1619: One Speaker, Six Co-Hosts, One Terrible Speech, and Nine Migraines

On the Ides of April, even Nikole Hannah-Jones couldn’t dampen Good Friday. Notwithstanding the insensitivity of holding a divisive event like “The 1619 Project Today” on Good Friday, The Review does wish to provide a small summary of the event, with perhaps some commentary along the way. 

A brief history for the uninitiated: The 1619 Project was first published in August 2019 by the New York Times and since then has been criticized or even directly denounced by an abundance of prominent historians. The event at Dartmouth was co-sponsored by various departments and featured a huge number of “convenors” and sponsors, etc. 

The evening began with President Phil Hanlon delivering an introductory speech, in which he skirted the issue at hand. He discussed the importance of “having conversations” and avoided endorsing the ideas of the 1619 Project flat-out. The lucky audience was then on the receiving end of poem and song performances. 

Owing to the lethargy of these festivities, the event seemed almost over when Jones was finally introduced. Things perked up when we soon learned that just about every single sentence that Jones ever says is loaded. In other words, almost each sentence carries with it certain presuppositions and imputations that have next-to-no basis in fact.

After declaring that her speech would not be inspirational, but instead would cause the audience to feel that they had been punched in the gut (by focusing on threats to democracy, apparently), the main portion of the event really got off to a rollicking start. The following is sort of a summary with, once again, some commentary:

Jones stated that Sens. McConnell and Cotton introduced a bill to ban the 1619 Project from being taught in schools. She lambasted McConnell and Cotton as desiring “performative” patriotism. She stated that her opening to the 1619 Project is the most patriotic thing she’s ever written. We wonder what her least patriotic thing is? Or do we really want to know? Also, we thought her entire speech was performative.

One fun quote she soon had was “I know that I am a bad ass journalist.” At this time, she also suggested that the United States is not a strong country because people have criticized the 1619 Project. She said, what opponents to it are “really arguing is that our country cannot withstand the truth. That we have all engaged in the fragility of a lie, that if we shine the light of truth on it, somehow something about the very fiber of the United States will be destroyed.”

McConnell and Cotton, she concluded with no factual basis, “oppose the teaching of the history of slavery.” She also decried a performative DOE investigation as well as the 1776 Commission, which she said was “composed of not a single historian of American history.” When they released it, she said, it was “quickly panned by every historical society and hundreds of historians across the country.” We wonder if she is truly so lacking in self-awareness as to not realize that her project is the report that has been condemned in this way.

On CRT, Jones said that progressives took the wrong response to accusations of CRT in public schools: ”Frankly, I would have been impressed if K-12 educators were teaching highly sophisticated analyses of racial and structural inequality in the United States.” So, she thinks CRT is not being taught in schools, but it should be.

She also said that the “lexicon” of BLM was “1619,” which we thought was just shameless self-aggrandizement. She also seemed to desire a modern-day “Bacon’s rebellion” against white elites. 

She went on: Republicans “are actually passing a law that hyper-gerrymanders, so that Democrats can get a majority of votes and cannot win the majority of seats, which then only solidifies the power that they [Republicans] are able to have.” She concluded, “we’re in danger, y’all.” 

It often seemed throughout her speech that the 1619 Project was more a platform for Hannah-Jones, her career, and her personal values than anything resembling the effort to “reframe the country’s history” via the long-form journalism promised by the original publication.

The journalist spent a significant portion of the event speaking about personal controversy last year, where, “because of a Republican-appointed board of trustees, as well as a very wealthy donor,” she was denied a chaired professorship and tenure. This denial, Hannah-Jones says, came after she was “the most qualified person ever for that chair.”

“Even with all my status and all my platform, I felt powerless.”

Once she aired her grievances, Hannah-Jones launched into a discussion of America’s racial progress. In reference to recent “anti-history” (in other words, anti-CRT) legislation signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis, Hannah-Jones explained that, “[w]henever there is a sign of racial progress, it’s met by a backlash.”

“I feel upset because I never believed that we were going to make substantial progress. And even I felt different in 2020. And now to see how quickly we’ve walked away,” she said, “The way I look at it is there was a window of opportunity to make change that was opening. And there are folks that are really trying to close that window. Our job in this generation is to make it impossible for them to do it.”

One of the most absurd portions of the event came when Hannah-Jones compared and contrasted the history of (Nazi) Germany with that of America.

“Try to compare the United States to Germany in how you would never see German statues to Nazis, buildings named after Nazis, you wouldn’t go have a picnic at a concentration camp, or a wedding there,” she said. 

“You can purge all of the period of Nazism and still have all of Germanic history, right? In the history of Germany, it was a small period of time. If you purge slavery, you have nothing. You have to get rid of all these buildings named after your founders. Right? You have to get rid of anything named after the man who wrote your Declaration, your Constitution, your Bill of Rights…Our history cannot be separated from history.”

If so, then what? In the case of higher education, Hannah-Jones, responding to an audience question, outlined clear policies for racial reparations.

Her first idea was for schools to offer free tuition to descendants of American slavery and indigenous students, “period.” Nevertheless, she noted that “we have to distinguish between the claims that indigennous people have in the sense of American slavery” while emphasizing the goal of “lineage-based admission.”

Her second suggestion for reparations in higher education was for certain universities, particularly Ivies and institutions whose histories and wealth can be “traced” back to slavery, to pay reparations to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in a wealth-sharing initiative.

Are these ideas feasible? It remains to be seen. Hannah-Jones even concedes that affirmative action will likely not survive its pending Supreme Court challenge. Nevertheless, the boisterous applause that some of Hannah-Jones’ more incoherent points received suggests that there is a significant constituency for the pie-in-the-sky racial reckoning and policy she supports.

We at The Review can speak little as to the source of their agreement or if her listeners actually believed what she said. It could just have easily been guilt-induced virtue signaling as it could have been true, complete acceptance. What we do know, however, is that the more Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks, the easier it becomes to point out the absurdity of her beliefs and her model of American history.