THE CASE FOR THE 1619 PROJECT: INTRODUCTION

When the Truth Hurts: The 1619 Project and America’s Schools

If we ever want to come together as a nation to provide a brighter future for our children, then we must stop denying our past

Kids showing hands during a lesson at an elementary school | Monkey Business Images | Shutterstock.com

When my daughter was about 11 or 12 years old, I bought her the book entitled To Be a Slave by Julius Lester. I wanted to begin teaching her about the history of slavery — a history that directly involves our ancestors. My great, great grandfather on my mother’s side was born into slavery. He managed to escape at seventeen and married my great, great grandmother, a Native American woman who worked to free many enslaved Africans. Many more of my family members were unfortunately enslaved (on both my parent’s sides), but this is the story that I am most familiar with that I have passed on to my daughter.

She was eager to learn not only about her family history but about her ancestral past, a history that she was not learning in school. As she read the book, she carried it around with her to and from school, placing it at the top of all her other books. My daughter felt proud to learn about this piece of her heritage. Although she was happy to be reading this particular book, she came home one day angry and dismayed.

It is indicative of a much larger and much graver problem in this country — the fear of learning the truth about the past and the present, and the threat of what that truth will reveal about who we are as a nation

Reaction from my daughter’s friend

She shared with me that one of her friends, a Black and Latinx girl her same age, saw the cover and title of the book and reacted almost with disgust, and asked her, “Why are you reading that book?” My daughter asked, “What’s wrong with this book?” to which her friend responded, “Why do you want to read about that? It’s too sad. You should read about something else.”

My daughter then went on to tell me that her friends never seemed interested in anything other than clothes, hair, and nails, video games, texting, etc. She said she only had one friend she could have any type of serious conversations with, and she didn’t understand why the others did not seem to care about their past, or about what was going on in the world. This occurred around the time that police brutality and racial terrorism were responsible for taking the lives of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. My daughter told me that none of her friends (who were a very ethnically diverse group) seemed to care about any of it.

While this story is only about one child and five or six of her pre-teen friends, it is indicative of a much larger and much graver problem in this country — the fear of learning the truth about the past and the present, and the threat of what that truth will reveal about who we are as a nation.

It places slavery at the forefront of American history to illuminate the crucial role that slavery played in creating this country’s wealth

The effect of the New York Times 1619 Project

The New York Times 1619 Project (henceforth referred to as The Project), spearheaded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, has had this same effect on many of our nation’s political leaders, historians, social commentators, and others. The Project does more than address the legacy of slavery in this country, it places slavery at the forefront of American history to illuminate the crucial role that slavery played in creating this country’s wealth through its political, economic, educational, and social systems. Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, addresses this in his article “Why We Published The 1619 Project:”

Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.¹

America is in denial

Much of America still seems to be in denial of this country’s dark past because they cannot reconcile the paradoxical nature of the vile inhumanity of its barbaric actions with its ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. Whether it is through willful ignorance of the historical facts, revisionist history that creates its own white-washed narrative of the truth, indifference to the generations of lives and livelihoods destroyed, or complacency and complicity with the greed, violence, hatred, and racism responsible for oppressing an entire culture of people, this country obscures, contradicts, or outright rejects the truth about its past. As Hannah-Jones stated in her article for The Project, “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.”

This lie, this denial about the impact chattel slavery has had on this country’s prosperity, built on an insidiously pervasive capitalistic system that exploited the labor of enslaved Blacks while creating generational wealth for free whites, has also woven a web of deceit in many American school systems. Like my daughter’s schools throughout her K-12 years, American history varied from watering down the history of slavery using the “happy slave” trope, to being laden with half-truths about the role that slavery played in America’s founding, to being outright deceptive with the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny.

The public school systems are doing a disservice to American children

Over the years my daughter recounted how often she has either had to correct a history teacher or politely confront them about the way they were teaching history to the class. I recall one incident where she told me about her middle school teacher who called Sally Hemings Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, to which my daughter replied, “you mean the girl he raped?” Her teacher got embarrassed and skirted around the issue, not only because what she said was true, but I believe it was also because he did not expect a child her age to know the truth and to challenge him on it.

My daughter has been taught to always speak up and speak the truth regarding any type of injustice. And perpetuating the lie that Sally Hemings was a grown woman who willingly had an affair with Thomas Jefferson, as opposed to an enslaved girl who was no more than a piece of property whom he could (and did) rape at will, is an injustice to the past.

How slavery is taught in America’s schools

Nikita Stewart, a journalist from The Project, explains how Maureen Costello of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Program Teaching Tolerance (renamed Learning for Justice) states that in most schools, teaching slavery is “treated like a dot on a timeline.” Costello goes on to say that “At its best, slavery is taught because we have to explain the Civil War. We tend to teach it like a Southern problem and a backward economic institution. The North is industrialized; the South was locked in a backward agricultural system.”

The public school systems are doing a disservice to American children. Instead of our country trying to confront the problem head-on, as the New York Times is doing with their 1619 Project, we are now facing a crisis in education. Republican state lawmakers are trying to punish all schools that teach anything from the 1619 Project in their history classes. Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, and Missouri have already filed bills to cut funding from K-12 and college school districts, with more states that will likely follow suit.

We must disrupt the lies with the truth, and demand that educators accurately teach students about America’s dark past

The importance of teaching the history of slavery

Chattel slavery is not just part of Black history, it is American history, and it must not only be told accurately but it must also be told period. If we ever want to come together as a nation to provide a brighter future for our children, then we must stop denying our past. If not, then we will continue to be steeped in the ideals of a hypocritically racist society that wants nothing more than to persist in the oppression of its most vulnerable members while it continues to privilege whiteness.

America it is time to raise our voices about this country’s white-washed history. We must disrupt the lies with the truth, and demand that educators accurately teach students about America’s dark past. As part of a collective of Writers & Editors of Color (WEOC) on Medium, we have taken on the task of addressing this critical issue, and we will continue to raise our voices until we see the necessary changes. As WEOC states on its Medium platform, we set out to “support, highlight, and amplify local, national, and global social justice issues, policies, and work.” And whether this country wants to admit it or not, the decimation of American history and the way it is taught, in addition to the demonization of the 1619 Project, has made this yet another social justice issue being played out in America’s schools. This injustice must end, and the time is now.

¹Silverstein, Jake. “Why We Published The 1619 Project.” New York Times Magazine, 2020, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html. Accessed 20 Apr. 2021.