The 1619 Project Depicts an America Tainted by Original Sin by John McWhorter

The 1619 Project Depicts an America Tainted by Original Sin by John McWhorter

Surely, non-black people will feel a little guiltier about "the black thing," and internalize a reluctance to assign black people true culpability out of a sense that "they" have been through too much to be expected to perform at the level of other people. Few things more crisply demonstrate that the Civil Rights revolution has gone off the rails than that so many smart black people actually see this condescending poster child status as civic improvement.

Meanwhile, black people will internalize an even deeper sense that America is not great and doesn't like them, in the only country they will ever know. We are now to instruct black kids just a few years past diapers in this way of thinking—in studied despair over events far in the past, and a sense that it is more enlightened to think of yourself as a victim than as an actor. At no other point in human history have any people, under any degree of oppression, conceived of this kind of self-image as healthy—and no one could effectively argue that they were missing something that we have just figured out.

John McWhorter has a real problem with the 1619 Project's focus on slavery as the foundation for American civilization.