Sen. Tom Cotton is not backing down on getting the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project out of U.S. classrooms.
The Arkansas Republican on Wednesday defended his decision last week to propose a bill that would bar federal funds being used to endorse or teach a curriculum based on the 1619 Project, a piece written by Nikole Hannah-Jones that focuses on race as the defining feature of the country’s story and aims to reexamine the legacy of slavery.
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“The 1619 Project is a radical work of historical revisionism to indoctrinate our kids to hate America, to teach them that America was founded not on the natural equality of mankind and the freedom that flows from that as our Declaration says but rather founded on racism,” Cotton said on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
School districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, New York, have updated their history courses to include the New York Times feature into the teachings of U.S. history. The goal of the project is to suggest that the nation’s true founding occurred in 1619 when the first slave ships arrived on U.S. soil, rather than 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4.
Cotton’s bill is unlikely to be passed by the GOP-led Senate and more unlikely to be approved by House Democrats. The senator also recently came under fire for comments he made about slavery, saying the country’s founders viewed slavery as a “necessary evil.”
He said despite criticism, he will continue to defend his position on keeping what he views as an accurate view of history in schools.
“I’m not going to back down when it comes to defending our country and defending what is great about America and teaching our children to be proud of America,” Cotton said.
