![]() It appeared in the earliest settlements of Sumer, Babylonia, China, and Egypt, and it continues in many parts of the world to this day. In fact, slavery was a mundane fact in most human civilizations, neither questioned nor much thought about. Unlike anything that existed in the world before? Seeing how far this is from the truth is the only way to make sense of the contradictions and perplexing compromises of the American Founding that trouble us so much today. “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.” Brutal? Yes. America’s “brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” Hannah-Jones writes. I’d like to propose adding another reason to close the book on the 1619 Project: it is based on a twisted notion of American exceptionalism. A few weeks ago, President Trump himself went on the attack. The New York Times has likewise done some stealth editing of its own, altering some of the more controversial assertions in the online edition. The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was at first boldly dismissive of the attacks, but she has more recently been going through contortions to insist that she didn’t say what she demonstrably said she has even erased her Twitter feed. No, the arrival of 20 African slaves at Jamestown was not when the country “began.” ![]() No, they’ve shown, protecting slavery was not the primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776. Ever since the Pulitzer Prize-winning essays first appeared in the New York Times in August 2019, historians have been chipping away at some of the central claims. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes-I tell you.The 1619 Project has not been having an easy time of it. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance? Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. An appeal to me in this fiendish row-is there? Very well I hear I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags-rags that would fly off at the first good shake. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff-with his own inborn strength. Let the fool gape and shudder-the man knows, and can look on without a wink.īut he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage-who can tell?-but truth-truth stripped of its cloak of time. Yes, it was ugly enough but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you-you so remote from the night of first ages-could comprehend.Īnd why not? The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity-like yours-the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Well, you know, that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being inhuman. “It was unearthly, and the men were-No, they were not inhuman.
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