While pursuing ideological racism, they are missing the miracle which should be celebrated

Lots of continuing acts of inanity and madness all around.  Clowns to the left of us as the song goes. In this instance, the New York Times's vanity 1619 Project, an exercise in creative fiction of the alternate reality type.  From '1619 Project' Founder Has a Tantrum After NYT Publishes Critical Column by Tyler O'Neil.  

Lots of pathetic pettiness to go around, including in O'Neil's article.  The gist:

On Thursday, The New York Times published an essay critical of its “1619 Project.” Bret Stephens, a writer of the sort that passes for conservative at The Times, wrote a painfully balanced rebuke of the 1619 Project, arguing that the project and its founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, were not truly anti-American but admitting that the project and its founder made serious errors in judgment that ended up dooming the project. The Times‘ leadership issued statements praising the 1619 Project, but Hannah-Jones appears to have lashed out with something of a tantrum, anyway.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed the internal machinations of The Times — and Hannah-Jones’ response, essentially blaming The Times of racism.

“Times leadership took pains to praise the 1619 Project this weekend. They maintained that Stephens’s criticism represented not an institutional scolding of the project but [a] commitment to thoughtful debate,” the Post reported. Acting Opinions Editor Kathleen Kingsbury said, “The Times’s openness to hear and tolerate criticism is the clearest sign in its confidence in the work.”

“Hannah-Jones, though, was livid. She sent vitriolic emails to both Kingsbury and Stephens ahead of publication. She also tweeted that efforts to discredit her work ‘put me in a long tradition of [Black women] who failed to know their places,'” the Post explained. “She changed her Twitter bio to ‘slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress’ — a tribute to the trailblazing journalist Ida B. Wells, whom the Times slurred with those same words in 1894.”

Speaking to the Post, the 1619 Project founder finally admitted she had made a key mistake. She had notoriously claimed that American patriots had rebelled against Britain in order to preserve slavery — a claim for which there is no evidence, and a good deal of evidence to the contrary. Historians repeatedly called her out on this, and The Times eventually issued a correction.

Scholars Demand Pulitzer Board Revoke Prize Over ‘Glaring Historical Fallacy’ in 1619 Project

Belatedly, Hannah-Jones admitted she should have consulted with scholars who had a particular focus on colonial history, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War.

But there is one passage that brought a recollection to mind of something I considered when this whole thing blew up months ago and which I have not seen really discussed since then.  The passage follows, emphasis added.

The Post did not report whether or not Hannah-Jones said she was “tortured by” lying about something else, however. Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project had claimed that America’s true founding came in 1619, with the arrival of the first slaves (who actually arrived far earlier), rather than in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Last month, however, both Hannah-Jones and the Project apparently deep-sixed this claim, deleting the language from the website. Hannah-Jones even went on television and lied, claiming she had never made such a claim.

When the lead essay was first published, that was my first thought.  "Doesn't she know that slavery was not brought here?  That it was pre-existing?"

As I read the article, it became obvious that we weren't really talking about actual history but simple, rank propaganda trying to advance a racist view of the world.

Slavery existed in North and South America for all the history of which we are aware, going back thousands of years.  Just as it has existed extensively worldwide throughout all recorded history.

The issue was never that there was slavery at the time of America's founding.  The miracle is that America was founded in the Age of Enlightenment belief in human universalism, in natural rights, rule of law and equality before the law and the possibility of establishing freedom within a social compact.  It was the first country to be founded on these ideas rather than on the long-established presumptions of power by birth, by blood, by force.  

And what a success it has been, steadily making progress against all historical precedent.  Even among the original thirteen colonies, some of them at their very founding abolished slavery, the very first governments to do so. 

One can split a couple of hairs about Hannah-Jones's argument.  Obviously she is limiting her argument about slavery to only African slavery and not chattel slavery as practiced/suffered by Native Americans or Europeans (or anywhere else).  While some 12 million African slaves were sold from Africa to the Americas (overwhelmingly to the Caribbean and South America) over 400 years to circa 1807, some 15-20 million were sold into the Middle East and Asia over some nine centuries, some 2-4 million aboriginal Americans taken by Europeans from 1500 onwards, and some 5 million Europeans were taken into slavery from the 1500s onwards by North Africans and the Middle East.  

Hannah-Jones is also limiting her discussion to a specific form of slavery, chattel slavery which dominated the African slave trade.  Chattel slavery existed but was less common among Native Americans and Europeans where there was a continuum from total control and ownership of war captives through control without ownership (such as serfs) to commercial but constricted slavery such as some forms of indentured servitude.  

In practice, many of those distinctions blurred. 

So when Hannah-Jones's original essay came out, it appeared to me to be singularly uninformed, deliberately misleading, markedly racially focused and profoundly, to the point of fictional, bad history.  Not worth investing time or effort exploring.  

The reaction has raged since then as historians try to fight the good battle with ideological racists, trying to stand up for scholarship when it rebuts preferred establishment delusions.  

But in all this time, I haven't seen anyone focus on the point above - Slavery was the norm and the miracle of the US was two-fold: its commitment to ending slavery and its commitment from the beginning to human universalism with everyone having the same natural rights.