Published below is the introduction by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North to the forthcoming book, The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. It is available for pre-order at Mehring Books for delivery in late January 2021.

The volume is a comprehensive refutation of the New York Times 1619 Project, a racialist falsification of the history of the American Revolution and Civil War. In addition to historical essays, it includes interviews from eminent historians of the United States, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, Richard Carwardine, Victoria Bynum, and Clayborne Carson.

***

I should respectfully suggest that although the oppressed may need history for identity and inspiration, they need it above all for the truth of what the world has made of them and of what they have helped make of the world. This knowledge alone can produce that sense of identity which ought to be sufficient for inspiration; and those who look to history to provide glorious moments and heroes invariably are betrayed into making catastrophic errors of political judgment.Eugene Genovese [1]

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests. These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truththe honest presentation of actual facts and tendencies of the past.Vadim Z. Rogovin [2]

On August 14, 2019, the New York Times unveiled the 1619 Project. Timed to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia, the 100-page special edition of the New York Times Magazine consisted of a series of essays that present American history as an unyielding racial struggle, in which black Americans have waged a solitary fight to redeem democracy against white racism.

The Times mobilized vast editorial and financial resources behind the 1619 Project. With backing from the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to schools. The 1619 Project fanned out to other media formats. Plans were even announced for films and television programming, backed by billionaire media personality Oprah Winfrey.

As a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of a number of distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history.

In support of its claim that American history can be understood only when viewed through the prism of racial conflict, the 1619 Project sought to discredit American historys two foundational events: The Revolution of 177583, and the Civil War of 186165. This could only be achieved by a series of distortions, omissions, half-truths, and false statementsdeceptions that are catalogued and refuted in this book.

The New York Times is no stranger to scandals produced by dishonest and unprincipled journalism. Its long and checkered history includes such episodes as its endorsement of the Moscow frame-up trials of 193638 by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, Walter Duranty, and, during World War II, its unconscionable decision to treat the murder of millions of European Jews as a relatively unimportant story that did not require extensive and systematic coverage. [3] More recently, the Times was implicated, through the reporting of Judith Miller and the columns of Thomas Friedman, in the peddling of government misinformation about weapons of mass destruction that served to legitimize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many other examples of flagrant violations of even the generally lax standards of journalistic ethics could be cited, especially during the past decade, as the New York Timeslisted on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of $7.5 billionacquired increasingly the character of a media empire.

The financialization of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspapers selection of issues to be publicized and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed for the purpose of providing the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimized its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Partys decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritizing racial conflict, marginalizes, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics.

The shift from class struggle to racial conflict did not develop within a vacuum. The New York Times, as we shall explain, is drawing upon and exploiting reactionary intellectual tendencies that have been fermenting within substantial sections of middle-class academia for several decades.

The political interests and related ideological considerations that motivated the 1619 Project determined the unprincipled and dishonest methods employed by the Times in its creation. The New York Times was well aware of the fact that it was promoting a race-based narrative of American history that could not withstand critical evaluation by leading scholars of the Revolution and Civil War. The New York Times Magazines editor deliberately rejected consultation with the most respected and authoritative historians.

Moreover, when one of the Times fact-checkers identified false statements that were utilized to support the central arguments of the 1619 Project, her findings were ignored. And as the false claims and factual errors were exposed, the Times surreptitiously edited key phrases in 1619 Project material posted online. The knowledge and expertise of historians of the stature of Gordon Wood and James McPherson were of no use to the Times. Its editors knew they would object to the central thesis of the 1619 Project, promoted by lead essayist Hannah-Jones: that the American Revolution was launched as a conspiracy to defend slavery against pending British emancipation.

Ms. Hannah-Jones had asserted:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade [S]ome might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy. [4]

This claimthat the American Revolution was not a revolution at all, but a counterrevolution waged to defend slaveryis freighted with enormous implications for American and world history. The denunciation of the American Revolution legitimizes the rejection of all historical narratives that attribute any progressive content to the overthrow of British rule over the colonies and, therefore, to the wave of democratic revolutions that it inspired throughout the world. If the establishment of the United States was a counterrevolution, the founding document of this eventthe Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the equality of manmerits only contempt as an exemplar of the basest hypocrisy.

How, then, can one explain the explosive global impact of the American Revolution upon the thought and politics of its immediate contemporaries and of the generations that followed?

The philosopher Diderotamong the greatest of all Enlightenment thinkersresponded ecstatically to the American Revolution:

After centuries of general oppression, may the revolution which has just occurred across the seas, by offering all the inhabitants of Europe an asylum against fanaticism and tyranny, instruct those who govern men on the legitimate use of their authority! May these brave Americans, who would rather see their wives raped, their children murdered, their dwellings destroyed, their fields ravaged, their villages burned, and rather shed their blood and die than lose the slightest portion of their freedom, prevent the enormous accumulation and unequal distribution of wealth, luxury, effeminacy, and corruption of manners, and may they provide for the maintenance of their freedom and the survival of their government! [5]

Voltaire, in February 1778, only months before his death, arranged a public meeting with Benjamin Franklin, the much-celebrated envoy of the American Revolution. The aged philosophe related in a letter that his embrace of Franklin was witnessed by twenty spectators who were moved to tender tears. [6]

Marx was correct when he wrote, in his 1867 preface to the first edition of Das Kapital that the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, inspiring the uprisings that were to sweep away the feudal rubbish, accumulated over centuries, of the Ancien Rgime. [7]

As the historian Peter Gay noted in his celebrated study of Enlightenment culture and politics, The liberty that the Americans had won and were guarding was not merely an exhilarating performance that delighted European spectators and gave them grounds for optimism about man; it was also proving a realistic ideal worthy of imitation. [8]

R.R. Palmer, among the most erudite of mid-twentieth century historians, defined the American Revolution as a critical moment in the evolution of Western Civilization, the beginning of a forty-year era of democratic revolutions. Palmer wrote:

[T]he American and the French Revolutions, the two chief actual revolutions of the period, with all due allowance for the great differences between them, nevertheless shared a great deal in common, and that what they shared was shared also at the same time by various people and movements in other countries, notably in England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, but also in Germany, Hungary, and Poland, and by scattered individuals in places like Spain and Russia. [9]

More recently, Jonathan Israel, the historian of Radical Enlightenment, argues that the American Revolution

formed part of a wider transatlantic revolutionary sequence, a series of revolutions in France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Haiti, Poland, Spain, Greece, and Spanish America. The endeavors of the Founding Fathers and their followings abroad prove the deep interaction of the American Revolution and its principles with the other revolutions, substantiating the Revolutions global role less as a directly intervening force than inspirational motor, the primary model, for universal change. [10]

Marxists have never viewed either the American or French Revolutions through rose-tinted glasses. In examining world historical events, Friedrich Engels rejected simplistic pragmatic interpretations that explain and judge everything according to the motives of the action, which divides men in their historical activity into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious. Personal motives, Engels insisted, are only of a secondary significance. The critical questions that historians must ask are: What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors? [11]

Whatever the personal motives and individual limitations of those who led the struggle for independence, the revolution waged by the American colonies against the British Crown was rooted in objective socioeconomic processes associated with the rise of capitalism as a world system. Slavery had existed for several thousand years, but the specific form that it assumed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was bound up with the development and expansion of capitalism. As Marx explained:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of the era of capitalist accumulation. [12]

Marx and Engels insisted upon the historically progressive character of the American Revolution, an appraisal that was validated by the Civil War. Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1865 that it was in the American Revolution that the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century... [13]

Nothing in Ms. Hannah-Jones essay indicates that she has thought through, or is even aware of the implications, from the standpoint of world history, of the 1619 Projects denunciation of the American Revolution. In fact, the 1619 Project was concocted without consulting the works of the preeminent historians of the Revolution and Civil War. This was not an oversight, but rather, the outcome of a deliberate decision by the New York Times to bar, to the greatest extent possible, the participation of white scholars in the development and writing of the essays. In an article titled How the 1619 Project Came Together, published on August 18, 2019, the Times informed its readers: Almost every contributor in the magazine and special sectionwriters, photographers and artistsis black, a nonnegotiable aspect of the project that helps underscore its thesis... [14]

In fact, despite the color barrier favored by Hannah-Jones, a number of the essays included in the 1619 Project were written by whites. These effortsby sociologist Matthew Desmond and historian Kevin Krusewere no better than the rest. This only goes to prove that the racialist viewpoint is rooted not in the racial identity of the author, but rather, in his or her class position and ideological orientation.

In any event, even if the Timeshad to bend its own rules, the nonnegotiable and racist insistence that the 1619 Project be produced almost exclusively by blacks was justified with the false claim that white historians had largely ignored the subject of American slavery. And on the rare occasions when white historians acknowledged slaverys existence, they either downplayed its significance or lied about it. Therefore, only black writers could tell our story truthfully. The 1619 Projects race-based narrative would place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. [15]

The 1619 Project was a falsification not only of history, but of historiography. It ignored the work of two generations of American historians, dating back to the 1950s. The authors and editors of the 1619 Project had consulted no serious scholarship on slavery, the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, or Jim Crow segregation. There is no evidence that Hannah-Jones study of American history extended beyond the reading of a single book, written in the early 1960s, by the late black nationalist writer, Lerone Bennett, Jr. Her reframing of American history, to be sent out to the schools as the foundation of a new curriculum, did not even bother with a bibliography.

Hannah-Jones and Silverstein argued that they were creating a new narrative, to replace the supposedly white narrative that had existed before. In one of her countless Twitter tirades, Hannah-Jones declared that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is, rather, about who gets to control the national narrative, and, therefore, the nations shared memory of itself. In this remark, Hannah-Jones explicitly extols the separation of historical research from the effort to truthfully reconstruct the past. The purpose of history is declared to be nothing more than the creation of a serviceable narrative for the realization of one or another political agenda. The truth or untruth of the narrative is not a matter of concern.

