Was 1776 or 1619 Our Nation’s Founding Year?

Was 1776 or 1619 Our Nation’s Founding Year?

– By Howard Sierer –

Hold off on 4th of July fireworks. The New York Times claims that 1619, the year the first African slaves arrived in Virginia, was our country’s founding year.

The paper made the claim in its “1619 Project.” The project claims to explain how slavery was the fundamental social and economic underpinning of colonial life, was the real reason that the colonists fought the Revolutionary War, and how it allowed colonists both North and South to prosper thanks initially to cotton exports and later gave rise to New England’s textile industry.

But the publication isn’t an honest effort to introduce new truths and insights into an important part of our nation’s history. Instead, it’s a race hustler’s political exercise to use race to secure political power.

Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s organizer, announced her political intentions openly, pairing progressive activism with the initiative’s stated educational purposes.

Riddled with falsehoods, the project was criticized by serious historians and economists of all political persuasions. Here’s a sampling of criticisms from a cross-section of scholars:

Black community activist Robert Woodson published a book titled “Red, White and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” Woodson calls it “An indispensable corrective to the falsified version of black history presented by the 1619 Project, radical activists, and money-hungry ‘diversity consultants.’”

His book features essays by a wide variety of black scholars and authors “who uphold the true origins of our nation and the principles through which its founding promise can be fulfilled.”

Columbia Professor John McWhorter writes that the problem is not merely the project’s numerous and well-documented inaccuracies but also its simple-minded approach to a complicated subject. “The issue is not differing interpretations of history, but an outright misinterpretation of it.”

Northwestern University history Professor Leslie Harris, whose specialty is African American life and slavery, was invited to fact check the 1619 Project. The Times ignored her factual corrections. She explains that the Revolutionary War was not fought to preserve slavery but in fact was a major disruption to the practice.

The Rev. Corey Brooks faults the 1619 Project’s “over-emphasis on slavery as the defining institution before and during our nation’s founding.” He adds: “The writers who participated in the 1619 project jettisoned facts in favor of a fictitious recounting of why our Founders formed a new nation.”

Peter Wood, who heads the National Association of Scholars, published “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.” He explains that slavery “was nothing new to the New World. It was an institution familiar to many native societies in both North and South America. These populations had been enslaving one another, as far as we can tell, from time immemorial.”

Phillip Magness, an economic historian, released “The 1619 Project: A Critique” that examines the project’s assertion that slave labor powered the U.S. economy, an argument that rests on “dubious statistical claims and shoddy research practices.”

Magness goes on: “The thrust of these exaggerations is to recast slavery as a distinctly capitalist enterprise, which, in turn, services the 1619 Project’s political message. The worthy historical task of documenting the horrors of American slavery has been cynically repurposed into an ideological attack on free-market capitalism.”

Economics professors Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode demonstrate that, contrary to the 1619 Project’s claim, cotton produced by slave labor did not give rise to industrial capitalism or world development. Economist Deirdre McCloskey has convincingly explained that it isn’t slavery that explains modern American economic growth rates, but innovation.

In his book’s introduction, Woodson writes that his goal is not to offer point-by-point rebuttals. Instead, he wants to “debunk the myth that present-day problems are related to our past . . . specifically, debunking the myth that slavery is the source of present-day disparities and injustice.”

The 1619 Project is yet another example of progressives telling blacks that they can’t improve their lives until systemic white racism is rooted out of our society. Is there anything more crippling to a person than to tell them they can’t do it on their own?

I’ll stick with the 4th of July. While you are enjoying your family picnic and local parades, remember that our Declaration of Independence holds “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Next week: despite what we read and hear, American race relations are far better than they are portrayed in the media.

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