I just received an invitation from the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem to a virtual book launch of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ super-controversial book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. I will share the invitation with you because you might want to hear the story of the book and its reception. I bought a ticket to the event and the book.
To get a ticket, you must buy the book from certain booksellers mentioned on the site.
The event date is November 16 at 8 p.m.
This is the description of the event:
The Apollo Theater is proud to partner with Penguin Random House in honor of the book launch of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. This virtual event brings together Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and collaborators in conversation around the expansion of the award-winning essay series from The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project is a groundbreaking work of journalism that reframes our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative.
About The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story:
A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.
The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.
This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.
Hannah-Jones will be joined by Ibram X. Kendi for a discussion about The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, moderated by journalist Soledad O’Brien. Later in the program, to celebrate the simultaneous publication of The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, a picture book adaption for young readers, Hannah-Jones will join co-author Renée Watson and illustrator Nikkolas Smith for a conversation moderated by author Derrick Barnes. The event will also feature an archival photo presentation by Kimberly Annece Henderson and a poetry reading by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
❤
Joined by Kendi, one of the great grifters of our time, who could stay away!
amazing duo
Surprised the word “uppity” wasn’t in that comment. Guess it was implied.
Also implied: “criminal” and “miscreant.”
I will not be surprised if the MAGA hate threats are rolling in one phone call and one e-mail after another. I also will not be surprised if the TRAITOR pays someone to show up and protest.
Imagine what we’d discover if we could trace every penny the TRAITOR spends through his offshore bank accounts, US bank accounts, shell companies, and corporations.
Thank you for sending this! I think I’ll send the event info (not the blog link 🙂 to the Missouri School Boards Board (who just dropped out of NSBA… a few legislators including manly man hawley
And, ordering my ticket from the independent bookstore in TEXAS! Ha!
He’s the doughtiest, manliest man.
He drinks the Bud, then eats the can!
None can outdo him in kissing Trump’s can,
That derring-do, doughtiest, manliest man!
Ode on the Commode, to Josh Hawley
The 1619 Project has been mischaracterized as “left,” even a “Marxist” critique of racism. It is none of those, but a right-wing racialist attack on the democratic traditions, history and struggle embodied in the American Revolution and Civil War. It advances a dangerous idea of a permanent, unchanging “white” racism literally in the “DNA” of “white” people. This is a gift to the fascistic right wing, legitimizing racial division. Moreover, the Project is filled with historical error designed to serve this [frankly self-serving] political ideology. As Sean Wilentz, Bancroft Prize-winning historian wrote, “This volume vindicates WEB DuBois’s condemnation of propaganda disguised as history.” His condemnation of the Project follows the detailed critiques by a long list of prominent historians including: Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, Adoph Reed, Richard Carwardine, and Clayborne Carson. For an honest look at the issues, I recommend “The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History” by North and Mackaman. University of Illinois Chicago professor Walter Benn Michaels makes a good point about this rebuttal, saying “This book is essential in two ways: it helps you realize how historically inaccurate the 1619 Project is and how fundamentally reactionary its politics are.” https://www.amazon.com/Times-Project-Racialist-Falsification-History/dp/1893638936/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=The+1619+Project&qid=1636834819&sr=8-6
Nancy,
Do you believe that Trump is a fascistic right winger who legitimizes racial division?
Do you agree that the entire Republican is dominated by fascistic right wingers who legitimize racial division?
I find that lots of right wingers copy and paste anti-1619 Project propaganda.
And it’s like a neo-Nazi not identifying himself but pretending to be very concerned because Democrats are a very racist party.
Maybe I’m wrong. If I am, you will be able to post about how racist and neofascist Donald Trump and nearly the entire Republican party is.
But right wing trolls don’t really say anything strongly negative toward other right wingers except in very generic, vague terms.
But people who actually cared about racial division would easily be able to post that of course Trump and the current Republican party has become dominated by fascistic right wingers who legitimize racial division.
