[The American Mind] Revisionist Black supremacist history can't grasp our shared equality.When Beto O’Rourke’s poll numbers were cratering in the Democratic primary runoff this summer, he decided that the only decent thing to do from his perch of white privilege was to confess that "this country was founded on white supremacy." This did little to boost his national appeal.
The limb was not properly guided or pruned, it will very likely always need a crutch.
Nevertheless, the New York Times Magazine and the Pulitzer Center have doubled down on the claim that white supremacy is the essence of the American regime in their "1619 Project." Complete with study guides and curricula which supplement more than thirty essays and artistic productions, this multilayered initiative seeks "to reframe the country’s history" by "placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."
One crucial "1619" installment is a 7,300-word essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones titled "Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals were False When They Were Written. Black Americans have Fought to Make Them True."
In Hannah-Jones’s version of American history, the Declaration of Independence marks not the beginning of a new era in human civilization, but only the continuation of white supremacy’s oppressive march on American soil. America did not begin in 1776 with the declaration that "all men are created equal," but with the clear negation of that statement in 1619, when the first 20 American slaves landed in Jamestown, Virginia. As far as the bedrock of America goes, it’s racism all the way down. Hannah-Jones ably informs us of many important contributions that blacks have made to America’s political and cultural prosperity.
But she unfortunately excludes significant facts that would ruin her disingenuous argument about the American Founders and their most exemplary defender, Abraham Lincoln. Hannah-Jones’s mistake is to interpret American history as a zero-sum narrative, wherein the recovered strivings of black folk must displace the recorded achievements of white folk. What we need is a more capacious revision of American history‐one that incorporates the heroic participation and fealty of black Americans while also acknowledging the Founders’ efforts to establish a free society in a land accustomed to racial slavery. Instead, Hannah-Jones’s "history" is riddled with half-truths, overstatements, out-of-context quotations, and just plain falsehoods about the founding and Lincoln. She distorts our past and undermines our common understanding of how we strove as a diverse people to align our practices with our noblest professions.