Indoctrination Continues In Public Schools
The schools are considering adding the 1619 project to curriculum and indoctrinating our children starting as soon as this fall. The 1619 project was started by the liberal New York Times newspaper in 2019 to rewrite American history by sating the true birth of America was not in 1776 but rather in 1619 when the first slaves arrived. This even predates the Pilgrims who landed in 1620. Mind you, if we are going back that far, we should continue to when the first settlers who where Spanish came to America in 1492 lead by the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. But we digress.
Somehow, the NY Times is under the impression that America did not start until the African slaves arrived to the Virginia colony in 1619. They are trying to establish this as the nations birth year stating America could have not been built without the slaves. It is true they were an integral part of our history and slaves helped the economy flourish as they were free labor to slave owners. However, the Americas were flourishing long before their arrival because almost all European nations had touched down in America and were fighting to claim it. In order to do so, they had to proved it was productive to the interests back home. Therefore the nations poured all kinds of assets into America along with large populations. At one point, the 13 colonies had over 2 million citizens, a staggering amount for its time.
The project has grown to now be pushed in our public schools. Although we don’t want to discount the impact that slaves made in building America, we don’t want to re-write history at the same time saying their arrival was the true birth of our nation. Many historians and political commentators agree. Many of those historians have asked that the NY Times make corrections to accommodate actual historical facts and they have denied those requests.
Five leading American historians, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes, contacted the NY Times and provided objections to the facts used in the project. They further accused the authors of a “displacement of historical understanding by ideology”. They strongly argued against the projects narrative that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. Historian Wood sent a letter to the NY times to elaborate further. He stated, “I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves and further said that no colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776. Historian Wilentz further added added that, “No effort to educate the public in order to advance social justice can afford to dispense with a respect for basic facts”.
Historian Harris, said she had warned that the idea that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery was inaccurate, and that the NY Times made avoidable mistakes.
With so many historians disputing the project that was written by a newspaper and baseless in facts, it is a danger that they are moving forward to teaching this in our public schools.
We here at America Against Hollywood are not overlooking the roles that slaves had in building our nation and nor do we sympathize with those who enslaved them but we must stick to the facts and we should all agree that all facts should be taught and not re-write history to fit a political agenda.
