We cats are plowing our way slowly through The 1619 Project — partly because it's nearly 600 pages, and mostly because wow, it really makes you stop and think.
That is, if you're white, of a certain age, and learned mostly American pablum, not history, in school. It kinda blows you away if — whenever you deign to think about it (which probably isn't often) — you unthinkingly accept the "freedom and liberty for all" themes that resonate every Fourth of July.
Instead, The 1619 Project re-centers everything for you. The founding of our nation was about enslavement just as much as throwing tea in Boston Harbor, and never mind about the later genocide against Indigenous North Americans. That's a lot of blood to have on your paws, but it's best that, instead of demonizing accurate history as the Republicans do, we all grow up and reconsider what we believe.
One of The 1619 Project's key takeaways is that Britain's pledge to free any enslaved Americans who fought on their side helped drive Southerners to support the Revolution. As writer and editor Nikole Hannah-Jones observes, "So much of the response was people saying, 'It can’t possibly be true,' or 'I certainly would have heard this before'...'I’ve never heard of this, so it must be a lie.'"
How about this instead: "I've never heard of this because my history classes were white-centered, so it must be true"?
Heck, even the musical 1776, written 54 years ago, recognized that Southern members of the Continental Congress threatened to defeat the Declaration of Independence unless "the peculiar institution" went unmentioned. Sounds like the truths Hannah-Jones and her team of historians and writers have unearthed could add another song or two to the show. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.
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