Nationalist mythmaking has, for a long period, played a significant political role in promoting the interests of aggrieved middle-class strata that are striving to secure a more privileged place in the existing power structures. As Eric Hobsbawm laconically observed, The socialists who rarely used the word nationalism without the prefix petty-bourgeois, knew what they were talking about. [16]

Despite the claims that Hannah-Jones was forging a new path for the study and understanding of American history, the 1619 Projects insistence on a race-centered history of America, authored by African-American historians, revived the racial arguments promoted by black nationalists in the 1960s. For all the militant posturing, the underlying agenda, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, was to carve out special career niches for the benefit of a segment of the African-American middle class. In the academic world, this agenda advanced the demand that subject matter that pertained to the historical experience of the black population should be allocated exclusively to African Americans. Thus, in the ensuing fight for the distribution of privilege and status, leading historians who had made major contributions to the study of slavery were denounced for intruding, as whites, into a subject that could be understood and explained only by black historians. Peter Novick, in his book That Noble Dream, recalled the impact of black nationalist racism on the writing of American history:

Kenneth Stampp was told by militants that, as a white man, he had no right to write The Peculiar Institution. Herbert Gutman, presenting a paper to the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, was shouted down. A white colleague who was present (and had the same experience), reported that Gutman was shattered. Gutman pleaded to no avail that he was extremely supportive of the black liberation movementif people would just forget that I am white and hear what I am saying [it] would lend support to the movement. Among the most dramatic incidents of this sort was the treatment accorded Robert Starobin, a young leftist supporter of the Black Panthers, who delivered a paper on slavery at a Wayne State University conference in 1969, an incident which devastated Starobin at the time, and was rendered the more poignant by his suicide the following year. [17]

Despite these attacks, white historians continued to write major studies on American slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rude attempts to introduce a racial qualification in judging a historians right to deal with slavery met with vigorous opposition. The historian Eugene Genovese (19302012), the author of such notable works as The Political Economy of Slavery and The World the Slaveholders Made, wrote:

Every historian of the United States and especially the South cannot avoid making estimates of the black experience, for without them he cannot make estimates of anything else. When, therefore, I am asked, in the fashion of our inane times, what right I, as a white man, have to write about black people, I am forced to reply in four-letter words. [18]

This passage was written more than a half century ago. Since the late 1960s, the efforts to racialize scholarly work, against which Genovese rightly polemicized, have assumed such vast proportions that they cannot be adequately described as merely inane. Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, critical race theory, the doors of American universities have been flung wide open for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity has replaced social class and related economic processes as the principal and essential analytic category.

Whiteness theory, the latest rage, is now utilized to deny historical progress, reject objective truth, and interpret all events and facets of culture through the prism of alleged racial self-interest. On this basis, the sheerest nonsense can be spouted with the guarantee that all objections grounded on facts and science will be dismissed as a manifestation of white fragility or some other form of hidden racism. In this degraded environment, Ibram X. Kendi can write the following absurd passage, without fear of contradiction, in his Stamped from the Beginning:

For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a darkworld not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist partiality, the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. [19]

This is a ridiculous concoction that attributes to the word Enlightenment a racial significance that has absolutely no foundation in etymology, let alone history. The word employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784 to describe this period of scientific advance was Aufklrung, which may be translated from the German as clarification or clearing up, connoting an intellectual awakening. The English translation of Aufklrung as Enlightenment dates from 1865, seventy-five years after the death of Benjamin Franklin, whom Kendi references in support of his racial argument. [20]

Another term used by English speaking people to describe the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been The Age of Reason, which was employed by Tom Paine in his scathing assault on religion and all forms of superstition. Kendis attempt to root Enlightenment in a white racist impulse is based on nothing but empty juggling with words. In point of fact, modern racism is connected historically and intellectually to the Anti-Enlightenment, whose most significant nineteenth century representative, Count Gobineau, wrote The Inequality of the Human Races. But actual history plays no role in the formulation of Kendis pseudo-intellectual fabrications. His work is stamped with ignorance.

History is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an essay titled Music Theory and the White Racial Frame, Professor Philip A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, I posit that there exists a white racial frame in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory. [21]

This degradation of music theory divests the discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality, consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived, Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from whiteness and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s to liberate music from Jewishness. The Nazis denounced Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely above average as a composer, and that he occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years. [22]

Academic journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New Hampshire, proclaims that race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics, and introduces the concept of white empiricism (italics in the original), which comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena. [23]

Prescod-Weinstein asserts that knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists, the racial and gender background of scientists affects the way scientific research is conducted, and, therefore, the observations and experiments conducted by African-American and female physicists will produce results different than those conducted by white males. Prescod-Weinstein identifies with the contingentists who challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective. [24]

The assumption of objectivity is, she claims, a major problem. Scientists, Prescod-Weinstein complains, are typically monistsbelievers in the idea that there is only one science This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix. Yet white empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth century physics: General Relativity. (Emphasis added) [25]

Prescod-Weinsteins attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge is buttressed with a distortion of Einsteins theory.

Albert Einsteins monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principal of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. (Emphasis added) [26]

In fact, general relativitys statement about covariance posits a fundamental symmetry in the universe, so that the laws of nature are the same for all observers. Einsteins great (though hardly simple) initial insight, studying Maxwells equations on electromagnetism involving the speed of light in a vacuum, was that these equations were true in all reference frames. The fact that two observers measure a third light particle in space as traveling at the same speed, even if they are in motion relative to each other, led Einstein to a profound theoretical redefinition of how matter exists in space and time. These theories were confirmed by experiment, a result that will not be refuted by changing the race or gender of those conducting the experiment.

