“Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The original intent of the 1619 Project was not to rewrite the historical record of our American mythology, but to provide context. Reading the amount of articles that have steadily come out either defending or, with increasing frequency, decrying it, it seems that original intent is an inconvenient motivation, a pebble in the shoe of the culture war gatekeepers: senators, op-ed columnists, historians, the media, etc.
The original intent supposes a disconcerting thought: the United States was founded on and continued to believe in a fundamental lie, a lie that has subjugated, disenfranchised, terrorized, and constrained the status of U.S. citizens simply because they are not white. The original intent of the 1619 Project was to present a supplemental reading of our history, an annotation that can be used to both challenge and clarify the gaps in the creation myth we tell ourselves, habitually, every time we cite the Constitution or celebrate the Fourth of July.
Instead of engaging with this intent, the criticism is largely, I’ll say overwhelmingly, focused on two issues: the opinion that 1619, not 1776, should be considered the year of the nation’s founding, and an…
