WATCH: 1619 Project author says ‘powerful interests’ want to avoid ‘grappling’ with history
Julia Johnson
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Nikole Hannah-Jones — who authored the 1619 Project, which has since been adapted into a Hulu docuseries — attributed significant backlash to “powerful interests that haven’t ever wanted us to grapple truthfully” on Monday.
According to the journalist and professor, critics dislike her work because “the history of black Americans is so inconvenient to the narrative of America.” She further told the panel on Morning Joe, “That’s why we have Gov. DeSantis banning AP African American studies in Florida.”
“That’s why we have all these so-called anti-critical race theory laws that are trying to make it more difficult to teach about racism and teach about what black Americans have experienced,” she added.
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The 1619 Project has infiltrated school curricula across the country, either by being explicitly named in lesson plans or funneled in through education tools such as Newsela. However, the project was blasted by several historians who claim it features glaring inaccuracies.
“These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology,” five historians wrote in a letter to the editor of the New York Times Magazine in 2019.
Despite the concerns of historians, the work has continued to be propped up by entities such as Hulu.
Hannah-Jones further told the MSNBC show that “if we are more honest about our history, then we choose different policies.”
“Do we want to be the country that begins in 1619 with the practice of slavery or the country conceived in 1776 with the ideas of liberty and equality?” she asked. “That’s unknown. We’re always seeing the tension and fight between these two halves.”
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Of those who refuse to engage with her work, she claimed, “People don’t want to feel guilty.”
“There’s nothing in this project that argues, you know, that white people today are responsible for what white people did a long time ago,” she said. “But what we are arguing is that we’re responsible to understand what happened a long time ago.”