The misery continues: “White people told the people they were not human. Those who did not die from maltreatment or suicide arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, crying “a silent cry as white men spoke strange words / talking about their bodies / and with a handshake / traded another’s child, another’s momma and daddy, 20 to 30 beloved human beings in all, / for a few pounds of food and drink.” The “people” then worked in the tobacco fields from “sunup to sundown” “bringing wealth to Virginia” (the far more numerous white indentured toilers go unmentioned). None of this is mentioned, but the horrors of the Middle Passage are dramatized. And it was the “ savage chiefs,” as Frederick Douglass called them, who raided villages for slaves, rounded them up, and sold them to African and Muslim middlemen, who then marched them to the coast where Europeans waited. In West Africa, slaves for centuries had been working on plantations, in households, in mines, and suffering as victims of sacrifice, as I demonstrate in Debunking The 1619 Project. This “origin story” is a fairy tale, however. The “white people,” kidnappers, then “baptized them in the name of their god.” So, “ Ours is no immigration story.” Hannah-Jones’s experience in her childhood years when she found herself unable to participate in a classroom exercise about her family’s origins (apparently never thinking to include her white mother’s heritage) provides the framework for the 38-page picture book, which begins and ends with a girl standing in for Hannah-Jones.Īfter school, the girl’s grandmother tells her and her brother the story about their African orgins, illustrated with drawings of giddy toothy African villagers, who, “before they were “stolen,” “were free” and had a home, a language, and knew farming, math, science, cooking, metal-working, drumming, and dancing. She tweeted on November 22, “Iowa’s Republican governor and legislature might not respect me or my work as they sought first to ban the 1619 Project explicitly and then passed one of these anti-history laws, but my community always supports and I can’t wait to see you all.” Dial, the high school teacher who radicalized her thirty years ago by introducing her to the writings of Lerone Bennett, a 1960s Ebony Magazine polemicist and coiner of the term Black Power. Hannah-Jones insisted that the first stop on her nationwide book tour be at West High School in Waterloo, Iowa, where the celebrity author appeared “in conversation” with Mr. New York Times “race” reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the much-criticized 1619 Project, co-author of the children’s book, and co-editor and contributor to the hardcover edition, accuses those introducing or passing laws forbidding classroom use of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory of “censorship.”Īt the same time, she has been publicizing a collaborative effort by her publisher, bookstores, and the nonprofit (which receives donations from Penguin Random House!) to encourage fans to buy and donate her books to “low income classrooms, libraries, and educational organizations.” The non-profit Pulitzer Center, which produced the original curricular materials for over 4,500 schools, has sponsored events for librarians and after-school initiatives, including the “ 1619 Freedom School.” A guide for high school teachers is also provided for the 600-page hardcover edition, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. It was the SPLC’s “survey” claiming that students were not being taught about slavery that was used as a pretext to justify The 1619 Project, published as an issue of the New York Times Magazine on August 18, 2019. This guide for those teaching kindergarten through eighth grade is linked at the page of the publisher, the multinational conglomerate Penguin Random House, but is produced by Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a criminal, conservative-smearing non-profit. “The first step in mitigating harm to children as you teach the hard and triggering history of the enslavement is confronting yourself.” This sentence is bolded. “It cannot be overstated,” says the educator’s guide for the new children’s book, Born on the Water, published alongside the hardcover edition of The 1619 Project.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |