'The 1619 Project' comes to TV with Oprah-produced docuseries

Slavery is ingrained "in the very structure of our politics, our economic system, our medical systems," Hannah-Jones told . . .

I consider myself to be pretty liberal, but I've come to see the 1619 Project as mostly baloney. Slavery was one of many social, political, and economic dynamics to play a role in the formation of the United States. It has never been a monolithic force, and the argument that racism is universally systemic is intellectually sloppy. The effects of the past still live on, but not in fixed institutional forms.

Read John McWhorter (who is black) on this matter. He proposes that a much bigger problem in America today is classism. The blacks who are killed by white police officers are mostly poor, and if you compare the number of poor blacks who are shot and the number of poor whites who are shot, the numbers are pretty similar. Blacks are more likely to be caught in a cycle of poverty, not because of current institutional racism, but because of the lingering effects of history.

Hannah-Jones said the backlash was "indicative of why the project had to exist in the first place -- that we've all been indoctrinated into these myths about America and we've all been told a history that's not true."

People like Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi promote a silly orthodoxy about racism that essentially calls anyone who questions their views "racist". You are racist if you don't incorporate black culture into your "own", and you are racist if you do, because then you are trying to culturally appropriate what is not "yours". It's really dumb.

Some arguments put forth by the project, including a claim that the American Revolution was motivated by white settlers' desire to keep slaves in the face of growing abolitionist sentiment in Britain, were publicly questioned by prominent scholars.

But Hannah-Jones said the backlash was "indicative of why the project had to exist in the first place -- that we've all been indoctrinated into these myths about America and we've all been told a history that's not true."

Boils down to: “If you prove me wrong, you’re a racist.”