The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves.
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Over the weekend, The New York Times rolled out the printed version of The 1619 Project, a sprawling historical-journalism project devoted to changing the way Americans currently understand and discuss the legacy of slavery in this country. The premise was that slavery was not a passing and painfully corrected mistake, but a foundational feature of all aspects of life in this country—and that therefore the black experience is at the center of the American experience.
Conservative pundits were not happy to see this. Right-wing intellectual heavyweights such as Newt Gingrich or right-wing intellectual junior middleweights such as Erick Erickson spent the past few days obsessively tweeting or yelling at you from your TV screens to make sure America knew that The New York Times was trying to—well, that part was not entirely clear.
For white conservatives, accepting that the United States wouldn’t exist without slavery would mean acknowledging that the Founders were not the creators of an infallible civic religion, which sets the limits on all modern claims for justice. It would mean that liberty was, in practice, as much a matter of exclusion as inclusion, and that success and prosperity owe more to centuries of exploitation than to God’s blessing of an exceptional people.
But their political project depends on not even considering those possibilities. And so their response was equal parts furious and vague, a barrage of arguments that discussing this country’s history is the last thing this country needs
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