[Peace-discuss] The New York Times’ 1619 Project promoted in schools across the US

[David Green]

World Socialist Web Site <https://www.wsws.org/>wsws.org
"The decision to go forward with this project, and to promote so
emphatically, is bound up with the immense social changes taking place in
the US and around the world. Young people are moving to the left. They are
more politically engaged, less patriotic, and increasingly identifying as
socialists. This radicalization is taking place alongside a massive growth
of the class struggle internationally. These initial struggles have
terrified the ruling classes of every country. It is in this context that
the 1619 Project must be understood. This is the response of the ruling
class to the growth of the class struggle. They are working to
systematically push racialist politics in order to divide and disorient the
working class."

The New York Times’ 1619 Project promoted in schools across the USBy
Genevieve Leigh
10 January 2020

A recent lesson plan released by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting,
in collaboration with the *New York Times*, asks students to choose a
historical document that interests them and to read through it. Next, the
assignment instructs them to erase parts of the document that they do not
like or believe in.

The lesson plan, “Erasure Poetry: Highlighting Inequities, Envisioning
Liberation,” explains that “erasure poems” can be “a way of reclaiming and
reshaping historical documents; they can lay bare the real purpose of the
document or transform it into something wholly new. How will you highlight
inequity—or envision liberation—through your erasure poem?”

The Declaration of Independence as well as the 13th Amendment are among the
documents suggested by the Pulitzer Center for the exercise, marked as
appropriate for students of all grades. The lesson plan is one of dozens
provided by the Pulitzer Center to promote a major initiative launched by
the *Times* on August 16, “The 1619 Project.” The aim, according to the
*Times*, is to fundamentally change the way American history is understood
and taught.

The authors of the project concentrate their arguments on the premise that
all problems can only be understood through the prism of “white America”
and “black America,” seeing racial division, rather than class conflict, as
the fundamental and abiding conflict in US history and in the present.

The *World Socialist Web Site* has taken the lead in rebutting the
historical falsifications of the *Times’* project. The WSWS coverage has
included a series of in-depth historical analyses
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/01/amer-n01.html>, interviews
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/28/wood-n28.html> with leading
historians of the American Revolution and Civil War, and a comprehensive
reply <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/28/nytr-d28.html> to the
*Times’* defense of the project.
Poisoning the Well: Schools across the US adopt the NYT 1619 Project

Despite the criticisms directed at the *Times* from historians, major
efforts are underway to establish the 1619 Project as the official
narrative of American history in schools and academic institutions. Chicago
Public Schools was among the first districts to announce that the 1619
Project would be provided as a supplemental resource at every one of the
system’s high schools. “Thanks to our partners at the Pulitzer Center,
every CPS high school will receive 200–400 copies of the New York Times’
The 1619 Project this week as a resource to help reframe the institution of
slavery, and how we’re still influenced by it today—from the workforce
management system created to harness enslaved labor and the incredible
wealth that came from its unsparing efficiency to the music that you may
very well be listening to now,” Chicago Public School CEO Janice Jackson
announced in September.

So far, five additional districts have committed to rewriting their
curriculum around the project, including Washington, D.C.; Buffalo, New
York; and Newark, New Jersey. Some districts have gone a step further by
developing special programs wholly dedicated to a study of the project. The
Carroll School in Brooklyn, NY, which serves K–5 students, is working to
secure a federal Title 3 grant to fund the creation of an “after-school
enrichment program” based on the project. The immense effort being made to
ensure that copies of the project are distributed to school children should
raise serious red flags. Many of these school systems are among the most
poorly funded in the country. Just last fall, Chicago educators went on
strike to demand increases in wages, funding to fix and repair decrepit and
decaying school buildings, lower class sizes and the hiring of desperately
needed support staff—none of which was realized. However, the dissemination
of the 1619 Project is fully funded.

In addition to the material resources provided to the schools, the
project’s creator and leading author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has been
dispatched on a speaking tour, attending university and college campuses
throughout the country. The effort has been funded in part by the Pulitzer
Center. However, some major corporations have also been involved,
including Shell
Oil, which sponsored a recent appearance
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/18/shell-d18.html> of
Hannah-Jones in Houston, Texas.

