I'm also a product of college in the 1960s (graduated in 1972). This is really different. I feel so badly for young people today because they've been "educated" to hate America and everything about her and to be disaffected and fearful. I cling to the rays of hope, such as the young woman who wrote a column from a coffee shop and observed all the comforts and benefits her generation has in this country and wondered what was wrong with her peers. I just hope that as these young people mature, they start to see things through her eyes. I'm also alarmed by the increase in militant right-wing young white men, but not surprised. They've been told practically from toddlerhood that they are personally the cause of all the problems in the world. What other outcome could there possibly have been after this kind of "education"? Those on the left decry this trend, yet they're the ones who created it.
Most on the Left created in their minds the idea that no matter what they did, young white men would become militant and right wing. They invented the idea that young white men are by their nature militant and right wing.
The real issue is this: the Left (and by extension the high institutions) rejected the concept of objective truth. Once you reject this concept you have no anchor.
Extrapolate this onto the question of young white men. It is objectively true to me that young white men are not destined to be anything other than older white men. But the Left created this structure based upon the precept that white men as a class have power and privilege. I don’t think they do. I think Will Smith’s kids have far more power and privilege than a son of oxy addicts in rural WV. But the Left imagines that this is not the case.
There is another issue. People like me that were never at elite institutions and are merely self taught often have a greater handle on philosophy and sociology than Ivy grads.
Why? Because Ivy grads are not going to a college that attempts to find truth any longer. They are going to a seminary. Most of their topics of discussion have the physical objective rigor of trying to find out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I am pretty right wing by any conventional definition. Why? I didn’t start that way. My parents are center Left. Most of my friends back in my 20s were various shades of Leftist. So what led me here? Self defense. If the Left calls me an enemy and demands total submission, and secondary status… what is my buy-in? I am not an automaton, and do not accept every assertion right wing people make, but overall they are my people because the other side tells me they hate me all the time. I hate the higher institutions of learning as well. Why? They state this quite openly.
They aren’t even just attacking straight white male Christians at this point. They are merely the hardest focus of their anger.
And yet, when I have observed civil disruptions and particularly their leadership, from UC Davis in 2011 on the quad, with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists discussing in cute cafes the problem that in America, the bourgeoisie would not take to the streets with weapons to help them overthrow the government, to the current day Code Pink for Palestine and all the rest of the pro-Palestinians that aren't Arabs, and ALL of the "trans-radical-activists" that attack and intimidate women --- EVERY single one of them is white, male, elitist, and militant. Virtually all of them are also descendants of the blue-blood settlers of this here United States.
EVERY SINGLE ONE! One exception I can think of is a secular jewish boy fleeing his heritage. There was that one.
A bit of history forgotten, and studiously ignored by "the left" that I see forgotten above, is that between 1600 and 1599, more Irish were sold into the Americas than any other people. This was post-Cromwell, after the English had a more humanitarian turn towards the Irish. More humane to sell the Irish into slavery than to slaughter the horrifically (like Oct 7th) and drive them, handless and naked into the snow to die. From 1550 and 1559, more Irish were sold into North America than registered free people that lived in colonies. It wasn't until 1713 or so that the Irish slave laws were taken off the books in South Carolina. After that, indentured Irish servants came over, and there are records that show the black slaves pitied them, because their term was 5 years, and there was little incentive for a slave owner to want a free white man to survive that hated him. Some of those indentured servants escaped into the mountains of Appalachia and became the hillbillies. Some of the slaves escaped to there before them.
The North brought Irish in and gave them a gun and if they fought for the North they would get citizenship. These were paid for by American citizens (mostly in New York and Boston) that had the money to avoid military service. Those Irish got their citizenship, and there were a lot of them. They had nothing much after the Civil War ended. "No Irish need apply" lasted until WW2, although Henry Ford found that hillbillies worked hard and brought them to his automotive plants where they prospered.
It is the descendants of those people that are much of the oxy generation. These people are still reviled by the elitist sons of the elite that put them where they are, plus a few oreo black leftists who have taken advantage. We now have a vice president from that ethnic "persuasion" who probably doesn't even know about his own history.