In an unsurprising turn of events, media reports today that Bill Ackman is one of Kyle Rittenhouse’s most notable defenders. Diane wrote on 10-7-2018 about Ackman’s profits from charter schools. Forbes described Ackman in this way, “financed construction of 79 charter schools- generates returns for investors by leasing or selling new schools to charter school operators like KIPP.”
We can credit Bill and Melinda Gates, AEI, the Center for American Progress and, the Fordham Institute for privatization.
Ack!
Interview with Don the Con, November 6, 2020
REPORTER: So, yesterday was truly a historic day for the Republican Party, which now controls the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, AND the Presidency. What are your feelings about this? And about the DeSantis victory? Good thing for the country?
DtC: A total scam. Everybody knows this. I won that election. Not even close.
REPORTER: But, with all due respect, you weren’t on the ballot in any state.
DtC: Bigger than last time. Biggest scam ever. Last time, they stole one election. This time, they stole the primary AND the general election. Let me ask you one thing: What happened to the billion write-in ballots for Glorious Orange Leader? People know what happened, believe me. People call me, they say, “Sir, congratulations on your historic victory.” You want to see the retruths? I’ve been retruthing about this for hours.
REPORTER: But Mr. DeSantis appears to be the clear winner. And there’s nowhere near a billion U.S. voters.
DtC: See? Fake news. I hope you’re not the guy covering my inauguration at Four Seasons Landscaping.
Yikes! That was supposed to be Nov. 6, 2024!
So, Michael Flynn says that there must be ONE religion in America. I’m thinking that perhaps we should all worship the Papuan Pig Goddess. At least with her, you get pigs, I mean actual pigs, not Republicans. Thoughts?
Poor Michael. He cannot even get the same religion in a single church. And many of the churches he might see as solidly representational of his vision are the most divergent in their beliefs. Protestant churches are supposed to act that way, respecting freedom of conscience in a way Flynn would find abhorrent.
I suspect the reason Flynn argues this is that he sees Islam as monolithic. He probably sees him own vision of religion as a monolith in opposition to Islam. How mistaken leadership can be.
Unfortunately, belief that one’s own religion is the One True Religion (GM*) is all too commonplace among followers of many major religions, often encouraged by the religious leaders.
It also has been the source of much cruelty , suffering and death throughout human history.
*GodMark
The idea that the members of a particular religion are “God’s Chosen People is one of the most absurd ideas that humans ever came up with.
But lots and lots of people believe just that.
At the federal level, historically, cultists driving their religious agenda have been prevented from top positions of political power. The shock is not that Flynn made the comment given that he was trained in tribalism. (A central north state capitol diocese reiterated in 2019, the view that the Church is the one and only true church based on two points. Christ founded that sect’s church, singly, and that that Church’s teachings have remained unchanged. The excuse for the prohibition of women priests is that Christ did not select them.)
The devaluation of women is a repeating theme of the right wing. The Wikipedia entry for “Jim Watkins (businessman)” identifies links with pornography sites, QAnon and 8Chan (misogynistic). And, it describes Watkins’ quoting of Bible verses on his podcast.
The shocking part about Flynn, which should receive media scrutiny, is how he he rose to the top. Media has been remiss in not providing more info. about how Leonard Leo achieved his successes and the religious aims of Koch-funded Paul Weyrich found such great traction.
The Wikipedia entry for hyper religiosity attributes the psychiatric disorder to degeneration of specific structures of the brain. At a different site, Living with Schizophrenia, the cultural aspects of religion are described to explain why 21-64% of people with schizophrenia (depending on which nation they live in) manifest with religious visions or voices. It is described, “For many people, religion is one way that we understand the world and give meaning to our lives and certainly religion plays an important part in many people’s experience living with schizophrenia…It is often said that a person in the first stages of experiencing schizophrenia will go see a priest before they see a psychiatrist.”
