David North
Like other great revolutions—including the French Revolution
of 1789 that it helped inspire, and later, the Russian Revolution of 1917—the
American Revolution fused the most advanced political thought with economic
conditions that had reached sufficient maturity to make the overthrow of an old
order both possible and, from an objective standpoint, necessary.
Thomas Mackaman
Indeed, the irrational, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Marxist,
and anti-working-class perspective developed over the past half century has
brought the pseudo-left into increasing alignment with the conceptions and
politics of the far right.
Joseph Kishore
But the idea that racism is a permanent condition, well,
that’s just not true. It also doesn’t account for the countervailing tendencies
in American history because opposition to slavery and opposition to racism have
also been essential themes in American history.
James Macpherson
The 1619 Project debuted as a special edition of The New
York Times. The New York Times has funded a staggering number of publications,
including this book from Penguin. It is primarily aimed at children and perpetuates
a lie. The 1619 Project consisted of 14 essays, including the lead essay by
project founder and New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, titled “Our
democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” Black Americans
have fought to make them accurate.” [1].
She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary as a reward for her efforts.
As James McDonald writes :
The falsification of a society’s history is a tyrant’s
weapon. As are our mythologies of blood. In its ongoing mission to disorient
and divide the American working class, the New York Times has wielded both
these weapons with its 1619 Project, which asserts that the “true founding” of
the United States dates back to the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in
Virginia rather than to 1776, the year of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence.
The common themes of the 1619 Project are that race is the
primary division in American society, that anti-black racism “runs in the very
DNA of this country,” and that African Americans have been the sole progressive
force in US history. For Hannah-Jones and her co-essayists, the American
Revolution was a counterrevolution intended to establish a slaveocracy, and the
Civil War, the second American Revolution, in which some 750,000 soldiers died
and which ended chattel slavery in the US, was of no historical significance.
Hundreds of thousands of copies of the 1619 Project have been distributed to
school districts to be incorporated into high school curricula.” The New York
Times has ensured that its falsification of history has entered schools and
libraries across America in unprecedented numbers .[2]
According to the blurb, from the #1 New York
Times bestselling series comes the latest title in the Who
HQ Now format for trending topics. It tells the history of a political and
social movement that advocates for non-violent civil disobedience and protests
against incidents of police brutality--and all racially motivated
violence--against Black people.”
The origins of the “black lives matter” movement began as a legitimate protest
against police brutality and racial acts of violence. The movement gained attention
in 2020 when it called for police reform in the United States after the
police-related murder of George Floyd.
However, this movement was hijacked by a money-mad layer of
the black petty bourgeoisie whose political aims and money-making were not part
of the original hopes and aims of “black lives matter”.
As this critical article states, “From the beginning, the
'mothers of the movement' Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi—who
collectively adopted the famous hashtag—specifically opposed uniting blacks,
whites and immigrants against the brutal class-war policies of the capitalist
state. Instead, the group did its best to confine anti-police violence protests
within the framework of the capitalist system and push a racialist and
pro-capitalist agenda.[3]
Lawrence Porter and Nancy Hanover's excellent articles go on
to state that “In the wake of the monetary commitment by the big-business
foundation network, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has explicitly embraced black
capitalism. It appears the group is now well-positioned to cash in on the
well-known #BLM Twitter hashtag. Announcing its first “big initiative for
2017,” BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors stated that it would be partnering with
the Fortune 500 New York ad agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT) to create “the
biggest and most easily accessible black business database in the country.”
Lakita Wilson’s book is a whitewash from start to finish. The
BLM’s purported aim to halt racial violence and oppression by ending “white
Supremacy and oppression” is nothing but a means of promoting a grasping layer
of the black middle class at the expense of black and white workers.
“The use and promotion of Black Lives Matter by key elements
of the capitalist state demonstrate once again the class role of identity
politics. For workers and young people looking for a way to fight, the social
physiognomy and political program of Black Lives Matter stand as an object
lesson on the role of bourgeois class forces and the reactionary dead-end of
racial politics.”
Notes
The New York Times 1619 Project and the racialist
falsification of history-David North, Tom Mackaman, Mehring Books- 2021
[1]
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html
[2]
The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: A significant
political and intellectual event-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/fals-a10.html
[3]
Black Lives Matter cashes in on black capitalism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/04/blm-a04.html
