In this morning’s Dispatch, I have an article examining the recent defenses of the 1619 Project offered by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jake Silverstein, who claim the Project’s critics fail to recognize that they were speaking only metaphorically about 1619 being the nation’s founding. But everybody knew it was a metaphor from the beginning. What was wrong was that the 1619 metaphor was repulsive:
To the extent that the 1619 Project caused Americans to learn more about black history, and to view the civil rights struggles of past generations in light of the American covenants of liberty, it has served an honorable purpose. But it accomplished this only to the degree that readers “repulsed” the metaphor that the project offered. Everything, in fact, that makes America great originates in the fact that Americans do not take the sale of human property in August 1619 as the source of their nationhood—that, on the contrary, they are disgusted by what doing so would say about their nation.
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