The QAnon motto, WWG1WGA, where we go one, we go all, was likely developed independent of any religious cultural institution. Or, there is a possibility that people in QAnon heard something like the slogan of a very large worldwide conservative religious organization for men and were attracted to the way it sounded. Then, they changed it up a little and made a catchy acronym for their own purposes, “In service to one, in service to all.”
“21-64% of people with schizophrenia (depending on which nation they live in) manifest with religious visions or voices.
If manifesting with religious visions and voices is a sign of schizophrenia, what does that tell us about the Prophets?
Hearing God’s voice is one thing, but “seeing” someone walking on water takes it to a whole other level.
Neuroendrocrineologist and evolution theorist and baboon expert Robert Sapolski thinks that religion originated as a consequence of schizophrenia. Here, my summary of other major views on the origins of religion from various thinkers throughout history:
Thanks for the link, Bob. The section about God as father resonated with me because I am reading about Carl Anderson’s replacement, Patrick E. Kelley, as head of the very wealthy Knights of Columbus. Kelley is retired U.S. Navy. He said, “a lot of these young people in the military lacked values…lacked father figures…lacked faith.”
Kelley was senior advisor to the ambassador at large for international religious freedom at the U.S. State Dept…included working with the Vatican and other nations on religious freedom issues. He entered the Pontifical John Paul II institute for studies on marriage and family. He played a prominent role in the Knights’ Ultrasound Initiative. He’s a graduate of Marquette University (Catholic) school of law (the alma mater of the Rittenhouse judge). Kelley was also a Director of the Pope John Paul II shrine in D.C. The shrine gave Trump a photo op opportunity after he was rebuffed at the Episcopalian church.
Pope John Paul II’s call for evangelism, activism in the public square, was a turning point for the separation of church and state in the U.S.
To demonstrate the reach of the evangelism advocacy, in 2006, the Catholic Athletes for Christ organization was introduced. Pope John Paul II had called for evangelism in the world of sports.
America is in danger. Jefferson said in every age and every country, the priest aligns with the despot.
The goal of conservative religion is for “religious freedom” policy and legislation to deny women and men their freedom.
Btw-
“The Great Awakening” is a phrase not unique to QAnon (and, to historical periods of religious fervor), it is also the title of a 2012 book, authored by Carl A. Anderson, former legislative aide to Jesse Helms.
How about the Mammoni$m?
Oh, wait, America already follow$ that (to the bank, til death do u$ part)
There has always been one religion in the US: money.
If msm and public influencers showed consciousness of integrity and, interpreted honesty as including omission, the public would have been informed how many and which states enacted school choice legislation as a direct result of the politicking of one religious sect ‘s state conferences.
There is an interesting poll result from the Washington Post today . It somewhat mirrors other areas of the poll in other areas like the economy or handling the virus. A sizable majority of Americans support the Biden Economic Proposals yet a large majority say the economy sucks (Simply put) . `There is an amazing disconnect between peoples opinions on issues and the results at the polls.
“Overall, 7 in 10 Americans say public schools should teach “a great deal” or “a good amount” about how the history of racism affects the United States today. Yet that remains a polarized view. More than 9 in 10 Democrats and more than 7 in 10 independents say schools should teach about the effects of racism. Just over 4 in 10 Republicans agree, with more than half instead favoring teaching the effects of racism “not much” or “not at all.”
So it would seem like an open and shut case that a minority of Americans are simply racist (I said it). Yet that minority managed to make cultural issues around race and identity central in this years elections coming out on top.
” A small group of well organized people perhaps 10% is all that is necessary to take power ” That quote was a policy goal attributed to the right. (I believe detailed in the “The Power Worshipers” , could have been “Unholy”. (?))
