In the preface to the recently published bestselling hardcover edition of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones uses an incident from 2015 to demonstrate what she claims is a need for The 1619 Project.
The incident involved Roni Dean-Burren who was alerted by her teenage son to a caption in his geography textbook that read, “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the Southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”
The number of Africans brought not only to the Southern United States but to all the British North American colonies, and then the states are grossly exaggerated here; it is not “millions” but about 400,000.
But that was not the concern. Dean-Burren opposed the choice of the word, “workers.” A Washington Post article cited by Hannah-Jones quoted Dean-Burren, who charged the publisher with “erasure” and “retelling” history in the way “the winners would like it told.” Reporter Yanan Wang explained, “In calling slaves ‘workers’ and their move to the United States ‘immigration,’ [Dean-Burren] noted in viral Facebook posts . . . the textbook suggests not only that her African American ancestors arrived on the continent willingly, but also that they were compensated for their labor.”
“‘Minimizing slavery,” said the Black Lives Matter hash-tagging mom, was “a way of saying those black lives, those black bodies, that black pain didn’t matter enough to give it a full description.’”
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After two days of outrage on Facebook, McGraw-Hill Education announced that a review showed that “‘our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.’”
“We believe we can do better,” the statement continued. They promised to update the caption in the textbook’s digital version and then in the next print run to “describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor.”
Dean-Burren gave the company a “thumbs up for listening,” but wanted them to go further, to recall the books and send out a supplement because few students used the digital version and another print version would not be coming out for another decade.
This was for one word in a textbook. Since it was only on this page that the word choice was noted, we can assume that the other material in the textbook made it clear that these were enslaved “workers,” among other types of workers, indentured and free.
Without acknowledging the company’s response, Hannah-Jones presents the incident as an example of the alleged “confusing and obfuscatory (sic) way school curricula tend to address the institution of slavery.” Per The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, McGraw-Hill remains guilty of referring to “African people brought to the Americas in the bowels of slave ships not as the victims of a forced migration who were violently coerced into labor but as ‘workers,’ a word that implies consensual and paid labor.” The incident stands as Exhibit A for the need for Hannah-Jones’s ostensibly corrective history.
The 1619 Project when it was first published as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine on August 18, 2019, came with ready-made lessons that were injected immediately into 3,500 schools across the country—without the usual writing and review process that textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill undertake and certainly without any vetting by parents. Woke teachers eagerly adopted the lessons for the Project that displays American history in racially charged language, with the founders described as “enslavers,” plantations “forced-labor camps,” and this nation a “slavocracy.” Sweeping charges are made about “white Americans,” who “strung [black people] from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them,” and on.
Some districts, such as Buffalo, New York, even began mandating it. Yet, today Hannah-Jones does not want parents “deciding what’s being taught,” as she said on Meet the Press, where she echoed failed Democratic candidate for Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe. Today, Hannah-Jones wants decisions made by “people who have an expertise in the subject area.” She said she trusted her daughter’s teachers because she herself is “not a professional educator,” Yet, Hannah-Jones herself has conducted numerous teacher workshops on using her own creation, The 1619 Project, in classrooms.
She has continued the campaign against transparency laws on Twitter. On January 10, she responded to Christopher Rufo’s tweet advocating for “curriculum transparency” as a way to “deflate” the argument about “bans” and “bait the Left into opposing ‘transparency.’” Hannah-Jones stated, “I hope journalists do a better job reporting on this than they did the original CRT propaganda campaign.” On January 20, Hannah-Jones opined, “The anti-CRT propaganda campaign is being called out for what it is, so they’re changing the tactics to maintain a veneer of legitimacy by pretending all they want now is ‘transparency.’” Parents could just ask the teacher, she suggested rather flippantly. On January 23, she again commented on Rufo’s statement claiming that transparency bills would “force ideological actors to undergo public scrutiny.” We should just accept these bills at “face value,” she said, sarcastically.
For Hannah-Jones transparency laws, ironically, constitute “repression and suppression of truth,” as she told Chuck Todd. All efforts to scrutinize her demonstrably false history are part of a “Republican propaganda campaign” against “the teaching of more accurate history.” During “The AP Interview,” she charged that “powerful people” were seeking to “discredit” and “censor” her work. The charge of “censorship” has become a mantra for Hannah-Jones, even when it comes to parental rights, the same rights she championed for Dean-Burren.
The question remains: if Dean-Burren was allowed to see her son’s textbook and get the publisher to make changes with more accurate language, why can’t other parents today?
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