America's Racist Founding? An East-European View

Abstract

By now everybody must have heard about The 1619 Project of the New York Times Magazine and the recent push to reinterpret the American Revolution as a racist enterprise which aimed at preserving slavery.1 There is a difference between saying that the United States failed to abolish slavery at a federal level, and saying that it declared independence precisely to preserve slavery. It is one thing to claim that white racists who tortured a Black American war veteran in 1946 were betraying Jefferson’s ideals, and it is quite another thing to say they were acting on the basis of „the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers used as the nation’s founding.“2 The 1619 Project was a 100-page supplement to The New York Times magazine published in August 2019 to recall the 400 years since the arrival of the first Black slaves in the present-day USA. It includes an introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones and ten short essays on various topics relating to slavery by multiple authors. In June 2020 it was followed by another supplement edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones that uses the historical narrative to justify reparations for Black Americans.3 Since then it has grown into an initiative that aims to reframe the entire history of the USA and make this reframed history the basis of school education. The narrative is also being imposed on historians. According to the New York Times Magazine, the preservation of slavery has been the main mission of the United States throughout its entire history. Hence the shift from 1776 to 1619, the year in which allegedly the first Black slaves arrived in the present-day USA. In the flowery language of the editor Jake Silverstein, this was the moment when the „seeds“ were planted, and the racist flower took its „roots“.4 This metaphorical language manipulates the reader into believing that everything in American history has been determined by its „seeds“, and there is no other remedy than uprooting the whole plant that has been growing since 1619. In the words of Jake Silverstein, the aim of The 1619 Project is „to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.“5