So the 1619 Project begins with a cliché, a tiresome liberal trope, endlessly repeated: “Why weren’t we taught this? Why didn’t we know this?” To which the obvious answer is: You were taught this. The dominant scholarship and popular work have emphasized slavery and the depth and persistence of racial oppression in US history.

Erasing Antislavery

If the 1619 Project was not actually introducing Americans to an aspect of their history they were never taught in school, why the controversy? If all the Times was doing was restating what we already knew, why the complaints? What was it about the way the Times presented that history that caused so much strife? There were the egregious factual errors, of course, but it’s more than that. It’s the ideological and political framework of the project that led its editors to those inaccuracies and distortions. The 1619 Project is, to begin with, written from a black nationalist perspective that systemically erases all evidence that white Americans were ever important allies of the black freedom struggle. Second, it is written with an eye toward justifying reparations, leading to the dubious proposition that all white people are and have always been the beneficiaries of slavery and racism. This second proposition is based in turn on a third, that slavery “fueled” America’s exceptional economic development.

Nationalism is always an interpretation of history, and it is always a distorted interpretation. Think of the way German nationalists, Southern nationalists, or Zionists have all used and abused history to justify their politics. History written with the goal of instilling patriotism in its readers, such as the 1776 Project, cannot help but be distorted. Nationalist histories emphasize continuity, tracing virtually unbroken lineages back through centuries, even millennia, often through racial or quasi-racial conceptions of a folk heritage. And above all, nationalists erase class divisions within the putative national community. Black nationalism — understood not as a protest movement but as the dominant ideology of the black professional-managerial class — is a variation on the theme. It views US history almost exclusively through the lens of race. It defines racism as America’s original sin, a sin that has been all but universal among whites and is passed down from generation to generation, like DNA. The metaphors of “original sin” and “DNA” are designed to freeze history, to emphasize continuity rather than change. Nikole Hannah-Jones refers in passing to the “progress” black people have made, but readers will be hard-pressed to find evidence of it — and in any case, whatever progress there has been was achieved by blacks alone, thanks to the racist gene embedded in white America’s DNA.