Commonsense & Wonder

David Horowitz dissects the completely dishonest and historically baseless 1619 Project from the NYT:

Hannah-Jones’ explanation of the project to make 1619 America’s Founding instead of 1776 or 1787, describes the event in these words: “In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va.,… the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War.”[6] [Emphasis added.) 

This description is a tissue of fictions beginning with the insinuation that 12.5 million Africans were shipped to America in the Atlantic Slave Trade. The proper figure is 330,000 – bad enough – but a sign that American slavery even in the Western Hemisphere was significantly less than Hannah-Jones and her enablers would like it to be. More strikingly, the statement that this was “the beginning of American slavery” is false on its face. It was a continuation of English – not American practice. And the 20 Africans brought to Virginia in 1619 were not slaves. 

As the distinguished African-American Princeton historian, Nell Painter, observed in a critique of the 1619 Project, the Africans brought to Virginia in 1619 were indentured servants, meaning that they would be free within a set number of years, usually five to seven.[7] In fact the majority of laborers in the Virginia colony were indentured servants, almost all of them white. Moreover, neither the 20 indentured servants who arrived in Virginia in 1619 nor the vast majority of actual slaves who came later were “kidnapped” by white Englishmen or any other whites. They were bought at slave auctions centered in Ghana and Benin from black African slave owners. The 20 indentured servants who arrived in Virginia in 1619 had been captured and indentured by black African warlords as spoils of war.[8] All of these facts undermine the Times’ attack on America’s founding, so Hannah-Jones omits them. 

The ideological character of the 1619 Project is manifest in the subtitle of Hannah-Jones’ historically illiterate introduction: “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”[9] This claim is based first of all on a grammatical misunderstanding of the word “ideals,” and then on an extravagant distortion of the historical record. “Ideals” are by their very nature aspirations not facts. The Founders’ ideals were actually commitments they made which they and their heirs did carry out.

Read the whole thing here.