Mass, space, time and other quantities turned out to be varying and relative, depending on ones reference frame. But this variation is lawful, not subjectivelet alone racially determined. It bears out the monist conception. There are no such things as distinct, racially superior, black female, or white empiricist statements or reference frames on physical reality. There is an ascertainable objective truth, genuinely independent of consciousness, about the material world.

Furthermore, all observers, regardless of their education and expertise, are not equally competent and capable of observing, let alone discovering, the universal laws that govern the universe. Physicists, whatever their personal identities, must be properly educated, and this education, hopefully, will not be marred by the type of ideological rubbish propagated by race and gender theorists.

There is, of course, an audience for the anti-scientific nonsense propounded by Prescod-Weinstein. Underlying much of contemporary racial and gender theorizing is frustration and anger over the allocation of positions within the academy. Prescod-Weinsteins essay is a brief on behalf of all those who believe that their professional careers have been hindered by white empiricism. She attempts to cover over her falsification of science with broad and unsubstantiated claims that racism is ubiquitous among white physicists, who, she alleges, simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of research conducted by black female scientists.

It is possible that a very small number of physicists are racists. But that possibility does not lend legitimacy to her efforts to ascribe to racial identity an epistemological significance that affects the outcome of research. Along these lines, Prescod-Weinstein asserts that the claims to objective truth made by white empiricism rest on force. This is a variant of the postmodernist dogma that what is termed objective truth is nothing more than a manifestation of the power relations between conflicting social forces. She writes:

White empiricism is the practice of allowing social discourse to insert itself into empirical reasoning about physics, and it actively harms the development of comprehensive understandings of the natural world by precluding putting provincial European ideas about sciencewhich have become dominant through colonial forceinto conversation with ideas that are more strongly associated with indigeneity, whether it is African indigeneity or another. (Emphasis added) [27]

The prevalence and legitimization of racialist theorizing is a manifestation of a deep intellectual, social, and cultural crisis of contemporary capitalist society. As in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, race theory is acquiring an audience among disoriented sections of middle-class intellectuals. While most, if not all, of the academics who promote a racial agenda may sincerely believe that they are combating race-based prejudice, they are, nevertheless, propagating anti-scientific and irrationalist ideas which, whatever their personal intentions, serve reactionary ends.

The interaction of racialist ideology as it has developed over several decades in the academy and the political agenda of the Democratic Party is the motivating force behind the 1619 Project. Particularly under conditions of extreme social polarization, in which there is growing interest in and support for socialism, the Democratic Partyas a political instrument of the capitalist classis anxious to shift the focus of political discussion away from issues that raise the specter of social inequality and class conflict. This is the function of a reinterpretation of history that places race at the center of its narrative.

The 1619 Project did not emerge overnight. For several years, corresponding to the growing role played by various forms of identity politics in the electoral strategy of the Democratic Party, the Times has become fixated, to an extent that can be legitimately described as obsessive, on race. It often appears that the main purpose of the news coverage and commentary of the Times is to reveal the racial essence of any given event or issue.

A search of the archive of the New York Times shows that the term white privilege appeared in only four articles in 2010. In 2013, the term appeared in twenty-two articles. By 2015, the Times published fifty-two articles in which the term is referenced. In 2020, as of December 1, the Times had published 257 articles in which there is a reference to white privilege.

The word whiteness appeared in only fifteen Times articles in 2000. By 2018, the number of articles in which the word appeared had grown to 222. By December 1, 2020, whiteness was referenced in 280 articles.

The Times unrelenting focus on race during the past year, even in its obituary section, has been clearly related to the 2020 electoral strategy of the Democratic Party. The 1619 Project was conceived of as a critical element of this strategy. This was explicitly stated by the Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, in a meeting on August 12, 2019 with the newspapers staff:

[R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next yearand I think this is, to be frank, what I hope you come away from this discussion withrace in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story. [28]

The New York Times effort to teach its readers to think a little bit more about race assumed the form of a falsification of American history, aimed at discrediting the revolutionary struggles that gave rise to the founding of the United States in 1776 and the ultimate destruction of slavery during the Civil War. This falsification could only contribute to the erosion of democratic consciousness, legitimize a racialized view of American history and society, and undermine the unity of the broad mass of Americans in their common struggle against conditions of social inequality and exploitation.

In Depth

The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

The racialist campaign of the New York Times has unfolded against the backdrop of a pandemic ravaging working-class communities, regardless of race and ethnicity, throughout the United States and the world. The global death toll has already surpassed 1.5 million. Within the United States, the number of COVID-19 deaths will surpass 300,000 before the end of the year. The pandemic has also brought economic devastation to millions of Americans. The unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels. Countless millions of people are without any source of income and depend upon food banks for their daily sustenance.

And while the pandemic rages, the structures of American democracy are breaking down beneath the weight of the social contradictions produced by a staggering level of wealth concentration in a small fraction of the population. The 2020 presidential campaign was conducted amidst fascistic conspiracies, orchestrated from within the White House, to establish a dictatorship. The old adage, It Cant Happen Here, coined in the 1930s during the ascent of fascism in Europe, has been refuted by events. It is happening here is a correct description of the American reality.

