Basically everything.
In The New York Times’ The 1619 Project it is proclaimed that slavery started in America, presumably the part of North America that became the United States, in 1619. Like most things about this series, that is a lie. Most Indian tribes practiced slavery, usually involving war captives or men who had sold themselves into slavery. The Spanish practiced slavery and began to colonize Florida in the Sixteenth Century. The Spanish began the colonization of what is now New Mexico in 1598 and brought the institution of slavery with them. The English colonists were Johnny-come-latelies when it came to the institution of slavery in what would become the US.
The date of 1619 is also misleading for another reason. Until the 1660s most Africans imported to Virginia had the status of being indentured servants, not very different from white indentured servants, a common institution of the time. An indentured servant was freed after his period of indenture. The perpetual slavery of blacks was a later development in Virginia and took time to be codified in law, with the first Virginia slave code being enacted in 1705.
Slavery as an institution is as old as Man and it persists in the contemporary world under other names. It deserves serious scholarly study and not the shoddy ideological point scoring of The 1619 Project.
A.G. Sulzberger, who doesn’t know much, puts N. Hannah-Jones, who doesn’t know much and hates white people, in charge of this agitprop exercise. He’s then poleaxed when academic historians who do know something tell him he’s promoting rubbish. Question for the Sulzberger cousins: why you put this tool in charge of the paper?
Some of the earliest slaves were women that were shang-hi’d of the streets of England and sold into prostitution at the furthest out post of the fur traders along with Indian women sold by their captor’s
Art, sometimes I wonder if you are asking rhetorically or are seriously confused sometimes by these people’s actions. 😉
Hannah-Jones was put up by the paper the same reason several Christian papers, bulletins, blogs, etc quote CS Lewis – she affirms their religion.
Hannah-Jones was put up by the paper the same reason several Christian papers, bulletins, blogs, etc quote CS Lewis – she affirms their religion.
That doesn’t tell me why the Sulzberger cousins want AG in charge of the paper. That aside, no clue why you’d compare a vulgarian like Hannah-Jones to C.S. Lewis, who was a serious student of philosophy and literature.
Maybe they think he’s doing a great job.
Just like Rupert Murdoch’s boy over at FoxNews.
Maybe they think he’s doing a great job.
Just like Rupert Murdoch’s boy over at FoxNews.
For those of us who prefer our history with an objectivist touch and without the contamination of current PC thinking, the 1619 project is just plain silly. A review of the history of the US clearly shows that a large number of the founders regarded slavery as a temporary evil and while obliquely recognized by the constitution, was never given the full approbation the southern states wanted as their price for entering the union. In fact, subsequent laws beginning with the abolishment of the overseas slave trade in 1807 started the process to eventually eliminate it altogether. There were even a few southern congressmen that voted in favor of the law. The Civil War itself would have been unnecessary had the US followed the British example and financially compensated slave owners while abolishing the institution. As far as today, slavery is practiced, in one form or another, in the non-Christian countries of Islam and in India along with government programs that are its equivalent in China and North Korea.