Like every ideologue who ventures into the study of history, Silverstein reduces the current controversy over the 1619 Project to a conflict between those who posit a patriotic myth and “the best scholarship” that sees the American Revolution as “sordid, racist and divisive.” There you have it: Silverstein speaks for the truth, against the critics who cling to mythology. This is self-serving claptrap. Those of us who see in American history profound divisions over democracy, equality, racism, and slavery are not plumping for a myth.

It is Silverstein who still cannot wrap his mind around the fact that, during the American Revolution, “some” Americans defended slavery while “some” Americans opposed it, and that the opposition to slavery had momentous consequences. He clings to the popular liberal myth that conservatives have “prevented generations of Americans from learning” about the “fundamental contradiction” between democracy and inequality at the core of our history — yet he does not realize that the endemic conflicts arising from that contradiction are conspicuously missing from the 1619 Project.

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. Unless you didn’t bother to take a US history class, or you didn’t do the reading, or you weren’t paying attention to the lectures, or you forgot. When I began my stint as a teaching assistant in my second year at Berkeley, where hundreds of students registered for the US history survey every semester, the first half was taught by Winthrop Jordan and the second half by Leon Litwack. Litwack’s class was justly famed for his extraordinary lectures, which, like his published work, strongly emphasized the depth and persistence of racial oppression in US history since the Civil War. His recent obituaries suggest that, over the course of his career, some forty thousand undergraduates sat through those lectures from the 1960s to the 1990s. He was not the only one stressing those themes. These days, when students register complaints about their US history classes, it’s often that there’s too much emphasis on race and slavery.

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.