Katherine Kersten on how the New York Times ‘1619 Project’ distorts America’s progress and the exceptional ideals that drive it

From Mark Perry.

"Twin Cities-based Center of the American Experiment senior fellow Katherine Kersten (and former StarTribune columnist) writes in the Sunday StarTribune about how the New York Times ‘1619 Project‘ “slavery-at-the-fore reframing of American history” distorts America’s progress and the exceptional ideals that drive it. Here are some “money quotes” from Katherine’s excellent op-ed:

The New York Times’ project is the latest chapter in the American left’s ongoing campaign to rewrite history. This movement approaches history, in all its messy complexity, not as a search for truth but as a vehicle for advancing a political agenda.
The 1619 Project aims to recast Americans’ concept of their nation as one founded on freedom, equality and opportunity into one irremediably corrupted by slavery, inequality and racism. Using distortions, half-truths and outright falsehoods, the Times promotes a narrative that our founding ideals, allegedly false from the beginning, remain so, by extension, today.
It concludes that wholesale social, political and cultural transformation — led, no doubt, by right-thinking people like those on its payroll — will be necessary to redeem our nation from this original sin. The 1619 Project’s simplistic and misleading “good guy/bad guy” narrative rests on several central falsehoods.
First, it portrays slavery as an evil for which Americans bear unique responsibility and should feel overwhelming guilt, even today. In fact, until recently, slavery and human bondage were the norm throughout the world. Slavery was a bedrock institution in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Asia, and among the Incas and Aztecs in the New World. In the early 1800s, an estimated three-quarters of the world’s population endured slavery or serfdom of some kind.
Today, approximately 40 million human beings remain trapped in slavery in countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China and various parts of Africa. By focusing uniquely on the U.S., the Times creates the impression that most slaves in the Atlantic slave trade were brought here. In fact, that was true of less than 4%. The other 96% were transported to Latin America and the Caribbean, with about 37% going to Brazil [and 53% going to the Caribbean and 7% going to the Spanish Americas, see visualization above].
…..
The 1619 Project’s mantra that America is racist to its core dovetails with the divisive racialist ideology — so influential today — that urges Americans to view one another as members of racial groups first, and as individual human beings second. This cynical vision threatens to undermine the very principles and institutions that offer greatest opportunity to all who seek freedom and prosperity, including black Americans.
Our nation does not need race-based shaming for whites and condescending “victim” talk for blacks. It needs inspiring examples of the beliefs and actions that enable individuals to take full advantage of the priceless benefits of living here.
Man’s seemingly boundless capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man is one of history’s indelible lessons. Only in Western civilization has the worldwide institution of slavery been questioned and reformed. Critics like the Times adopt the standards of equality and natural rights — which arose only in the West — and then revile those who created them.

MP: The data in the bar chart race visualization above are from the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases, which are the “culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The National Endowment for the Humanities was the principal sponsor of this work carried out at Emory University Center for Digital Scholarship, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. The Hutchins Center of Harvard University has also provided support.” Here are some details on the visualization:

1. Of the nearly 10 million African slaves brought to the New World between 1511 and 1870, more than one-half (5.1 million and 52.8% of the total) disembarked in the Caribbean, and more than one-third were brought to Brazil (3.5 million and 36.5% of the total). Of the remaining approximately 1 million African slaves who were brought to the New World, 658,000 (and 6.8% of the total) disembarked in the Spanish Americas (Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, etc.) and only about 366,000 arrived in mainland North America (which became the United States) representing only 3.8% of the total slaves arriving in the New World during the trans-Atlantic trade. For every one African slave brought to the United States, there were more than 26 slaves who arrived elsewhere in the New World (Brazil, Caribbean, and Spanish Americas).

2. By ratios, there were nearly 14 times as many slaves brought to the Caribbean and nearly 10 times as many slaves brought to Brazil as the United States (Mainland North America).

3. There were nearly as many slaves (352,411) brought to the Spanish Americas between 1511 and 1620 as arrived in the United States between 1651 and 1870.

4. In the year 1700 when only 12,000 slaves had arrived in North America, there were already more than half a million slaves in both the Caribbean (517,000) and the Spanish Americas (553,000). By the early 1800s when the total number of slaves brought to Mainland North America peaked and stabilized at about 361,000, there were more than 4.25 million slaves in the Caribbean and nearly 2 million in Brazil. Between 1810 and before the Civil War started in 1861, fewer than 5,000 African slaves arrived in the United States.

5. Even as the slave trade stopped in the United States, the Spanish Americas, and Brazil by around 1860, more than 135,000 African slaves were brought to the Caribbean between 1856 and 1870.
For more reading, here are some related articles:

1. “Historians vs. the ‘1619 Project’” in National Review by Charles Cooke (editor of National Review Online) who “heartily recommends devastating interviews about the 1619 Project” with prominent historians Gordon S. Wood (Brown University), James McPherson (Princeton University), and James Oakes (Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York).

2. “A Divisive, Historically Dubious Curriculum: Teachers should reject the 1619 Project” by Max Eden of the Manhattan Institute:

The themes and messages of the 1619 Project are not only historically dubious; they will also lead to deeper civic alienation. Conscientious teachers should file the 1619 curriculum where it belongs: in the waste bin.

3. “The Flagrant Distortions and Subtle Lies of the ‘1619 Project’” by Rich Lowry in National Review:

The American past has had its share of both hypocrisy and nobility. Truthfulness demands that we acknowledge both. Americans were hypocrites in extolling liberty and grounding our national identity to a significant extent in it, while at the same tolerating or even embracing slavery. But, over time, the principles and rhetoric of freedom proved powerful tools against slavery.
The stakes in getting this right are large. If they succeed in making America only about the hypocrisy, the architects of the 1619 Project will deny the country’s nobility to the rising generation. They will have made America, in Huntington’s terms, a lie pure and simple, and enshrined their own hostile, mythologized account of our history.

4. “How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.?” by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research:

Perhaps you, like me, were raised essentially to think of the slave experience primarily in terms of our black ancestors here in the United States. In other words, slavery was primarily about us, right, from Crispus Attucks and Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker and Richard Allen, all the way to Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. Think of this as an instance of what we might think of as African-American exceptionalism. (In other words, if it’s in “the black Experience,” it’s got to be about black Americans.) Well, think again.
Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.

5. “Preaching a Conspiracy Theory: The 1619 Project offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—not history” by Allen C. Guelzo, Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative in Politics and Statesmanship at Princeton University:

The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.
The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory. And like all conspiracy theories, the 1619 Project announces with a eureka! that it has acquired the explanation to everything, and thus gives an aggrieved audience a sense that finally it is in control, through its understanding of the real cause of its unhappiness. But historians—and most journalists—know that human experience is multivalent, contingent, and contradictory. And it bodes ill for the 1619 Project that while conspiracy theories arouse tidal waves of attention in their first unveiling, they also—like the Grassy Knoll or the Blood Libel—wear out quickly, because their ability to explain everything usually ends up explaining nothing.
The 1619 Project is not history; it is ignorance. It claims that the American Revolution was staged to protect slavery, though it never once occurs to the Project to ask, in that case, why the British West Indies (which had a far larger and infinitely more malignant slave system than the 13 American colonies) never joined us in that revolution.
The 1619 Project is not history; it is evangelism, but evangelism for a gospel of disenchantment whose ultimate purpose is the hollowing out of the meaning of freedom, so that every defense of freedom drops nervously from the hands of people who have been made too ashamed to defend it."