DEBATENATE

Topics / America

The challenge

“The 1619 Project tells the true story of America”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. It tells a slanted story, and it had to correct its own headline claim. The lead essay said protecting slavery was a primary reason the colonists declared independence. Five leading historians, including Gordon Wood and James McPherson, objected in writing. In twenty twenty the Times changed it to some of the colonists. When your thesis about why the country exists needs an edit, you're not teaching history. You're workshopping it. The founding date is seventeen seventy-six, and the true story is that the Declaration's words broke slavery. Frederick Douglass called its principles saving principles. You'll say critics just want comfortable history. Wrong. Teach slavery, all of it, and teach who ended it and with what. Let me ask you this. If seventeen seventy-six was a lie, why did Douglass and King keep quoting it? The Declaration wasn't the cover-up. It was the crowbar.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The project's boldest claim, about why America declared independence, drew written objections from some of the most respected historians alive.

    In December 2019, historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes sent a letter, published by the New York Times Magazine, objecting to the claim that protecting slavery was a primary reason the colonists declared independence.

  2. When your central claim has to be walked back, you're not telling the true story. You're revising it in public.

    In March 2020 the New York Times Magazine updated the essay to say protecting slavery was a primary motivation for some of the colonists.

  3. The founding principles were the weapon that beat slavery, not its shield. Leave that out and you lose the heroes of the story.

    In his 1852 Fourth of July speech, Frederick Douglass called the principles of the Declaration saving principles and argued the Constitution, rightly read, was a glorious liberty document.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: The historians quibbled over one sentence. The project's main point, that slavery and racism shaped American life far more than textbooks admitted, still stands.

Nate: That one sentence was about why the country exists. That's not a footnote. Slavery shaped America, and nobody serious denies it. But a story that centers the sin and sidelines the Americans, Black and white, who fought it with the founding's own words isn't the true story. It's half of one, taught to kids as the whole.

The lines

Sources

  1. The New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project (2019)
  2. The New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, An Update to The 1619 Project (2020)
  3. Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (1852)
  4. Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream, speech at the March on Washington (1963)

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