America was at root founded by the descendants of both sides of the English Civil War. Puritans and Cavaliers. The radicals you describe are often literally and always metaphorically the descendants of the Puritans.
The Irish and Scots-Irish were brought in as filler to prevent other Europeans from getting the territory. I believe that the core of America is those people, which is why they are the most attacked. But in them is the essence of America.
We have others who have come who took the side of the Puritans, but they are and always have been the core and root of everything wrong with America.
In prior times though they Atleast had some loyalty to America as a concept. They atleast wanted America to be a thing. The latest of their spiritual and literal descendants though have been taken by the GAE concept. And once again they want to use the hillbillies to help them overseas while abusing them at home.
"The problem today is that America’s elite universities seem to have lost sight of the above sacred purpose of honoring and propagating the best of its civilizational legacy."
The 1619 project was a project of the New York Times, and reflects the results of journalist conducting a kind of research they are completely unqualified for (historical research). Dozens of professional historians openly and rather harshly criticized the project for grave errors and worse. There are enough real problems in contemporary academia without misattributing blame that belongs elsewhere.
The "journalist" in question is Nikole Hannah-Jones. She first published her work in the NYT Magazine. She then attempted to enter academia.
She was offered tenure at UNC, even after some right wing lobbying. She won a Pullitzer Prize and a MacArthur Award and numerous other honors. She turned down the chaired tenured position at UNC to accept an even better offer from Howard University, where she now resides.
I am fairly sure that she could have had her pick of positions at almost any academic institution in the US, and maybe anywhere in the West. So although it is true that she was working for the NYT at the time of her original work on the 1619 project, it was EXACTLY what most current academic institutions want and reward.
This is in spite of the fact that even professional historians, hailing from one of the most woke parts of modern academia, lobbied hard to exclude her from academia.
So the author is not really misattributing blame. The author is right on the money.
I know it is painful to face this. But, we are in REAL trouble.
It is more complicated than that. Yes, there are political appointments like Hannah jones. And of course there are bad things happening in academia. It doesn’t change the fact that the 1619 project, specifically, is just not an example of one of them! It did not happen in academia even if the chief culprit of that unfortunate project was rewarded for it by an academic institution.
Sort of. Maybe not this initial project, but lots of follow-up "scholarship" and publications and lectures have all been done under the auspices of academic institutions.
H-J is celebrated as some sort of god or a prophet. I do not really care when she started this work, or who was her employer at the time. It probably was even before she went to the NYT. Who cares?
What is important is the REACTION to this work, no matter who funded it and where H-J worked during this project. This effort probably went on for years.
And we see the media loved it. And academia loved it. In some ways, the mainstream media and the humanities in academia are just two sides of the same coin. There is a bit of a revolving door there.
A political appointment is something given by the government. I am not really sure that I would classify H-J's faculty chair as a political appointment. Howard University is a private institution in DC. It is not a government institution in the same way that the Naval Academy is, for example. Some elected government official did not appoint her to that position.
So the real issue is not the petty topic of where she worked when the first piece might have been published. Does anyone care about that?
The damning indictment of academia is their overwhelmingly positive response. And the small handful of naysayers were effectively over-ruled, and made irrelevant.
It does not matter that this material is just a bunch of nonsense and racist horsepucky. Our systems are so broken that this garbage is celebrated, not rejected, as it should have been.
>>And we see the media loved it. And academia loved it. In some ways, the mainstream media and the humanities in academia are just too sides of the same coin. There is a bit of a revolving door there.
Who are the historians who criticized it? Are they not also the Humanities in academia? Critics easily forget that…
Listen, I’m not saying there aren’t problems. But they don’t justify uncritical hyperboles and misattributions. In fact it’s ironic if those who rightly criticize contemporary academia as often veering too far from accuracy, rigor and truth show too little concern for it themselves.