In the midst of this unprecedented social and political catastrophe, requiring a united response by all sections of the working class, the New York Times has devoted its energies to promoting a false narrative that portrays American history as a perpetual war between the races. In this grotesque distortion there is no place for the working class or for the class struggle, which has been the dominant factor in American social history for the past 150 years, and in which African-American workers have fought heroically alongside their white brothers and sisters. The extreme social crisis triggered by the pandemic, and the desperate conditions that confront tens of millions of working people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, constitute an unanswerable indictment of the reactionary premises of the 1619 Project. The factual refutation of the 1619 Projects falsification of history is provided in the essays and interviews with distinguished historians published in this volume.

David North

Detroit

December 3, 2020

Notes:

[1] The Nat Turner Case, in The New York Review of Books, September 12, 1968.

[2] Vadim Z. Rogovin, Bolsheviks Against Stalinism 19281933: Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition (Oak Park: 2019), p. 2.

[3] Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and Americas Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge: 2005), p. 5.

[4] New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, p. 18.

[5] Cited in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York and London: 1996), pp. 55657.

[6] Ibid, p. 557.

[7] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production I, Volume I (London: 1974), p. 20.

[8] Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom, p. 558.

[9] R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 17601800 (Princeton: 1959), p. 5.

[10] Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 17751848 (Princeton: 2017), pp. 1718.

[11] Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: 2018), p. 49.

[12] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume I (London: 1974), p. 703.

[13] Karl Marx, To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, in Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Volume 20 (New York: 1984), p. 19.

[14] How the 1619 Project Came Together, accessed on 12/3/2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/reader-center/1619-project-slavery-jamestown.html

[15] New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, p. 5

[16] E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Program, Myth, Reality (London: 1991), p. 117.

[17] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: 1988), p. 475.

[18] Eugene D. Genovese, In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York: 1968), p. viii.

[19] Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: 2017), p. 80.

[20] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=enlightenment

[21] Music Theory and the White Racial Frame, in MTO, Volume 26, Number 2, September 2020.

[22] Beethoven Was an Above Average ComposerLets Leave It at That, April 24, 2020, accessed on 12/3/2020: https://musictheoryswhiteracialframe.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/beethoven-was-an-above-average-composer-lets-leave-it-at-that/

[23] Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2020 Volume 45, No. 2, p. 421.

Here is the original post:
Introduction to The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History - WSWS

This interview took place between Boon Wurrung Land of the Kulin Nation, Australia; and Jakarta, Indonesia. I acknowledge the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants and traditional custodians of this nation and pay my respects to First Nations Elders past and present and traditional owners of all lands on which this interview took place.

The Planet A Lament was part of a the Asia TOPA festival supported by Arts Centre Melbourne at the beginning of 2020. While Arts Centre Melbourne begins to open up outdoor events in December, their Together With You program will continue to be available online, where you can watch a digital showing of The Planet A Lament as part of Asia TOPA Connected.

This article is part of a two part series that also includes an interview with set and costume designer Anna Tregloan. A podcast version of Garins interview is available through the Climactic Network here or by searching The Composting Costumier on Apple Podcasts.

(Readers are advised that this interview contains some descriptions of physical and political violence and conflict.)

CC: I watched The Planet A Lament a few weeks ago, so thought now would be a good time to hear a bit from you about that process. GN: The important issue of The [Planet, A] Lament is a song about enlightenment and death. I think it is the important issue of the era of Covid now it is about death and survival and enlightenment. These are three words that are important today and if you saw The Lament itself, its a story about someone who saved the planet. [Those are] the two words, pandemic and tsunami an environmental problem and [a] pandemic. In this way the issue of Planet is about death, survival, enlightenment and also about so many problems with the environment, with tsunamis (especially in my country) and about [the] pandemic itself. Which is why in one chapter of The Planet there is the song [that asks], where do we want to go? Where are the natural places that make us safe?

CC: You said that it relates to what were going through now, but the tsunami youre also talking about is the 2004 tsunami isnt it? GN: Yeah, Because Indonesia is the ring of fire, it has more than 100 mountains active in my country. [The show is] In between environment and how people must understand the character [of the] environment and survival, but also know that the cycle of life is also part of human existence itself. And I have experienced so many [environmental catastrophes]: with the tsunami in Jakarta; with the mountain eruption in Aceh; I came to this [work-The Planet, A Lament] after the tsunami in Papua and Nusa Tenggara, I always come [to create work] in the chaotic atmosphere in the relationship between human beings and environment.

CC: So you started working on this particular piece in 2014? Is that right? GN: I started in 2014, but the idea was a long time ago, about 5 years before 2014. Because I have experience in so many catastrophes, not only in the environment but in politics. I saw many conflicts: between tribes; between politics and society; in Ambon, in Kalimantan in front of my eyes. For example: in Jakarta between tribes of Makassar and Ambon for example; in Kalimantan: between Kalimantan and Madura for example; in Anbon between Muslim and Christianity for example. And everything is bleeding in front of my eyes- bleeding. [They] cut the nose [of eachother] cut the eyes, in front of my eyes. And the second thing is, I always come to the area of catastrophes, because of the environment: mountain eruption or tsunami for example, in front of my eyes.

And then I always have experience in lament, I dreamed to make a lament.