In the the NY Times today there is an article on the Loudoun county school controversy over diversity training and Identity. The article goes to great pains to point out that only 43% of the population of the schools is White a tremendous demographic shift in 25 years. . The picture of the School Board meeting says it all . A packed meeting hardly a person of color in the audience. Certainly validates the above quote. That meeting than gets magnified in a well organized well funded right wing echo chamber from Fox News to the internet .
Then the phony grievances are then legitimized by the Corporate media who bend over backwards to be fair and equal.
The voter disconnect flows from the inability of Democrats to use language and the inability to deliver on policy. Some of that inability is due to constitutional flaws . But as this blog points out there are many Democrats who have made their bed with corporate donors. Buying into the DLC / NDC market mantra. From Education where they sleep with the Waltons to Labor where Virginia Democrats fail to repeal Right To Work . They are the cog in the wheel that prevents change.
But the inability to use language is inexcusable.
Part (if not a big part) of the problem is undoubtedly the way polls are worded.
You can prove anything you want with a poll — and pollsters regularly do.
The four kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and polls.
And the five kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, statisticians , pollsters and pols.
True enough. And I am sure there are some in that 70% that are giving the answer that they think they are expected to give. But it is kind of like what Churchill said of Democracy .
But still the same WP poll that finds an outright decline in support of Democrats finds their policies widely approved of .
I would say failure to deliver on the promised policy and an ignorant electorate is a big part of the problem.
Unemployment is relatively low. The markets that these same unhappy voters used to brag about is going through the roof (rational or not ). Wages especially at the bottom are up .
And inflation does not seem to bother the Bond Market all that much. A clue that they think it is transitory (not permanent ), related to Pandemic disruptions to a ” Just In Time ” supply chain and consumers locked in the house for almost 2 years, shifting their spending to goods from travel and entertainment.
Yet 70% are unhappy with the economy. That may be the same as the 70% above, people are saying what they think they should say.
The Marquette polling group surveyed people about their confidence in government. I speculate that Grover Norquist and Charles Koch had something to do with declining faith in government. I thought it was interesting that Marquette research found that the public had more confidence in SCOTUS than other government entities. The poll I reviewed was conducted after the appointment of a fifth conservative Catholic judge.
You make a fascinating point, Joel. A couple scientists at Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute put forth what they call the “10 Percent Rule”: when 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief and communicates it vociferously, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. This might also be called the loudmouthed crazy rule.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110725190044.htm
I think Stewart(?) traced it a bit further back than even the Christian Nationalist she quoted as saying it.
An area Greg B might be more familiar with.
The disconnect from people’s beliefs and their voting habits is long standing. A case in point: Just before the 1980 election, The Chicago Tribune ran a two-page spread with a long list of issues in one column, where Reagan stood on the issue in the next, and where Carter stood in the next. In every case, the majority of Americans stood with Carter. Reagan won in a landslide.
This is why I think that Democrats will continue to lose elections, despite their majority, UNTIL they start running, in addition to campaign ads, ads SOLELY on issues. Like the ones from The Lincoln Project, but SOLELY about issues, not about particular politicians. Voters need to be educated into understanding that where they stand on the issues is where the Democratic Party stands, typically.
Only if they deliver Bob. And sadly as I stated the structural constraints aside the Corporatist ( more fitting than neo-liberal as they only selectively believe in free markets) wing of the party obstructs as much as the Republicans. How many Democrats only vote for legislation knowing it stands no chance of passing.
Agreed wholeheartedly, Joel.
As I read the description of the event and got near the end, where is says, “… and a poetry reading by …,” I paused and prayed.
“Oh, GTU, please let me not read the name Amanda Gorman.”
And so I did not. What a relief!
A relief because earlier Saturday I had restocked my Little Free Library, and the restocking included Amanda Gorman’s wonderful and beautifully illustrated book, “Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem.”
This snippet of a goosebumps-inducing poem in Change Sings stays with me:
“I talk not only of distances,
“From where and how we came.
“I also walk our differences,
“To show we are the same.”
