1619 Project Author: America Was Founded as Racist Country

Wednesday on the CNN+ show Who’s Talking, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the widely-debunked revisionist history called the 1619 Project, declared that parents were wrong for rejecting her claim that America was founded as a racist country.

Hannah-Jones said, “I think that I don’t know how one can argue we were not founded as a racist country. I believe that we were. I believe that the record is clear. If you’re founded as a country where black people, because they are black, don’t have rights, don’t have freedom if you have a Supreme Court that’s dominated by enslavers, 10 of the first 12 presidents dominated by enslavers, our founding fathers dominated by enslavers.

“If you have these things — the Father of the Constitution was an enslaver. The drafters of the Declaration was an enslaver, of the Bill of Rights. So to argue that people who were explicitly white supremacist in their writings, I mean, the notes on the state of Virginia says black people are inferior as a race. That is a racist foundation. This is just a factual rendering to me,” she added.

Here is a factual rendering the hateful racist Hannah-Jones wants to obscure: 1) America was not America in 1619, when slaves were brought to these shores and the date to which Hannah-Jones would like to reset our founding; 2) slavery was ubiquitous across time and space until white Americans (and the British slightly earlier) ended it, and at the cost of a bloody civil war, no less; 3) not all slaves were black, and not all slave owners white. Blacks were not enslaved because they were black, but because they were readily available, thanks to an African slave trade facilitated by black Africans themselves; 4) the Founding Fathers were not “white supremacists” or “enslavers” (a loaded word Hannah-Jones is trying to normalize in order to demonize them) but slave owners — participants in a system which we rightly abhor today but which, as noted above, was practiced everywhere at the time. Many of the Founders believed the system should be brought to an end, and the Constitution she condemns laid the groundwork for that.

That’s not enough for Hannah-Jones, a black nationalist who once wrote, “The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world…. Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different than [sic] Hitler. The crimes they committed were unnecessarily cruel and can only be described as acts of the devil.”

The entire aim of the 1619 Project was and is to promote the simplistic, mendacious, destructive far-left narrative that America is and always has been “systemically racist” and that all white Americans participate in upholding that system. Hannah-Jones’ visceral hatred of this country and of white people underpins the entire Project. For CNN to give her a platform to spread her poison without the alternative viewpoint of an actual scholar like Mary Grabar is demonstrative of the mainstream media’s anti-American, propagandist agenda.