The 1619 Project is entirely rooted in Critical Race Theory, which is part of the New Left's Critical Studies "scholarship", and which posits racism as embedded in all of America's systems, thus making all of America and white Americans inherently bigoted towards "people of color" (whether they know it or not).
I've seen it described as a racialist offshoot of Marxism, where "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is transformed into "From each according to his Whiteness, to each according to his Black/brownness."
Either way, it is entirely a product of American academia, as is its glossy offshoot, The 1619 Project. The latter would not exist without the former.
That’s as may be. But the biggest problem with the 1619 project isn’t the conclusions we don’t like but the grave factual and methodological errors! It is on *those* that we insist (or ought to insist) in academia, not one ideology or another. And in any case calling it “a product of” academia defined so loosely is dishonest sophistry.* It was produced by the New York Times and for the New York Times (selling copies of their magazine). It was NOT produced by professors or by an academic institution. It is not a product of academia in a meaningful sense. If you believe academia is so sick you shouldn’t have a problem pointing out real honest and irrefutable examples, so why choose obviously incorrect ones?!
(* I realize that you distinguish “product” and “offshoot” but whether or not we see value in such fine distinctions the original piece made no such qualifications).
Is there some truth in the 1619 project? Of course. Its main focus is on the existence of slavery in the region which was to become the United States. And of course, there was slavery there, as there was throughout the Americas and the rest of the world.
It is the weird political spin that the author (and by extension, those in academia and the media who worship her) put on the topic. That is, the claim or suggestion is that slavery in this region was somehow unique. And that the entire purpose of the United States was to perpetuate slavery.
This is obviously false. The Federalist papers and early drafts of the US Constitution demonstrate this, but those sources were ignored by the author.
It is not as though there were not countervailing opinions on the topic in the US at the time. It took some decades before the US disavowed slavery completely. However, the US was one of the first jurisdictions to ban the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
In recent years, the US has put efforts into stamping out slavery. I might argue that we have not worked hard enough at this, given that slavery still exists. But, we have made some efforts.
The author also excludes all kinds of other interesting and relevant historical facts. For example, the French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas had far more slavery. Or that there are more slaves in Africa now than were transported to the colonies destined to be the US. Or the fact that there was a massive slave trade of white people to Africa and the Middle East, and so on.
Clearly, the Spanish and the French were in the part of the Americas that became the US a century or more before Jamestown. Are we to believe that they did not engage in the practice of slavery in this area, which they did in the rest of the Americas or their other colonies? This would be an interesting topic to explore, but it is ignored since it does not suit the author's narrative.
The problem is not just that the techniques and scholarship used are of low quality. It is that this entire project is only a crazy polemic with minimal basis in fact. And the interpretations of the facts are twisted to suit an agenda.
"If you believe academia is so sick you shouldn’t have a problem pointing out real honest and irrefutable examples, so why choose obviously incorrect ones?!"
I really don't think it's dishonest or inaccurate or "obviously incorrect" to map the lineage of the 1619 Project from Critical Theory to American academia, which is the lab where Crit Race Theory was created. The 1619 Project is not a literal direct product of academia (which I never claimed), but it is rooted in it, and without professors like Kimberlé Crenshaw (of UCLA and Columbia) and Derrick Bell (of NYU Law) it would never exist. I doubt even Hannah-Jones herself would dispute this.
"the biggest problem with the 1619 project isn’t the conclusions we don’t like but the grave factual and methodological errors! It is on *those* that we insist (or ought to insist) in academia, not one ideology or another."
Of course we agree here, but there are "grave factual and methodological errors" in both CRT and 1619 because these works are not based on scholarship but on political ideology and activism. They begin with a conclusion then work backwards to support it, instead of the other way around.
Marx's dictum: "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" is basically the official motto of all the New Left Crit Studies Depts, as they were all created by Marxists and/or in the Marxist tradition.
It's not my fault that American academia rotted itself out with New Left ideology and commissars disguised as deans and that it forsook its stated purpose (scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge through reason and open debate) to pursue a radical political agenda which has destroyed its own credibility and reputation. Don't shoot the messenger!