To me, this speaks of The Sankofa Bird needing to turn its head forward more often than backward.
https://mailchi.mp/a8114590432e/amanda-gormans-change-sings-filling-buckets-science-empathy-and-other-books-new-in-little-free-library
There was an nasty rant against Nikole Hannah-Jones posted above that invoked the liberal white historian who is supposedly the embodiment of all that is good and non-racist — Sean Wilentz.
Anyone who wants to better understand what implicit racism is should read Wilentz’ barely contained outrage that led him to his over the top condemnation of Hannah-Jones, and compare how Wilentz reviewed a book by Jill Lepore that was a source for Hannah-Jones and the way that Wilentz minimizes as unimportant the supposed “errors” in Jill Lepore’s work he amplifies and suggests are discrediting in Hannah-Jones work. When a white scholar does it, Wilentz doesn’t call it “propaganda disguised as history” and Wilentz did not go on a massive discrediting effort against Jill Lepore to make sure Jill Lepore was cancelled. Wilentz didn’t agree with Lepore’s work, but he treated her as with respect.
New York Review of Books, 11/8/2018 “The American Revolutions”, Sean Wilentz review of Jill Lepore’s book “These Truths: A History of the United States”
“Like any ambitious book covering several centuries, These Truths contains trivial slips that can be easily corrected in the next printing: the occasional misspelling of a name or the misdating of a significant event. But especially in light of the book’s themes and Lepore’s precision elsewhere, it’s perplexing to read, for example, the ambiguous statement that the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, by substantially enlarging slaveholding states’ allotment in the House of Representatives, granted those states “far greater representation in Congress than free states,” an assertion that, if taken to mean proportions in the House, would be inaccurate.
The framers did not resolve their larger impasse over representation in the House and Senate by passing the Northwest Ordinance—Lepore seems unaware that the Confederation Congress, and not the Constitutional Convention, approved the measure—nor did the ordinance decree that states south of the Ohio River would continue slavery. If any of these assertions were accurate, the politics of slavery and antislavery over the following decades would have been markedly different, so the fumbles are not inconsequential.
Some shakiness about elementary facts, especially on politics, recurs in later chapters. Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans did not, as the book asserts, align as, respectively, antislavery and proslavery parties prior to the momentous crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819 and 1820; most congressmen in what John Quincy Adams called the “free party” were in fact northern Republicans. Adams, who was by then a Republican himself, did become increasingly opposed to slavery over the following decades, as Lepore relates, but partly on that account, he never “steered the erratic course of the Whig Party,” as the book contends. If he had, something like Lincoln’s Republican Party might have arisen two decades earlier than it did.
Together, these lapses make the founding generation appear more proslavery and the later Federalist and Whig parties more antislavery than they actually were, but they can be adjusted without weakening Lepore’s general argument. ”
End of quote of Wilentz review of Jill Lepore’s book.
Wilentz goes on to challenge various facts and the weight that Jill Lepore places on various events in history. But Wilentz entire essay reinforces the narrative that this work by Jill Lepore has value, despite those.
When Hannah-Jones does it, Wilentz went on a massive PR campaign to make sure that Hannah-Jones work was dismissed as worthless propaganda.
When works by white people don’t have to meet an unattainable standard that works by black people are held to, that’s implicit racism.
When white people deny that they minimize when white scholars do the same thing that they demonize black writers for doing, even though it is obvious from their own writings that they do, and other white people let them get away with it, that’s implicit racism.
Hannah-Jones used the scholarship of Jill Lepore as one of her sources. Therefore, Wilentz wants to cancel Hannah-Jones but not Jill Lepore. He fears the scholarship of one person, but not the scholarship of the person whose work helped inform the person whose work outrages him.
Maybe Wilentz just doesn’t like people named Nikole and it has nothing to do with this implicit racism. But I doubt it.
