NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES' NEW BOOK SIDESTEPS SCHOLARLY CRITICS WHILE QUIETLY DELETING PREVIOUS FACTUAL ERRORS. The 1619 Project Unrepentantly Pushes Junk History.

• Author: Magness, Phillip W.

"I TOO YEARN for universal justice," wrote Zora Neale Hurston in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, "but how to bring it about is another thing." The black novelist's remarks prefaced a passage where she grappled with the historical legacy of slavery in the African-American experience. Perhaps unexpectedly, Hurston informed her readers that she had "no intention of wasting my time beating on old graves with a club."

Hurston did not aim to bury an ugly past but to search for historical understanding. Her 1927 interview with Cudjoe Lewis, among the last living survivors of the 1860 voyage of the slave ship Clotilda, contains an invaluable eyewitness account of the middle passage as told by one of its victims. Yet Hurston saw only absurdity in trying to find justice by bludgeoning the past for its sins. "While I have a handkerchief over my eyes crying over the landing of the first slaves in 1619," she continued, "I might miss something swell that is going on in" the present day. Hurston's writings present an intriguing foil to The New York Times' 1619 Project, which the newspaper recently expanded into a book-length volume. As its subtitle announces, the book aims to cultivate a "new origin story" of the United States where the turmoil and strife of the past are infused into a living present as tools for attaining a particular vision of justice. Indeed, it restores The 1619 Project's original aim of displacing the "mythology" of 1776 "to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding." This passage was quietly deleted from The New York Times' website in early 2020 just as the embattled journalistic venture was making a bid for a Pulitzer Prize. After a brief foray into self-revisionism in which she denied ever making such a claim, editor Nikole Hannah-Jones has now apparently brought this objective back to the forefront of The 1619 Project.

Vacillating claims about The 1619 Project's purpose have come to typify Hannah-Jones' argumentation. In similar fashion, she selectively describes the project as a work either of journalism or of scholarly history, as needed. Yet as the stealth editing of the "true founding" passage revealed, these pivots are often haphazardly executed. So too is her attempt to claim the mantle of Hurston. In a recent public spat with Andrew Sullivan, Hannah-Jones accused the British political commentator of "ignorance" for suggesting that "Zora Neale Hurston's work sits in opposition to mine." She was apparently unaware that Dust Tracks on a Road anticipated and rejected the premise of The 1619 Project eight decades prior to its publication.

On the surface, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World) expands the short essays from The New York Times print edition into almost 600 pages of text, augmented by additional chapters and authors. The unmistakable subtext is an opportunity to answer the barrage of controversies that surrounded the project after its publication in August 2019. "We wanted to learn from the discussions that surfaced after the project's publication and address the criticisms some historians offered in good faith," Hannah-Jones announces in the book's introduction, before devoting the majority of her ink to denouncing the blusterous critical pronouncements of the Trump administration after it targeted The 1619 Project in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Serious scholarly interlocutors of the original project are largely sidestepped, and factual errors in the original text are either glossed over or quietly removed.

While the majority of the public discussion around The 1619 Project has focused on Hannah-Jones' lead essay, its greatest defects appear in the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond's essay on "Capitalism." Hannah-Jones' writings provide the framing for the project, but Desmond supplies its ideological core--a political charge to radically reorient the basic structure of the American economy so as to root out an alleged slaveryinfused brutality from capitalism.

Hannah-Jones' prescriptive call for slavery reparations flows seamlessly from Desmond's argument, as does her own expanded historical narrative--most recently displayed in a lecture series for Masterclass in which she attempted to explain the causes of the 2008 financial crisis by faulting slavery. "The tendrils of [slavery] can still be seen in modern capitalism," she declared, where banking companies "were repackaging risky bonds and risky notes...in ways [that] none of us really understood." The causal mechanism connecting the two events remained imprecise, save for allusions to "risky slave bonds" and a redesignation of the cotton industry as "too big to fail."

Making what appears to be a muddled reference to the Panic of 1837, she confidently declared that "what happened in 1830 is what happened in 2008." The claimed connection aimed to prove that the "American capitalist system is defined today by the long legacy and shadow of slavery." This racist, brutal system "offers the least protections for workers of all races," she said, and it thus warrants a sweeping overhaul through the political...