I might also note that this original screed, the 1619 Project, has been followed up with innumerable OTHER "scholarly works" on the exact same theme by academics in academia. Do they not exist?
I have seen the same thing in Canada, although the terms are slightly different. What is in common is the racist claim that the country is systemically racist, and that the solution is full strength woke DEI and the "social justice" of proclaiming white men (and Jews and Asians) as "oppressors" who must minimally be excluded but preferably crushed. This was foisted on the country by the lightweight prime minister J. Trudeau, but was taken up with a vengeance by our female dominated universities and especially denizens of grievance "studies" fields. Lacking the black population and history of slavery, Canadian "social justice" warriors took up the cause of the indigenous peoples, allegedly subjected to genocide (but now 5% of the population), and now allegedly oppressed by other 95% of Canadians, who are now designated "colonial settlers." Universities are at the forefront of "indigenizing" their "knowledge," including STEM, and otherwise "decolonializing" Canadian institutions and society by advocating transferring all wealth and property to the indigenous population. And any members of "protected" ethnic or gender or sexuality feel offended by another student or a professor, that offender is tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. As for our civilizational heritage, that is all Nazi and must be silenced. Whiteness too.
Honestly at this point, I’d be thrilled to see the university professors and admin totally demolished. They are unsalvageable. We need to burn academia to the ground and build it back up from the ashes.
That's why I refuse to support or have anything to do with an American or British university until and unless they have not only rid themselves of this poisonous ideology, but of every faculty and administrative staff member who supported it. Even if they all have to fail and be replaced by completely new universities dedicated to the founding principles.
Civil war is here. The communists have captured so many entities, including the universities and media. The left was so close. They had almost curbed free speech with the Biden administration's truth ministry effort. Guns are also their existential problem. The question is, how many good Americans are present to defeat the communists and their useful idiots?
Alan Bloom, The Closing of the America Mind, “It is a betrayal of the universities founding purpose; that is to harness tradition, the best of that which has been thought and said, in order to mold young souls in pursuit of excellence for its own sake. University has abandoned this central purpose and replaced it with vocational training and a smattering facts about other nations and cultures and a few social science formulas.”
I would say that comports with our authors argument .
I’m 61 now and as I look back, I think most of my university professors were losers. There was a couple genuine scholars (what a pleasure) and some quirky weirdo’s.
The solution to this problem is not to police what people think, that’s impossible, it is to defund the universities, no taxpayers money and let them fall apart. 50% will go and the remaining ones will remain on merit, and rest assured, ideology is not meritorious.
There are some who claim that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and others who claim that the Civil War was not fought because of slavery. However, five Southern states wrote wrote Declarations of Causes of Seceding States and the 13 colonies wrote the Declaration of Independence: "WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation."
If one looks at the draft of the declaration Jefferson and his co-authors submitted to the Continental Congress, there is absolutely no doubt that Jefferson included [male] slaves among those who were endowed by their creators with certain inalienable Rights and that Jefferson blames the King for the existence of the abomination of slavery in the colonies:
"[The King] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. There is no doubt from other documents popularized by the 1619 Project that colonists were concerned about the possibility of slave rebellion, Lord Dunmore's proclamation and attack from "Indians", but these rationals aren't cited in the Declaration. On the other hand, four of five of the Declarations of Causes of Seceding States make it absolutely clear that slavery was the main reason of secession. Texas said it best:
"That in this free government ALL WHITE MEN ARE AND OF RIGHT OUGHT TO BE ENTITLED TO EQUAL CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations ...
Lmao Abe Lincoln didn’t originate the House Divided quotation, that was Jesus Christ, and the fact we don’t know that and have replaced him with a modern deist is the origin of the problem in the first place
I'm also a product of college in the 1960s (graduated in 1972). This is really different. I feel so badly for young people today because they've been "educated" to hate America and everything about her and to be disaffected and fearful. I cling to the rays of hope, such as the young woman who wrote a column from a coffee shop and observed all the comforts and benefits her generation has in this country and wondered what was wrong with her peers. I just hope that as these young people mature, they start to see things through her eyes. I'm also alarmed by the increase in militant right-wing young white men, but not surprised. They've been told practically from toddlerhood that they are personally the cause of all the problems in the world. What other outcome could there possibly have been after this kind of "education"? Those on the left decry this trend, yet they're the ones who created it.