The 1619 Project will also be the basis for a series of books for readers
of all ages. The series of books will include an expanded version of the
magazine issue, including fiction essays and poetry as well as a graphic
novel, and four “1619 Project” publications for young people. The
publication of the books is being overseen by Hannah-Jones and by Jake
Silverstein, editor-in-chief of *The New York Times Magazine*.
What is being taught in the NYT 1619 School Curriculum?

The foundational lesson plan presented by the Pulitzer Center, “Exploring
‘the idea of America’, by Nikole Hannah Jones” is designed to introduce
Hannah-Jones’ essay and the 1619 Project to students. Hannah-Jones’ essay,
along with all the other 1619 material, is presented to teachers and
students not as one “narrative” among many, but as verified fact. Indeed,
the material doubles down on many of the widely discredited historical
assertions made in the project. One set of questions, for example, asks
students to support the claim that the country was founded as a slavocracy:
“What examples of hypocrisy in the founding of the U.S. does Hannah-Jones
supply? What evidence can you see for how ‘some might argue that this
nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy’?”

Another set of reading questions from the same lesson plan prompts students
to expand on the project’s portrayal of the leaders of the American
revolution and Civil War as racists: “What picture does Hannah-Jones paint
of major figures in classical U.S. history, such as Thomas Jefferson and
Abraham Lincoln? Did you learn new information about them from her essay?
If so, why do you think this information wasn’t included in other resources
from which you have learned about U.S. history?”

Present throughout the Pulitzer Center material is the insistence on the
fundamental division of the country along racial lines. In one exercise,
students are instructed to investigate the contributions of “Black
America”; In another, students are asked to carefully consider a quote from
the essay: “Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and
from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original
culture.”; Yet another asks, “How does Hannah-Jones expand on this quote
from sociologist Glenn Bracey: ‘Out of the ashes of white denigration, we
gave birth to ourselves’?”

Other lesson plans include “Mapping Your Community’s Connection to
Slavery,” in which students are to pick an article from the project and use
it to develop a pitch “for a news story about how this topic intersects
with race in your community.”

The curriculum is designed to inculcate in a new generation of workers a
divisive racialist historical, and by extension political, worldview. All
problems are to be explained by an “endemic” conflict between the races
that “we still *cannot purge* from this nation to this day,” as
Hannah-Jones puts it. The resources for the project’s nation-wide mass
marketing and distribution effort have come from its co-sponsor, the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a Washington D.C. based non-profit
founded in 2006 to support “journalists, stories, and workplaces that
represent and illuminate diversity and inclusion in all forms.” The
function of the Pulitzer Center has been to legitimize the dissemination of
the project as a credible historical work throughout the US education
system.

Funding for the Pulitzer Center comes from a wide range of sources. A
number of billionaire philanthropic foundations, such as The Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation
of New York, appear on its donor list, as well as other well connected
companies such as BDT Capital Partners, a long-standing partner of Goldman
Sachs, which handles the finances of the rich.

With the help of the Pulitzer Center, the 1619 Project was launched in
September with a fully developed school curriculum based on the project’s
initial 18 essays. The school curriculum was immediately made available for
public use from the Pulitzer Center website. The extensive set of materials
are designed for children of all ages, from elementary school through
college. Throughout the *Times* articles and the subsequent media blitz
that accompanied the project, teachers and educational staff around the
country were encouraged to adopt the project and use the material,
presented as authoritative historical journalism, in their classrooms.

The *New York Times* has taken it upon themselves to re-write school
curriculum, without any oversight or input from leading historians who have
spent their entire careers dedicated to the study of such history. They
ignore decades of historiography of the Revolution and Civil War, which
have been subject to intense and rigorous scholarly debate.

The decision to go forward with this project, and to promote so
emphatically, is bound up with the immense social changes taking place in
the US and around the world. Young people are moving to the left. They are
more politically engaged, less patriotic, and increasingly identifying as
socialists. This radicalization is taking place alongside a massive growth
of the class struggle internationally. These initial struggles have
terrified the ruling classes of every country. It is in this context that
the 1619 Project must be understood. This is the response of the ruling
class to the growth of the class struggle. They are working to
systematically push racialist politics in order to divide and disorient the
working class.
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