Introduction
The 1619 Project is a collection of articles that examine a crucial facet of American culture through the lens of African American history, from the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619 to the current day. It also contains photographs, prose, poetry, and other art projects.
Project Critique
The essays’ titles and style are far from academic standards; instead, they should be called journalistic, but they give a clear idea of each essay’s main idea (Waldstreicher, 2022). Here are a few examples. Thus, this project’s strength is that it raises an important theme of inequality. Its potential is that it touches on history, thereby drawing attention to it. The younger generation needs to know where various prejudices begin. This project will provide an opportunity to rethink the reasons for society’s behavior and ultimately abandon prejudice, bringing humanity closer to justice and equality.
If we apply the political movement model to Project 1619, it can be considered one of the most developed social movements in the narrow sociotechnical sense (Waldstreicher, 2022). It confidently enters the third, implements its ideology, and places “its people” in state authorities, political parties, and other social institutions.
The project’s weakness is that it was immediately oriented toward mass distribution, including methodological manuals and guides for schools and seminars. The danger is that the direction of ideas for school education and street slogans inevitably led to an ideological interpretation and simplification of the project’s theses, as well as to the distortion and discarding of several inconvenient historical facts and collisions (Waldstreicher, 2022). All this entailed a rejection of standard norms of historical research.
Another shortcoming is that Project 1619 bridges from early seventeenth-century America to today’s America to justify the historical rights of the descendants of the enslaved people and, by extension, the entire black population to occupy a leading position in American society and receive reparations in the broadest sense of the word (Waldstreicher, 2022). In their picture of the world, there is no United States as a whole, no national interest, but only a zero-sum game of ethnic minorities.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the project’s authors decided to promote the new national narrative in academic publications and public space from the beginning. Although many read the Times Magazine publication, the fact that Project 1619 was being constructed as a grand social engineering project that included many interrelated activities might have escaped the general public’s attention. The August 2019 publication was only the first of them. Hanna-Jones was not only the author of the project but also, in the parlance of the exhibition business, its curator: she came up with the concept of the project, wrote the introductory essay for it, created its publicity, and ensured its promotion to various audiences.
Reference
Waldstreicher, David. “The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy.” Boston Review, Web.