Most on the Left created in their minds the idea that no matter what they did, young white men would become militant and right wing. They invented the idea that young white men are by their nature militant and right wing.
The real issue is this: the Left (and by extension the high institutions) rejected the concept of objective truth. Once you reject this concept you have no anchor.
Extrapolate this onto the question of young white men. It is objectively true to me that young white men are not destined to be anything other than older white men. But the Left created this structure based upon the precept that white men as a class have power and privilege. I don’t think they do. I think Will Smith’s kids have far more power and privilege than a son of oxy addicts in rural WV. But the Left imagines that this is not the case.
There is another issue. People like me that were never at elite institutions and are merely self taught often have a greater handle on philosophy and sociology than Ivy grads.
Why? Because Ivy grads are not going to a college that attempts to find truth any longer. They are going to a seminary. Most of their topics of discussion have the physical objective rigor of trying to find out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I am pretty right wing by any conventional definition. Why? I didn’t start that way. My parents are center Left. Most of my friends back in my 20s were various shades of Leftist. So what led me here? Self defense. If the Left calls me an enemy and demands total submission, and secondary status… what is my buy-in? I am not an automaton, and do not accept every assertion right wing people make, but overall they are my people because the other side tells me they hate me all the time. I hate the higher institutions of learning as well. Why? They state this quite openly.
They aren’t even just attacking straight white male Christians at this point. They are merely the hardest focus of their anger.
I don’t think they can move back from it either.
And yet, when I have observed civil disruptions and particularly their leadership, from UC Davis in 2011 on the quad, with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists discussing in cute cafes the problem that in America, the bourgeoisie would not take to the streets with weapons to help them overthrow the government, to the current day Code Pink for Palestine and all the rest of the pro-Palestinians that aren't Arabs, and ALL of the "trans-radical-activists" that attack and intimidate women --- EVERY single one of them is white, male, elitist, and militant. Virtually all of them are also descendants of the blue-blood settlers of this here United States.
EVERY SINGLE ONE! One exception I can think of is a secular jewish boy fleeing his heritage. There was that one.
A bit of history forgotten, and studiously ignored by "the left" that I see forgotten above, is that between 1600 and 1599, more Irish were sold into the Americas than any other people. This was post-Cromwell, after the English had a more humanitarian turn towards the Irish. More humane to sell the Irish into slavery than to slaughter the horrifically (like Oct 7th) and drive them, handless and naked into the snow to die. From 1550 and 1559, more Irish were sold into North America than registered free people that lived in colonies. It wasn't until 1713 or so that the Irish slave laws were taken off the books in South Carolina. After that, indentured Irish servants came over, and there are records that show the black slaves pitied them, because their term was 5 years, and there was little incentive for a slave owner to want a free white man to survive that hated him. Some of those indentured servants escaped into the mountains of Appalachia and became the hillbillies. Some of the slaves escaped to there before them.
The North brought Irish in and gave them a gun and if they fought for the North they would get citizenship. These were paid for by American citizens (mostly in New York and Boston) that had the money to avoid military service. Those Irish got their citizenship, and there were a lot of them. They had nothing much after the Civil War ended. "No Irish need apply" lasted until WW2, although Henry Ford found that hillbillies worked hard and brought them to his automotive plants where they prospered.
It is the descendants of those people that are much of the oxy generation. These people are still reviled by the elitist sons of the elite that put them where they are, plus a few oreo black leftists who have taken advantage. We now have a vice president from that ethnic "persuasion" who probably doesn't even know about his own history.
America was at root founded by the descendants of both sides of the English Civil War. Puritans and Cavaliers. The radicals you describe are often literally and always metaphorically the descendants of the Puritans.
