New York Times magazine staffer Nikole Hannah-Jones claimed this week that her infamous 1619 Project is not actually a work of history, but rather an “origin story.”
Do the schools that have incorporated the project into their history curricula know about this?
On Monday, Willamette University Professor Seth Cotlar said in praise of the project that it “is not about history. It’s about memory; about what parts of the nation’s past we should hold in our memories going forward & about how we tell the story of the nation to our children.”
Hannah-Jones, who founded and heads the project, which posits that America’s true founding dates back to the year that slaves were first brought to its shores, was pleased to hear him describe it in such terms.
“He is right: The fight over the 1619 Project is not about history. It is about memory,“ she responded on social media. “I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”
First, there is a word for literature that seeks not merely to inform but to “challenge the national narrative” and “national memory,” and it is not “journalism.”
Second, if the project “is not a history,” then what are we to make of the schools that have updated their history curricula to make way for its faulty central claims? Practically speaking, how does one incorporate the 1619 Project into a straightforward history curriculum? Who knows!
The project, its founder stressed, “never pretended to be a history.”
This seems an odd thing to assert now, considering Hannah-Jones herself claimed previously that the project is “American history, not black history.” There is also the rather awkward fact that she and her cohort have spent no small amount of energy boasting about the number of historians who have contributed to the effort, whether with essays or fact-checking. In retrospect, I suppose it was stupid to assume that an initiative bragging of the number of involved historians was also a work of history.
Perhaps she is backtracking now on “history” because even interpretive history, like journalism, must rely on solid facts. Unfortunately for Hannah-Jones, her contributions to the 1619 Project have been criticized far and wide as being counterfactual.
“The fight here is about who gets to control the national narrative, and therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself,” she continued this week. “One group has monopolized this for too long in order to create this myth of exceptionalism.”
“I am not sure what is confusing about this,” she continued, responding to critics who were reasonably confused by her description of the project and its stated goals. “I am not an historian. I am a journalist. The 1619 Project involves historical research, reporting, and argument to tell a story about the modern legacy of slavery. Historiography does something completely different.”
“I’ve said consistently that the 1619 Project is an origin story, not the origin story,” she added. “Our intro says explicitly, what would it mean to consider 1619 our founding — not that it is our founding. The entire point of the 1619 Project … is to offer an alternative, to challenge the single narrative, to push against it and center the margins.”
Well, all right then. Whatever you say.
Honestly, at this point, it is anybody’s guess what the true purpose of the project is. I had stupidly thought that its goal was to posit a premise (that everything we know about America flows from chattel slavery) and then back up said premise with historical fact. But the project apparently exists to “challenge” a “narrative” and our “national memory” — whatever that means.
