Carlos Lozada reviews the new 1619 Project book in today’s Washington Post. The review is decidedly mixed, incorporating criticism, praise, and confusion in one review! Since the 1619 Project first appeared in The New York Times two years ago, I have run excepts, and posted criticism from different parts of the scholarly spectrum of the well-known series. I attended an incredibly enthusiastic lecture by Nikole Hannah-Jones at the university where I teach, Hofstra. I have also heard from numerous critics and supporters of the Project on social media. Because my expertise is in immigration law and policy, and not the Founding of the United States, I have approached the controversy as a student hoping to learn more from the arguments. I have tried to bring you interesting elements of the discussion over 1619 so you too can make up your own mind about this.
In his review, Lozada offers a critique of the sometimes contradictory ways in which the writers and editors behind 1619 have described the Project. I suggest you read the entire review, but I though that Lozada’s discussion of what 1619 really is is worth reprinting here:
The New York Times’s celebrated 1619 Project is as intriguing for the second half of its title as for the first. What is the project of this sprawling project; what are not just its principal conclusions and messages, but also its underlying methods and objectives? For a work of journalism — or history, or perhaps something in between — grounded in the specificity of a single date, there is also an elusiveness, almost a malleability, pervading the effort. Part of the challenge in assessing it involves the multiple formats in which the project has been showcased: There’s the New York Times Magazine special issue published on Aug. 18, 2019, with print and online versions; a broadsheet edition appearing the same day; a podcast spinoff; a new, lengthy book version; an illustrated children’s book; plus the many responses, updates and essays published by the Times defending, amending or otherwise explaining the project.
Together these elements form a powerful and memorable work, one that launched a seismic national debate over the legacy of slavery and enduring racial injustice in American life. It is also a work with a variety of competing impulses, ones that can at times confuse and conflict. This is evident in “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” a book that softens some of the edges of the prior magazine collection but also transcends its original mission as a historical corrective, informing readers what they now must do or else risk personal complicity in the painful story they have just been told.
The elusiveness begins where the project begins — in 1619, with the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to reach the English American colonies, and that moment’s proper status in the history of the United States. In his note introducing the special issue, New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein first depicts the project as something of a thought experiment, counterfactual to the common notion of 1776 as the year of the nation’s birth. “What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?” Three sentences later, the question mark is gone, the tone more declarative. The barbaric system of slavery introduced that month is not just the United States’ “original sin,” Silverstein asserts; it is “the country’s very origin.” The project’s broadsheet supplement widens that perspective, declaring that “the goal of the 1619 Project is to reframe American history, making explicit that slavery is the foundation on which this country is built.” From what-if to no-matter-what, all on the same day.
This hardly settles matters. More than a year later, in an article titled “On Recent Criticism of The 1619 Project,” Silverstein indicated that the notion of 1619 as the country’s birth year should be regarded as a “metaphor” and not read literally. This is why, he explained, the Times had deleted a description of 1619 as our “true founding” that previously appeared in the project’s online presentation. But then, in an essay this month titled “The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History,” Silverstein wrote that the date indeed “could be considered” the moment of the United States’ “inception.”
In the new book version, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who conceived of the overall effort and wrote its lead magazine essay, offers a few interpretations. In the preface, she cautions that the project is “not the only origin story of this country — there must be many.” Then, in the opening chapter, Hannah-Jones repeats the text of her original magazine essay and refers to Black Americans as the country’s “true ‘founding fathers,’” as deserving of that designation “as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital.” Some 400-plus pages later, in a concluding chapter, she writes that the origin story in the 1619 Project is “truer” than the one we’ve known.
What might an assiduous reader conclude from all this? That 1619 is a thought experiment, or a metaphor, or the nation’s true origin, but definitely not its founding, yet possibly its inception, or just one origin story among many — but still the truer one? For all the controversy the project has elicited, this muddle over the starting point is an argument that the 1619 Project is also having with itself.
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