Lament is personal, personal in every human-being individual. And I believe in the catastrophes in the world now, this is the important [thing], that every human-being individual has the lament in their soul.

And that is why when in 2014 AsiaTOPA asked me to make a new performance, then directly I brought the idea of The Lament itself.

CC: Youve got a team from Indonesia, Melanasia and Australia, what was it like bringing that team together? GN: Melanasia is an important thing in political and cultural geography in the world. Melanasia is the area from Australia, Papua, Nusa Tenggara, Timor and also Hawaii, etc etc. In Hawaii itself World War Two is also an important issue [because thats where] the Japanese lost [to the American Allies] in 1945. It means Melanasia is also one of the political geographies that changed the world itself. In this way geopolitically it is also important. The second thing is also that the Black society a proud society is also [living across a] very big area (except the US). You can see like Papua, Nusa Tenggara you know, and Melanasia have a special character, that centres voices in song and I think [that makes it] one of the important sources of the musical key and voices in the area of Melanasia. And the third thing is also because Nusa Tanggara and Papua, (part of Indonesia) is the biggest population of Melanasian society itself. And If you read the history of music and the musical key, that forest part of Nusa Tenggar is one of the best sources of vocals and music in the world I think in the forest itself. Thats why Melanasia is a very important map for the choir and Lament.

CC: The natural disasters would be a shared experience for everyone in the team, how did all the different experiences feed into the piece? GN: I think the important thing is the voices of society. This is the important thing of the lament. If you saw all the members of the choir, [they dont] come from one area, or one city, or one village, they come from many areas of Nusa Tenggara, from Rote, from Batawa, from many areas with different perspectives. It means they came together with their own [individual] Laments and [together] it has become the orchestra of Lament with the differences different experiences, different backgrounds like that.

And The orchestra of Lament from different persons, characters, people becomes the orchestra of humanity and I think this becomes the soul of the planet itself.

We also only choose the songs that are not diatonic but pentatonic, only note 1 until 5,not to 7. [Note: most European based music, which would have been brought to Indonesia through colonisation, is written using a diatonic scale with 7 degrees/notes, the pentatonic scale contains 5]. Why? Because the aural tradition in my country is more pentatonic: the dilemma in Indonesia is the majority of the church and the country only bring diatonic songs, in church for example, or in choir group for example. But the biggest lament that develops from society is more pentatonic and that is why we collected all the pentatonic songs, laments and transformed them into the choir method which I think has become one of the important processes of The Lament itself. Because its never happened in Indonesia that [they] collected the songs with the pentatonic [tonality] from many areas or villages and then transformed [them] with the choral method.

CC: One of the things I found really interesting was the three creatures that come out of the wreckage of humanity after the collapse, what was the idea behind those? GN: The idea is always connected with the environment. Because the sense of this [is that in] the planet [there are] more environmental dilemmas now and [will be in] the future. The three creatures are because all the development of humanity [has been] the development of dead things. Dead things [are] like the car, hotel; everything that is not part of the environment the car, street, building, everything. The dead things are developed so fast, and the live things like [the] forrest are getting more and more displaced. It means all [that] humanity creates is developed from dead things, and the dead things are close to the live things. And it is a tragedy! [Society is] more clever, more intellectual, more technological, more sophisticated, more millennial, but we create more and more dead things and dont leave the room for the live things.

CC: So theyre like creatures made of the dead things. GN: Yes! The irony, something that humanity didnt realise,[is] that it is an irony of humanity: We are born as live creatures and then we develop the dead things bigger and bigger. And the three characters more represent the dead things itself, like plastic for example, that also cannot die, they also need energy, they cannot die. Then humanity develops the dead thing that never cannot, die! And it becomes more like a monster, like plastic is like a monster and these three character represent how the dead things have become a monster.

And if you saw all the cars, the buildings, everything is a monster that needs energy. The energy is created from the environment, and it is ruining the world. Its this irony, you create a dead thing, the dead thing needs energy and energy comes from the environment and kills the environment because the way you create the energy has broken the environment.

CC: In some of your other interviews youve spoken about the spirit of play and adding a childlike element to the process, what is the importance of that in bringing more humility and humanity into art? GN: Yeah I think we must think back to a sense of the lament itself, and the choir and the planet itself. I think now [its] always difficult to talk about the soul of the human being and the soul has become not an important thing. When I made The Planet A Lament, everyone said if you make this performance in a situation like the pandemic, what is the function of the timing of The Planet? and my answer is so simple:

Sometimes we need only 70 mins when use of our soul to say to the environment that we love the environment, not only [that we are] thinking [about] and exploring the environment and the function of the environment, but we love the environment with our soul and the environment is part of our soul.

And this way the humanity perspective is important in the performance of The Planet. All the movement, all the songs are part of the soul and environment itself, the way they walk for example. The way they express and everything is developed between the soul, the body, and the environment itself.

