Part 2: Why Has The 1619 Project Been So Controversial?

This is the second essay in a series of two exploring the 1619 Project and its influence. Part 1 introduced the Project and the impact it’s had on the discourse of American history, racism, and slavery. This week we look at the controversy surrounding the project in its various forms – historical, political, pedagogical, ideological – and what it reflects about the nature of public discourse on racism and history.

Who gets to write our history?

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I remember a flurry of online videos on social media that addressed themselves to white people and made some variation of the following point: “It’s not Black people’s job to educate you on racism, the Black experience, Black history, or anything relating to these subjects.”

While I broadly agreed with the sentiment behind this message, it’s become clear to me over the past few years that – as with so many ideas diffused through social media – the reality on the ground is much more complex.

History in particular demands a plurality of voices. While it’s never a good idea to treat people of color as shortcuts to historical knowledge, there’s an equally powerful imperative for us to remain active voices in the writing of our own history.

The 1619 Project originated out of this need in academic and popular history. It was a bold re-imagining of American history that centered the legacy of slavery in our national narrative. The writers of the original New York Times Magazine issue published in 2019 were primarily – though not exclusively – people of color. And almost as soon as it was published, people from all sides of the political spectrum had something critical to say.

The first significant critique appeared in the form of a letter to the Times, signed by a group of reputable American historians (most of whom were white). This letter quickly triggered a predictable series of articles from commentators on the left and right, which alternately decried the inaccuracy of the Project or scoffed at the historical pedantry of its critics.

The right-leaning seized the opportunity to discredit the 1619 Project, because surely any historical inaccuracies meant Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist spearheading the Project, was out of her depth. The left-leaning claimed that anyone critiquing the Project was uncomfortable with its radical re-imagining of history. The implication was that any attempt to “correct” the Project’s inaccuracies betrayed a deeper ideological discomfort with its overall objective – namely, presenting a radical, new perspective on the foundational role of slavery in American history.

These debates are significant because they influence what we will and will not allow from the Project. Critics of its historical accuracy argue that it should not be supplementing K-12 school curricula. But critics of the critics themselves – who believe the authors of that initial letter to the Times are stuck in an outdated view of American history – reflect an equally troubling resistance to expert testimony and scholarship, which has been a hallmark of American discourse on all sides since the advent of “fake news” and the Trumpian crusades against fact, objective truth, and even just good old critical thinking. Ascribing ideological motivations to historical critique is a sign that some proponents of the Project wanted to fuel a political debate, rather than a nuanced historical one.

The reality is that both sides were correct to some degree. The Project’s inaccuracies had to be addressed, especially if they were to be used in educational environments. And the historians who critiqued the Project undoubtedly had their own agendas in issuing these corrections. But on the other hand, and more importantly, resisting their critiques on ideological grounds only hurt the Project in the long run by opening the door to more careless, unsophisticated criticism.

We can argue that the controversies over the 1619 Project comes down to any number of binaries: Black vs. white, archaic vs. modern, left vs. right, and so on. We can harp on about the fact that the historians who critiqued the Project had their own agendas. But in reality, what the controversies show is that when it comes to complex issues, we prefer public spectacle with familiar heroes and villains, rather than a productive debate and nuanced arguments that make us all better off in the long run.

The historical controversy over The 1619 Project

The fact is: the 1619 Project did contain a couple historical inaccuracies worth questioning. They were not legion, and they did not invalidate the Project’s aims, but there was reason enough to open a debate over them.

That so many historians originally refused to join in this challenge (as reported by the Atlantic in 2019) only shows how far political sensitivities and media posturing have supplanted our collective commitment to critical discourse. By the same token, the New York Times’ original reluctance to issue any corrections or qualifications to the 1619 Project – even in the limited ways the historians originally suggested – shows that they were more interested in staging a controversy than in hosting a nuanced debate.

Let’s examine the nature of the historical controversy in greater detail to appreciate these points. 

After the Project was first published in August 2019, a letter signed by five eminent scholars of American history was quickly submitted to the New York Times Magazine. The authors pointed out a few inaccurate statements (and others that lacked sufficient evidence) in one or two of the essays – including the Project’s now widely-publicized claim that the colonists originally declared independence from Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” Initially, the New York Times Magazine editorial team refused to make corrections or respond to the letter for several months.

The response they eventually published is a careful refutation of the historians’ perfectly valid challenge to some of the points in Nikole Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay. Jake Silverstein, the editor-in-chief of New York Times Magazine who penned the response, takes pains to soften Hannah-Jones’ claims as part of this exercise. For example, in his words, her assertion that the colonists fought the Revolutionary War “to ensure slavery would continue” becomes instead a “contention that uneasiness among slaveholders in the colonies…helped motivate the Revolution”. You can see how the latter is easier to defend than the former.

When you read the historians’ response to Silverstein’s article, it becomes clear that while their corrections are valid, they in no way invalidate Hannah-Jones’ overall argument. Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton, wrote instead that he hoped his corrections would help protect the 1619 Project against unnecessary and unfair attempts to discredit it.

In his own historical arguments, Wilentz outmaneuvers Hannah-Jones and Silverstein in making a highly detailed, historical case about slavery in the Revolution (unsurprising, given that he is a professional historian). His attempts to complicate and contextualize Hannah-Jones’ assertions about slavery in the run-up to the Revolution never amount to an ideological attack, but rather a valid – and even necessary – correction that clarifies the role of slavery in this major historical event.

