Hulu – “1619 Project”

 Hulu – “1619 Project”

 I just watched Hulu’s six-part presentation of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ controversial “1619 Project”.  I offer my critique.

 Like many others, I object to Ms. Jones’ foundational premise for her series, that American history actually began in 1619 when the first cargo of African slaves landed in Virginia.  This is science fiction and an alternate reality, not factual history, and belies the contributions of so many others to the long history of America.

 I further object to Ms. Jones’ continuing theme that primarily black African slaves contributed to the growth of America and its customs and history, to the exclusion of so many other immigrant groups and native Americans.

 The most egregious distortion of the “1619 Project” is the obvious Marxism-Leninism that permeates it.  Marx’s “class struggles” are replaced by race.  Much of the rest of the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite polemic remains the same.  It is obvious that Ms. Jones writes from the extreme left of the political spectrum.

 I do not criticize Ms. Jones for showing pride in the contributions of black Africans to American society.  We are all proud of our ethnicity and heritage, and can compose stories of how our ancestors contributed to the building of America.  But these are contributions to our American psyche, not efforts to hijack the American story by claiming hegemony for all of our progress, as Ms. Jones does in the “1619 Project”. 

 The unique thing about our black American brothers and sisters is that they were brutally enslaved at a time in history that such atrocities were permitted by history and society.  The descriptions in the “1619 Project” of how enslaved people were treated with animal husbandry like cattle is particularly poignant, as are the eugenics practiced.

 An eye opener for me was the revelation that after the importation of slaves into the U.S. was prohibited by law in 1808 when the slave population was about 1 million, it ballooned to 4 million by 1860 at the start of the Civil War.  Not only were slaves bred by their owners, blacks were defined as matrilineal, so mixed race offspring of white fathers and black mothers were automatically slaves.

 Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones is probably a better writer than a presenter.  Much of the Hulu “1619 Project” is anecdotal with few hard facts to back it up.  She draws on her own individual experiences often as illustrations as part of her story-telling

 Something that Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones seems to have forgotten in her narrative is that nearly 750,000 mostly Caucasian Americans lost their lives in the American Civil War to free the black African slaves.  It seems that she should have fit this important fact into her story of black America.

 The segment on the contribution of Africans to American music is pertinent, but again, omits mention of any other contributing segments of Americana.  Appalachia and American classical music come to mind.

 The call for trillions of dollars of reparations is loosely based on economic abuses of black people that mostly occurred over the last two hundred years.  Claims of continuing economic discrimination seem subjective in a society that is redressing many of these issues.

The insidious nature of the “1619 Project” is that it has become part and parcel of Critical Race Theory, and is being installed as valid course curricula in many of our schools.  Laws passed against these bigoted items?  Just change the names and keep teaching them.

 Ray Gruszecki

February 11, 2023