CC: Youve spoken about the experiences youve had with natural and political disasters, I was wondering, nowadays what sort of impact does the environment have on your life outside of theatre? Whether thats something that you do to connect back to the environment or whether thats the environment affecting you? GN: Now in between state and everyday life, has become mixed together. [For the] majority [of the time] if I make something, like film or theatre, then what happens onstage becomes part of my everyday life and this is the problem. When I came to Australia it [was just the start] of the pandemic and two members of my choir [had relations in Indonesia taken to the hospital because of Covid] even though it had not happened [here in Australia] yet and when I went back to Indonesia I had to go [for] some small operation in hospital and [so] then pandemic came together [with] when I was in hospital in everyday life. But I always have experienced that work onstage is always part of my everyday life. When I made the Opera Jawa (the producer is Peter Seller from the United States) [for the] opening [of] the 250 years of Mozart Anniversary by coordination and produced by Peter Seller [Note: The film Opera Jawa was commissioned of Garin by the government of Austria for Peter Sellers New Crowned Hope Festival to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozarts birth]. I made the Opera Jawa and I said that so many things in Java will be lost and at the end of the film, after the screening of the film, then the earthquake came, even in my home for example.

Sometimes onstage is part of my everyday life because creativity is part of the soul itself and if the soul is developed with the environment, then it will become part of your life because the soul is [part of] the environment itself. And if creativity is part of the soul it will [just] happen like that.

CC: Do you have any current projects that youre working on at the moment that youre able to speak about? I know were all in the middle of a pandemic, but whether theres anything going on? GN: Yeah I have a festival: the Performing Arts Festival. And we use the streaming online and I will be mentoring. We open proposals for all Indonesian communities of performing arts. Now its the fifth year and I think everyyear we have about 400 proposals and we choose about 14 performing arts communities and give them the mentoring because the majority of them are young people who are running the community. And everyday Saturday and Sunday they are performing and touring online for all Indonesian people with 14 performing arts that we choose from 400 open proposals. The second thing is that Ill still make the new musical for young people about the history of [the] environment in Indonesia that from the revolution of technology [global warming is increasing from] from 1.0 to 4.0 [degrees]. It always is about how they try to explore expiration of the environment itself. It means politics is always about how to bargain with the environment and [thats what] I make the musical theatre for young people [about] now.

CC: Is the idea that it will tour around Indonesia [in the future], or will it be online as well? Is it a long term kind of thing? GN: It will be online on 5th Dec for the musical theatre, next month. And the festival for performing arts is always running until the end of the year, until January on Saturdays and Monday for the community of performing arts in Indonesia.

CC: Is there anything else youd like audiences to know about from your show?

GN: I hope the audience likes this performance because Melanasia is one of the important political and cultural geographies. And in this pandemic era, I think to hear the lament as the soul that comes from the body of society and the environment, is an important time for us together.

Link:
The Composting Costumier talks The Planet - A Lament with Garin Nugroho | Columns - Aussie Theatre

Memory lies at the heart of many academic disciplines. [6 min read]

Nearly every living thing on the planet has memory. Beyond the reach of our individual memories, fossils remember long-ago landscapes, while groups of people use folklore to pass down a collective memory dating back centuries or even millennia. But for all its utility, memory can be misused, too. Even today, wars are fought over conflicting accounts of the true versions of historical events dating back thousands of years. Whatever its function, memory is everywhere. Here, four USC Dornsife scholars discuss how it is expressed in diverse disciplines, from Earth sciences to history and from anthropology to American studies and ethnicity.

EARTH SCIENCES: Memories Preserved in Leaf Wax

Sarah Feakins, associate professor of Earth sciences,and her team study changing water availability and plant life, key components of the habitability of our environment. By studying ecosystems past and present, they advance knowledge of how the climate system works and how plants respond and interact with climate.

In her Leaf Wax Lab at USC Dornsife, Feakinsstudies climate and plant life through the waxycoating on plant leaves. Not only do these remarkable molecules have important functions for living plants, they are preserved over geological time. As Feakins says, Leaf wax is the molecular legacy of past forests and grasslands. This waxy memory paints pictures of the landscapes in which our human ancestors evolved.

Her work is not a historical curiosity. The past illuminates what we can expect as we dial up the planetary thermostat, she says. It helps us to wrap our heads around the transformative change of ecosystem disruption ahead.

Feakins and her team reconstruct evidence for how climate patterns and plant life have changed over tens of millions of years by studying the material that has been eroded from land and preserved in sediments offshore. To access these sea-floor sediments, she participates in the International Ocean Discovery Program.

My research is driven by a need to understand environments in which we evolved and warm times of the past thatare relevant to our future trajectory, she says. Warmperiods of the past provide lessons for future climate states, beyond the range of historical witness.

ANTHROPOLOGY: Shaping Our Cultural Memory

Our cultural and collective memory is shaped through folk stories like mythology and legends, notesTok Thompson, professor (teaching) ofanthropology.

Myths, for example, are universal. They are found in biblical passages, Greek epics and creation tales. They provide a road map for those seeking order in the world or a guideto daily self-conduct. But this aura of universality can be inherently dangerous, leading people to believe their culturally inscribed behaviors are natural rather than habitual, Thompson argues.

Mythology is not about history, but it uses history. It uses the idea of the past to make sense of our current condition, Thompson says. Not all myths are problematic some are simple entertainment, some provide a record of ecological events from hundreds or thousands of years ago, some convey general knowledge but we also need to be aware of their potential for exploitation.

