This is not at all the picture Nikole Hannah-Jones paints. In her preface to The 1619 Project, she describes the attitude of white America to the teaching of black history as dismissive or even hostile. African Americans “were largely absent from the histories I read” as a public school student in Iowa, she writes. “The vision of the past I absorbed from school textbooks, television, and the local history museums depicted a world, perhaps a wishful one, where Black people did not really exist.” The need to remedy this absence is the motivation for The 1619 Project and its constellation of supplemental materials, including sample curricula and reading guides.
To support her claim that black history is still untaught today, Hannah-Jones cites a 2018 study from the Southern Poverty Law Center showing that only 8 percent of high school seniors named slavery as the main cause of the civil war. That study is dubious for several reasons, in addition to its provenance in a highly politicized NGO. It was an online survey of only a thousand students, and the plurality (48 percent) answered that the Civil War was caused by “tax protests,” which, needless to say, is not the line they would have read in an old United Daughters of the Confederacy textbook.
A better study was done in 2008, in which high-school seniors in all fifty states were asked to write down the ten most famous Americans in history who were never president. The three most popular answers were Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman. Christopher Caldwell writes in his recent book The Age of Entitlement, drawing on his experience as a parent, “Race is the part of the human experience in which American schoolchildren are most painstakingly instructed.” That more closely reflects my own experience attending public school in North Carolina in the 1990s. Somewhere in our attic is the speech I wrote for a class project on Menelik II, boasting that Ethiopia would never be colonized by Europeans.
Even if modern schools are already full of race material, the 1619 Project is by no means redundant. It marks a significant departure. Black history is no longer, as Greene put it, “in the picture with all other groups.” The 1619 Project sees “anti-Blackness as foundational to America” and insists that slavery, “sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin . . . is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.” Hannah-Jones proudly quotes a Chicago high-schooler describing what she learned from the 1619 curriculum at her school: “We were the founding fathers. We put so much into the U.S. and we made the foundation.”