Debunking The 1619 Project: Real History as Antidote to Critical Race Theory

In the 1990s, when I was in graduate school and reading required postmodern/Marxist theory, including Critical Race Theory, I little imagined that twenty-some years later, irate parents at school board meetings would be denouncing its use in elementary school classrooms and organizing recall elections.

This is for the good. CRT is dividing Americans and actually harming blacks—and whites.

What I as an adult graduate student found tedious and abstractly wrong-headed is now boiled down for K-12.

It tells students that what their eyes and ears tell them is wrong: all white people are privileged oppressors. To accomplish this, it reaches into a chimerical past. It teaches children that one race carries the taint of a secularized “Original Sin” that continues to keep the other race in a form of bondage.

The fabricated history pushing CRT, The 1619 Project, replaces 1776 as the American founding year with 1619, when, with the arrival of about twenty Africans at Jamestown our entire sordid history of building a country on the backs of slaves and their descendants began.

In this simplistic history being used in most of our schools, individuals act in accord with their groups, per Marx’s fantastical class struggle formula. As Lenin ordered, “Negroes” would be known as the exploited proletariat class.

Like Howard Zinn’s record-breaking bestselling A People’s History of the United States, The 1619 Project “reframes” American history by twisting evidence and leaving out exculpatory facts.

Real history, however, is complicated, and like great literature, full of comedy and tragedy, surprises and reversals. People act unpredictably. People change. The oppressed become oppressors, and oppressors sometimes get their comeuppance. People who had lectured their elders, then, later, learn lessons by suffering disappointments they could not have foreseen in their youthful, idealistic days.

One such story I include in Debunking The 1619 Project concerns the 27-year-old Edward Coles, secretary to President James Madison, who thought that Thomas Jefferson was not doing enough to end slavery. In 1814, he wrote to the 71-year-old former president, respectfully “beseech[ing]” him to “exert your knowledge and influence” for the “gradual emancipation of Slavery.” He urged, “put into complete practice those hallowed principles contained in that renowned Declaration [of Independence], of which you were the immortal author...”

Jefferson, however, had experienced setbacks in his efforts to end slavery peacefully. He learned that noble efforts, not executed judiciously, could result in backlash.

Jefferson wrote back politely, urging Coles to become a “missionary” for emancipation and bring the “doctrine” to his generation of leaders. In the meantime, one should remain diligent in “duties” to those under his care.

Coles, however, decided to move to the western territory of Illinois to take a position as registrar and free his own slaves. But it took him five years to do so. He had to follow restrictive manumission laws. He had to make arrangements for the care of two old slave women who could not leave Virginia. On the way to Illinois, he emancipated three slave families, giving each 160 acres of farmland. For one slave woman and her five small children, he purchased her husband from his Virginia owner and settled the family in St. Louis, where they were made legally free in 1825.

Even with such careful planning, however, problems arose. Coles found himself fighting lawsuits that attempted to void the freedmen’s emancipation and titles to their land. Free blacks at the time faced the danger of being kidnapped and held as de facto slaves or sold into slavery in the South. In 1823, Coles became the second governor of Illinois and helped defeat the move to make Illinois a slave state.

But Coles wearied and returned to the East, met and married the wealthy Sally Logan Roberts, and settled in Philadelphia, where his abolitionist work more modestly centered on supporting the American Colonization Society, which settled freed slaves in such havens as Liberia.

Coles also faced disappointment and tragedy during the Civil War. He lost his eldest son on the battlefield—on the Confederate side.

Thomas Jefferson, whose earliest memory was of being carried on horseback by a trusted slave, to his dying days expressed his wish to see slavery ended—peacefully. Throughout his life he struggled to find the means for doing so, changing his approach as warranted. He went from advocating for restrictionism to advocating for “diffusionism.”

But according to The 1619 Project, Jefferson was a veritable concentration camp overseer, running a “slave-labor camp.” He never intended to “abolish slavery.” And colonization was a plot to banish blacks.

In fact, all the enslaved worked in “slave-labor camps”; they produced the wealth of the United States.

In The 1619 Project, there are no Africans who raid villages and sell the captives to African or Muslim middlemen, who then sell them to Europeans, as actually happened.

Nor are there black slave owners in America, who, for example, in the four states of Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia in 1830 owned 10,000 slaves.

To fight CRT, the chimerical history upon which it is based must be debunked and fuller stories, such as the one about Coles and Jefferson, need to be told.

CRT uses a distorted history as an ends to justify reparations which in itself achieves nothing.

CRT is really an explanation of why minorities as a group, principally blacks, do not excel economically in the society of American opportunity. Economic failure results in a host of other societal ills, such as criminal activity. CRT believes that all racial groups are equally capable on an even playing field and should perform equally to whites. They equate an uneven playing field to “white privilege”.

Upon examining the premise of equality of capability and the societal construct of the playing field, there are two possible conclusions, either the premise of equality of capability is false, or indeed the economic playing field is biased in favor of whites.

The elephant in the room says that much has been studied regarding the lesser innate intelligence of American blacks. The “Bell Curve” and other studied around the world have come to this conclusion. It does not mean the black Americans are less human or less valuable in the eyes of God. So I pose that the premise of equality of capability is false. Why should this not be possible? White men can’t jump.

The minority standing on the sideline only see the outcome of the creativity, dedication and hard work of those that choose to compete. He assumes that all those people have succeeded with capabilities similar to his. This is an error. But his conclusion is that the playing field must be tipped in favor of the whites. What to do?

The best revenge for minorities against White Privilege is to compete and succeed. If you believe that the "playing field" is not level then you have two choices, compete anyway and work even harder to succeed, or go find another playing field.

The other playing field would be to succeed within your own minority community. Black owned businesses in Black neighborhoods, buying from Black distributors and producers.

Minorities will never find a solution in expecting whites to tip the playing field in their direction. The two groups have a completely different view of the field of competition. I think that whites go about their lives competing on the field of life and don't even see the blacks on the sidelines. Blacks stand on the sidelines and have no idea how to get on the field. For some reason they think they need to ask permission of the whites to play?

Just step on the field and compete! Or don't. It’s up to you. But don't blame it on whites if you can't.

From my Forth Grade Virginia History lessons, circa 1961:

1619 was known as,”The Red Letter Year” in Virginia, recognized for three events (not just a single). First, the establishment of The House of Burgesses, North America’s first elective legislative government. Second, the arrival of women in significant numbers; an effort to promote families and permanence for the colony. Finally, the twenty Black Africans, who were received as indentured servants, a common practice in Colonial Virginia.

Not trying to ignore slavery or it’s injustice here, simply an attempt at adding some perspective.

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