“[I]t is impossible to shake off this chain” of a stained history, said Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1874 meditation On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. But we don’t need to shake off history, he added. We need to overcome it.

1619 is the year the first slave ships arrived in Virginia. In January, Hulu released The 1619 Project, a six-part docuseries based on the book of the same name currently used in some 4,500 classrooms in the US. The written version of The 1619 Project is a revisionist history of America published by the New York Times, first as a magazine supplement in August 2019 and then as a book in 2021, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The first edition contained numerous glaring factual errors and dubious claims, which drew widespread criticism from scores of leading historians. The second edition has only partly corrected these, and many of its unqualified controversial claims remain. But what is sometimes lost in the debate—necessary as it is—over the veracity of its specific facts is the project’s fundamentally misguided use (or abuse, as Nietzsche put it) of history.

In the Hulu docuseries, the 1619 Project’s founder Nikole Hannah-Jones states that the project’s goal is to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” But what is most important is what goes unsaid: that the video, like the book, is a work of strict and meticulous historical redaction. I taught in China several years ago, and reading or watching The 1619 Project is a lot like reading or watching the news in China: every line, every phrase, has been run through a filter, in this case to scrub out all traces of black-white unity, cooperation, and common goals from America’s history, all in order to leave the audience with a deeply warped caricature of America as having only known racial disunity and conflict. The facts of history defy this narrative; thus, the only way The 1619 Project manages to spin it is by abusing history.

[There’s a lot of abuse these days. More and more people are saying “stop it right now.” More need to have that courage. ~ Beege]