If you read all the materials going back and forth on this point, you walk away thinking that (a) Hannah-Jones has a very rhetorically powerful point about the relationship between slavery and our original democracy and (b) that Sean Wilentz has some significant challenges to it, which are not that damaging. Because the bottom line is: protecting slavery was not a primary cause for the colonies to go to war, but it did play a role in motivating some of the colonists as they approached 1776. That bottom line does not interfere with Hannah-Jones’ point that slavery was a foundational issue in the founding of the American Republic.

Of course, admitting all that would not have allowed the Times to fan the flames of controversy in order to drive traffic to the Project. We know this was to some degree their motivation, because it turns out that even within the 1619 Project’s team of fact-checkers, challenges to the essays’ shakier historical claims were not taken on board by the editorial team.

The ideological debate behind the 1619 Project

A March 2020 Politico article eventually publicized the claims of a fact-checker and historical consultant working for the Times, who said they ignored her objections to questionable claims in the series. (Including the one about slavery and the Revolution.) At the same time, the author of the article, Leslie M. Harris, a Northwestern professor of American history, makes clear that this criticism by no means invalidates the core thesis of the relevant essays or the overall objective of the 1619 Project.

The actual history of slavery during any period, she argues – and especially during the Colonial period – was far more complex than the 1619 Project or the historians who criticized it would suggest.

To Harris’ mind, the authors of the original letter were right to question the historicity of various claims in the 1619 Project. But at the same time, the Project never purports to prove that slavery is the only important thing to know about the Revolution, or the Constitution, or any number of critical periods in our history. It seeks instead to redress an imbalance by presenting under-examined and under-taught narratives, many of which have to acknowledge the role slavery played in American political, economic, social, and cultural development.

Harris is even-handed in pointing out that both the 1619 Project and the historians criticizing it offer incomplete and sometimes misleading views of American slavery. But she is (rightly) much more concerned by the longer tradition of ignoring slavery in American history altogether than she is in proclaiming victory for either side of a highly specific historical debate.

Critics overly concerned by the emphasis the 1619 Project places on slavery are inevitably responding to the discomfort it forces us to sit with. As Americans, we have prided ourselves for hundreds of years on the invention of a new model of democracy. One that was based on liberal, rational, egalitarian values and achieved considerable success relatively quickly.

So it is deeply unsettling to our national sense of identity, nurtured by the whitewashed, incomplete, or otherwise bowdlerized narratives we learn in school, to have to re-examine this history. As Harris points out,

It is easy to correct facts; it is much harder to correct a worldview that consistently ignores and distorts the role of African Americans and race in our history in order to present white people as all powerful and solely in possession of the keys of equality, freedom and democracy.

(Politico)

From this perspective, it’s clear that the 1619 Project provided a necessary corrective to American historiography. But! That also doesn’t exempt its readers, critics, or creators from trying to clarify and nuance the complex arguments it makes.

Neither journalists nor historians should stand by when rhetoric attempts to obscure truth. Harris, and many other historians like her, refused to sign the original letter critiquing the 1619 Project, because they believed these critiques would be damaging to the broader purpose of the Project. But as Sean Wilentz originally pointed out, refusing to engage with that critique only opened it up to more insidious criticism.

The 1619 Project became so contentious because the Times preferred to stage a controversy that would amplify the relevance of the Project by politicizing it. A simple challenge to the historicity of a couple of claims in a few essays did not have to be viewed so skeptically. Besides some rather pompous language, nothing in the historians’ original letter suggested they were opposed to the 1619 Project’s “ideology”. It merely registers their concern that ideology, or at least rhetorical effect, had potentially misguided some of their statements – to the detriment of their historical accuracy.

But instead of examining the critique and its challenges, the Times allowed a historical debate to trigger an ideological one, which in turn exploited a political divide that has now driven millions to discredit or ignore the Project.

The irony, of course, is that Nikole Hannah-Jones has since acknowledged some of the inaccuracies, and the Times has made several qualifications online (without acknowledging Wilentz’s more in-depth clarifications). But the ideological and historical divide ripped open by this discourse ostensibly remains.

Are we a rationalist, progressive, and exceptional nation who lit the torches of freedom for all; or, are we a deeply flawed nation that conceived brilliant new ideals, which we then took centuries to actually believe and put into practice?

The answer is of course somewhere in between, and the question itself is an overly simplified condensation of the 1619 Project’s arguments and those of the “white history” it seeks to correct. But the 1619 Project is not the only history we need to answer these questions. It is certainly not the only valid perspective on American history. The corrective lens it offers – i.e., a re-centering of the role of Black Americans and the institution of slavery in our nation’s development – represents a necessary innovation in how Americans view our past. And one we desperately needed. But that doesn’t mean it’s our exclusive take.

We need more people to write and engage with our history, not fewer. If we resist critique on the grounds of its perceived ideological agenda, if we refuse to listen merely because we question the validity of the source, then we limit the scope of our education.

American history, and history in general, is every citizen’s responsibility – to learn, to critique, and to share. Let the 1619 Project and the controversies that have attended it be a reminder to us all that this responsibility shapes not only our view of the past, but the politics of the present. For that reason, it’s critical we demand that open debate and critical thinking remain at its heart.

Porter Braswell