How low you go seeking to make support to Nicole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project the litmus test of anti-racism. Straw man argument and non-sequitors aside, The 1619 Project has been critiqued by a substantial list of the most eminent contemporary historians (black and white), see above, for its factual errors. Historians must measure the value of their work by one standard: the truth. But The 1619 Project, instead markets a series of dangerous, racialist theories: the claim that the American Revolution was waged to “defend slavery,” the idea that “blacks fought alone” against racism and oppression, the notion that Lincoln was a racist who viewed “black people [as] the obstacle to national unity” and more all of which have been exhaustively refuted. Her political aim, which your words echo, is to ascribe unbridgeable, intrinsic divisions to race and, above all, deny economic class as the driving force of society. The entire history of the labor movement, for example, in which races often unified to break the back of racist employers, is completely omitted. The falsification of history invariably serves very real, even if unstated, contemporary political interests. The racial narrative is intended to replace one that is based on the analysis of objectively existing social and class interests. It is also vastly benefiting her and an entire layer of upper middle class academics. It is notable that now tenured at Howard, the beneficiary of a $20 million big business-funded foundation, Hannah-Jones has said nothing about the abysmal living conditions of the Howard students–the subject of a month-long sit-in. Students are living with black mold, roaches and filthy, but unlimited sums are handed to her and Ta-Nehisi Coates to preach racial division. The working class is moving to the left and the racialists seek to cut it off at the pass. Hannah-Jones is a gift to fascist right wing; they talk the same language. Nothing good has, or will ever, come of “blood and race.” The socialists, on the other hand, fight for social equality, the unity of humankind, the end of poverty and war, and the abolition of the profit system. It is capitalism that feeds on and requires racism, to keep the masses divided. Ending the exploitation of man by man is the way to end all forms of racism, prejudice and social backwardness. Further details: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/28/nytr-d28.html
I think you are unfair to Nikole Hannah-Jones and “The 1619 Project.” I have been reading black history for many years, as written by black scholars (Eg, Carter Woodson, W.E.B. DuBois). I was aware of some, but not all of the details, in the essay. I certainly understand Hannah-Jones’ desire to make history accessible to a popular audience. I am not moved by the differences of opinion between Hannah-Jones and a small number of historians. In my view, the critical historians did not uncover a fatal flaw in her essay. The two sides had different perspectives, but debate and disagreement are at the heart of historiography. It’s not unusual for historians to disagree; it’s customary.
Hannah-Jones says that some of the founders wanted independence so as to protect slavery. Many of the founders were slave owners, including Washington and Jefferson. Certainly the elites in the slave South were dependent on the slave system, so I find it reasonable to assert that “some” founders wanted to preserve slavery. Not all. Some. The slave owners had enough power to insert into the Constitution that slaves would count as only 3/5 of a person for census purposes.
I think we can all learn by reading “The 1619 Project.”
On this blog, I posted Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay as well as the critics’ critique.
Make your own judgment.
I do wonder, like NYC PSP, why mostly white historians got so exercised by black journalists and scholars publishing their perspective on the black role in American history.
Speaking for myself, when I was in school, black people didn’t exist in our history books (or our schools).
Now black scholars have a voice. We should listen.
Diane,
Thank you, this is so important.
Saul Wilentz’ critique of Jill Lepore in the NY Review of Books essay criticizes Jill Lepore without discrediting her entire book. In fact, Wilentz certainly gives the impression that there is great value in Lepore’s book despite the supposed “errors” he cites.
And yet with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Wilentz proclaims that the same supposed “errors” justify his discrediting the author and demanding she be cancelled.
If that isn’t implicit racism, what is it?
Also, I think “Nancy” is a right wing troll. They always link to wsws articles and can be identified by their determination to normalize the most repellent actions of Trump and the Republicans, or simply ignore them. I believe they are not allowed to post anything negative about Trump. They are allowed to post rabid rants against Hannah-Jones and Democrats.
Cancel culture