The Irish and Scots-Irish were brought in as filler to prevent other Europeans from getting the territory. I believe that the core of America is those people, which is why they are the most attacked. But in them is the essence of America.
We have others who have come who took the side of the Puritans, but they are and always have been the core and root of everything wrong with America.
In prior times though they Atleast had some loyalty to America as a concept. They atleast wanted America to be a thing. The latest of their spiritual and literal descendants though have been taken by the GAE concept. And once again they want to use the hillbillies to help them overseas while abusing them at home.
Because most university programmes now promote activism and alienation.
"The problem today is that America’s elite universities seem to have lost sight of the above sacred purpose of honoring and propagating the best of its civilizational legacy."
Remove "seem to" from that sentence.
Yep.
The 1619 project was a project of the New York Times, and reflects the results of journalist conducting a kind of research they are completely unqualified for (historical research). Dozens of professional historians openly and rather harshly criticized the project for grave errors and worse. There are enough real problems in contemporary academia without misattributing blame that belongs elsewhere.
The "journalist" in question is Nikole Hannah-Jones. She first published her work in the NYT Magazine. She then attempted to enter academia.
She was offered tenure at UNC, even after some right wing lobbying. She won a Pullitzer Prize and a MacArthur Award and numerous other honors. She turned down the chaired tenured position at UNC to accept an even better offer from Howard University, where she now resides.
I am fairly sure that she could have had her pick of positions at almost any academic institution in the US, and maybe anywhere in the West. So although it is true that she was working for the NYT at the time of her original work on the 1619 project, it was EXACTLY what most current academic institutions want and reward.
This is in spite of the fact that even professional historians, hailing from one of the most woke parts of modern academia, lobbied hard to exclude her from academia.
So the author is not really misattributing blame. The author is right on the money.
I know it is painful to face this. But, we are in REAL trouble.
It is more complicated than that. Yes, there are political appointments like Hannah jones. And of course there are bad things happening in academia. It doesn’t change the fact that the 1619 project, specifically, is just not an example of one of them! It did not happen in academia even if the chief culprit of that unfortunate project was rewarded for it by an academic institution.
Sort of. Maybe not this initial project, but lots of follow-up "scholarship" and publications and lectures have all been done under the auspices of academic institutions.
H-J is celebrated as some sort of god or a prophet. I do not really care when she started this work, or who was her employer at the time. It probably was even before she went to the NYT. Who cares?
What is important is the REACTION to this work, no matter who funded it and where H-J worked during this project. This effort probably went on for years.
And we see the media loved it. And academia loved it. In some ways, the mainstream media and the humanities in academia are just two sides of the same coin. There is a bit of a revolving door there.
A political appointment is something given by the government. I am not really sure that I would classify H-J's faculty chair as a political appointment. Howard University is a private institution in DC. It is not a government institution in the same way that the Naval Academy is, for example. Some elected government official did not appoint her to that position.
So the real issue is not the petty topic of where she worked when the first piece might have been published. Does anyone care about that?
The damning indictment of academia is their overwhelmingly positive response. And the small handful of naysayers were effectively over-ruled, and made irrelevant.
It does not matter that this material is just a bunch of nonsense and racist horsepucky. Our systems are so broken that this garbage is celebrated, not rejected, as it should have been.
>>And we see the media loved it. And academia loved it. In some ways, the mainstream media and the humanities in academia are just too sides of the same coin. There is a bit of a revolving door there.
Who are the historians who criticized it? Are they not also the Humanities in academia? Critics easily forget that…
Listen, I’m not saying there aren’t problems. But they don’t justify uncritical hyperboles and misattributions. In fact it’s ironic if those who rightly criticize contemporary academia as often veering too far from accuracy, rigor and truth show too little concern for it themselves.
I am sure you are aware of the statistics and data about the composition of the faculty.
Are there some of us pushing back against the nonsense? Yes, obviously. We are here on the Heterodox STEM section of Substack.
But, so far, it has not been enough.
It remains to be seen if any efforts by anyone will change the current path of destruction US academia is on.
