t alter the nobility of those principles, and it was finally those principles that undid the Peculiar Institution.
The American mind in 1776 established the equal protection of the equal rights of all citizens as the ideal at the center of our political life. We have made much progress since then — most strikingly with the Civil War and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments — in making this ideal a political and cultural reality...
