Toxic Propaganda or A More Accurate US History?

In a speech last month at the National Archives Museum, President Donald Trump attacked the 1619 Project as “toxic propaganda” that will destroy our country. This New York Times initiative, that won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently optioned by Oprah Winfrey for film and television, was launched in August 2019. It observed the 400-year anniversary of the beginning of American slavery and chronicled the sacrifices and contributions of African Americans in United States history. It was created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, and included over a dozen essays as well as poetry, fiction and a curriculum for students.

In his comments as part of the White House Conference on American History, President Trump said he hoped to uproot this project and to replace it with something he called the 1776 Commission. “Today, I am also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an Executive Order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education,” he said.

Linda Villarosa, a professor of journalism and Black Studies at the City College of New York who contributed an essay to the 1619 Project, does not take the president’s comments seriously. “Even though he wants to cut federal funding to any schools teaching this curriculum, most local schools do not receive federal funding,” she said. “So this is very likely an empty threat.”

President Trump referred to the 1619 Project as illegitimate and described its authors as people who hate America. This, Professor Villarosa said, seems unfair and overblown. “Just as he has proposed an alternative to the ACA [Affordable Care Act] that never materialized, it is likely that this commission will not appear either,” she said. “The commission seems to be just another way to denigrate and demean the Project. Rather than defiling history, the goal of the project is to fill out the story of our history and to explain how the legacy of slavery is still so embedded in our culture.”

Black Studies experts believe that the Project helps replenish what’s been erased from American history. ”The 1619 Project has done a tremendous job in terms of centering the history of the United States around the contributions of Black peoples,” said Dr. Vanessa K. Valdes, the director of the Black Studies Program at CCNY. “It begins with the history of enslavement of Africans and what scholar Saidiya Hartman has named as the afterlife of slavery. It has reoriented how millions of people have thought about the foundations of this country.”

So much of history, Dr. Valdes believes, has been tightly focused on the experiences of white Americans only. “For so many of us, we do not know what we do not know, and so yes, there are millions of people who are willing to support the version of US history that they learned in school because they do not know any different,” she explained. “For those of us who study the contributions of peoples of color to this country, those of us who study race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in fact, we all learn from more nuanced renderings of our history.”