The 1619 Project is entirely rooted in Critical Race Theory, which is part of the New Left's Critical Studies "scholarship", and which posits racism as embedded in all of America's systems, thus making all of America and white Americans inherently bigoted towards "people of color" (whether they know it or not).
I've seen it described as a racialist offshoot of Marxism, where "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is transformed into "From each according to his Whiteness, to each according to his Black/brownness."
Either way, it is entirely a product of American academia, as is its glossy offshoot, The 1619 Project. The latter would not exist without the former.
That’s as may be. But the biggest problem with the 1619 project isn’t the conclusions we don’t like but the grave factual and methodological errors! It is on *those* that we insist (or ought to insist) in academia, not one ideology or another. And in any case calling it “a product of” academia defined so loosely is dishonest sophistry.* It was produced by the New York Times and for the New York Times (selling copies of their magazine). It was NOT produced by professors or by an academic institution. It is not a product of academia in a meaningful sense. If you believe academia is so sick you shouldn’t have a problem pointing out real honest and irrefutable examples, so why choose obviously incorrect ones?!
(* I realize that you distinguish “product” and “offshoot” but whether or not we see value in such fine distinctions the original piece made no such qualifications).
Is there some truth in the 1619 project? Of course. Its main focus is on the existence of slavery in the region which was to become the United States. And of course, there was slavery there, as there was throughout the Americas and the rest of the world.
It is the weird political spin that the author (and by extension, those in academia and the media who worship her) put on the topic. That is, the claim or suggestion is that slavery in this region was somehow unique. And that the entire purpose of the United States was to perpetuate slavery.
This is obviously false. The Federalist papers and early drafts of the US Constitution demonstrate this, but those sources were ignored by the author.
It is not as though there were not countervailing opinions on the topic in the US at the time. It took some decades before the US disavowed slavery completely. However, the US was one of the first jurisdictions to ban the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
In recent years, the US has put efforts into stamping out slavery. I might argue that we have not worked hard enough at this, given that slavery still exists. But, we have made some efforts.
The author also excludes all kinds of other interesting and relevant historical facts. For example, the French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas had far more slavery. Or that there are more slaves in Africa now than were transported to the colonies destined to be the US. Or the fact that there was a massive slave trade of white people to Africa and the Middle East, and so on.
Clearly, the Spanish and the French were in the part of the Americas that became the US a century or more before Jamestown. Are we to believe that they did not engage in the practice of slavery in this area, which they did in the rest of the Americas or their other colonies? This would be an interesting topic to explore, but it is ignored since it does not suit the author's narrative.
The problem is not just that the techniques and scholarship used are of low quality. It is that this entire project is only a crazy polemic with minimal basis in fact. And the interpretations of the facts are twisted to suit an agenda.
"If you believe academia is so sick you shouldn’t have a problem pointing out real honest and irrefutable examples, so why choose obviously incorrect ones?!"
I really don't think it's dishonest or inaccurate or "obviously incorrect" to map the lineage of the 1619 Project from Critical Theory to American academia, which is the lab where Crit Race Theory was created. The 1619 Project is not a literal direct product of academia (which I never claimed), but it is rooted in it, and without professors like Kimberlé Crenshaw (of UCLA and Columbia) and Derrick Bell (of NYU Law) it would never exist. I doubt even Hannah-Jones herself would dispute this.
"the biggest problem with the 1619 project isn’t the conclusions we don’t like but the grave factual and methodological errors! It is on *those* that we insist (or ought to insist) in academia, not one ideology or another."
Of course we agree here, but there are "grave factual and methodological errors" in both CRT and 1619 because these works are not based on scholarship but on political ideology and activism. They begin with a conclusion then work backwards to support it, instead of the other way around.
Marx's dictum: "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" is basically the official motto of all the New Left Crit Studies Depts, as they were all created by Marxists and/or in the Marxist tradition.
It's not my fault that American academia rotted itself out with New Left ideology and commissars disguised as deans and that it forsook its stated purpose (scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge through reason and open debate) to pursue a radical political agenda which has destroyed its own credibility and reputation. Don't shoot the messenger!
I might also note that this original screed, the 1619 Project, has been followed up with innumerable OTHER "scholarly works" on the exact same theme by academics in academia. Do they not exist?
What on earth?
I have seen the same thing in Canada, although the terms are slightly different. What is in common is the racist claim that the country is systemically racist, and that the solution is full strength woke DEI and the "social justice" of proclaiming white men (and Jews and Asians) as "oppressors" who must minimally be excluded but preferably crushed. This was foisted on the country by the lightweight prime minister J. Trudeau, but was taken up with a vengeance by our female dominated universities and especially denizens of grievance "studies" fields. Lacking the black population and history of slavery, Canadian "social justice" warriors took up the cause of the indigenous peoples, allegedly subjected to genocide (but now 5% of the population), and now allegedly oppressed by other 95% of Canadians, who are now designated "colonial settlers." Universities are at the forefront of "indigenizing" their "knowledge," including STEM, and otherwise "decolonializing" Canadian institutions and society by advocating transferring all wealth and property to the indigenous population. And any members of "protected" ethnic or gender or sexuality feel offended by another student or a professor, that offender is tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. As for our civilizational heritage, that is all Nazi and must be silenced. Whiteness too.
Honestly at this point, I’d be thrilled to see the university professors and admin totally demolished. They are unsalvageable. We need to burn academia to the ground and build it back up from the ashes.
Have you read Roger Kimbal’s “The Long March”?
Thank you
Great article, Carl!
That's why I refuse to support or have anything to do with an American or British university until and unless they have not only rid themselves of this poisonous ideology, but of every faculty and administrative staff member who supported it. Even if they all have to fail and be replaced by completely new universities dedicated to the founding principles.
Berkeley '92
Oxford '94
Uppsala '95
Cornell '99
Civil war is here. The communists have captured so many entities, including the universities and media. The left was so close. They had almost curbed free speech with the Biden administration's truth ministry effort. Guns are also their existential problem. The question is, how many good Americans are present to defeat the communists and their useful idiots?
We need to build out a parallel system beginning with Hillsdale and new college.
Bravo: hear, hear!
I have the habit of writing things down.
Alan Bloom, The Closing of the America Mind, “It is a betrayal of the universities founding purpose; that is to harness tradition, the best of that which has been thought and said, in order to mold young souls in pursuit of excellence for its own sake. University has abandoned this central purpose and replaced it with vocational training and a smattering facts about other nations and cultures and a few social science formulas.”
I would say that comports with our authors argument .
I’m 61 now and as I look back, I think most of my university professors were losers. There was a couple genuine scholars (what a pleasure) and some quirky weirdo’s.
The solution to this problem is not to police what people think, that’s impossible, it is to defund the universities, no taxpayers money and let them fall apart. 50% will go and the remaining ones will remain on merit, and rest assured, ideology is not meritorious.
My two cents worth .
There are some who claim that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and others who claim that the Civil War was not fought because of slavery. However, five Southern states wrote wrote Declarations of Causes of Seceding States and the 13 colonies wrote the Declaration of Independence: "WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation."
If one looks at the draft of the declaration Jefferson and his co-authors submitted to the Continental Congress, there is absolutely no doubt that Jefferson included [male] slaves among those who were endowed by their creators with certain inalienable Rights and that Jefferson blames the King for the existence of the abomination of slavery in the colonies:
"[The King] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. There is no doubt from other documents popularized by the 1619 Project that colonists were concerned about the possibility of slave rebellion, Lord Dunmore's proclamation and attack from "Indians", but these rationals aren't cited in the Declaration. On the other hand, four of five of the Declarations of Causes of Seceding States make it absolutely clear that slavery was the main reason of secession. Texas said it best:
"That in this free government ALL WHITE MEN ARE AND OF RIGHT OUGHT TO BE ENTITLED TO EQUAL CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations ...
Lmao Abe Lincoln didn’t originate the House Divided quotation, that was Jesus Christ, and the fact we don’t know that and have replaced him with a modern deist is the origin of the problem in the first place