Mythology naturalizes culture, Thompson says. Usually when people say something is natural, they mean it is mythologically set in stone, which is very different from saying that something occurs in nature.

But while myths are often shaped by those in power, legends can be a more organic way of passing on information, one that often presents stories of those who have been left out of official accounts, Thompson says.He cites ghost stories as one example. Many such tales concern injustice the ghost was wronged in life and returns for a reason.

Often folk memories will remember what official memories dont want to, he says.

Folklore may or may not be factual, Thompson notes, but itprovides an important counterbalance to some of the more dominant political mythologies and narratives put forth by different groups.

History is written by the victors. Folklore is written by everybody, he concludes.

HISTORY: Remembering Rome

If history is about preserving, understanding and interpreting our memories, then Rome is a singular touchstone of memory, says Assistant Professor ofHistoryMaya Maskarinec.

What fascinates me is the way there have always been competing claims to Rome, which has fed into the citys prestige and mystique, she says. And Rome is malleable; it can be remembered and misremembered in different ways.

The legacy of Rome as a city, an ideal, an empire has been forged, forgotten, rediscovered and repurposed by people in a nearly ceaseless cycle for centuries.

To Christians of the Middle Ages, it was a testament to the endurance of their faith. To Renaissance artists and Enlightenment thinkers, it was the ideal model for aesthetics and rational thought. To many countries, past and present, it has symbolized the rule of law.

All of these different constellations make up what we imagine Rome to be, Maskarinec says.

But these competing claims were not always compatible, she notes. The idea of having rediscovered the ideas of Rome was central to the foundational concepts of the Holy Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and many other groups or people that claimed to be rescuing Roman ideals from the darkness of the preceding era. But for Rome to be rediscovered, it first had to be forgotten. After the sack of Rome in 410 A.D., the memory of theeternal city and all its glories was supposed to have faded, only to be recovered centuries later.

Part of why we have these narratives of loss is this desire to claim an authentic rediscovery of Rome, Maskarinec says. Central to claiming this authority was the argument that those who came before never truly understood Rome or what it stood for.

But as Rome is conceived, so is it misremembered, Maskarinec argues. The city of marvels was also a place of cramped tenement blocks, high infant mortality rates and disease for its poor inhabitants.

As historians, we must tread very carefully on the topic of Rome and keep in mind how it has been misused and misremembered when we study the process of memory, she says.

AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY: Memory and Race

For scholars of American studies and ethnicity, memory whether individual or collective occupies a central role.

Natalia Molina, professor of American studies and ethnicity and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, researches how historical narratives of racial difference shape modern views of race.

Race is not made in just one moment or by just one powerful person or group, she notes.

Molina studies the concept of racial scripts, socialconstructions of racialized groups that cross time and space as well as groups. A kind of shorthand composed of attitudes, practices, customs, policies and laws she says that once racial scripts are directed at one group, they can be easily repurposed and applied to others.

By looking at connections between the scripts in the arc of history, we can see that they are always available for use in new rounds of dehumanization and demonizationdown the road, Molina says.

Racial scripts work in large part because they arenotnew, she notes. Their familiarity generates credibility, making racist ideas seem normal.

For example, weve seen renewed anti-Asian and anti-Asian American sentiments and even hate crimes since the onset of the pandemic.

We can trace these stereotypes back 150 years to see how the Chinese were discriminated against when working in the gold rush, or on the railroad, Molina says. These racialscripts were also redirected and perpetuated against Latinx immigrants today, and widened the possibilities for mistreatment of other racialized groups.

The powerful reality about race and racism, she argues, is that it succeeds by repetition.

Read more stories fromUSC Dornsife Magazines Fall 2020/Winter 2021 issue >>

Excerpt from:
Why Is It Important to Remember What Came Before? > News > USC Dornsife - USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Public Goods December 3, 2020 Ingo Schmidt

Well, we busted out of class, had to get away from those fools. We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.

Bruce Springsteen

Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten years a great man? Who paid the bill? So many reports. So many questions.

Bertolt Brecht

Post-secondary education is marketed, and widely seen, as human capital investment. Obtaining a college or university degree today will yield a skill-premium tomorrow. And a possible gain in social status or, if coming from the educated classes, at least retention of the status of ones parents. Marketing and expectations of pecuniary and status gains are sometimes complemented by hints at post-secondary education as a pathway to becoming a good citizen. At its most emphatic, such as invoked by Kants definition of enlightenment, suggesting that post-secondary education is the indispensable guide to emerge from (..) self-incurred immaturity.

HR departments, without going so far as to invoke dead philosophers, echo the marketing of post-secondary education as being about more than naked self-interest by portraying their well-educated and equally well-motivated employees as their most valuable assets. Its unlikely that they mean that they only hire people who produce surplus value for the company, even though producing surplus value is the sine qua non for hiring any worker in a capitalist company. HR departments wrap commitments to shareholder value into the idea that stakeholders of a company all share the same values that surely transcend callous cash payments.

Some students buy into the marketing efforts of post-secondary executives and HR departments. However, those who have to work all kinds of jobs to make it through college or university may second guess HR-talk about highly valuing their employees. For most jobs it doesnt translate into high, or at least decent, pay. Of course, most students would prefer high-paying over low-paying jobs. But they might be ok with low pay while studying toward their degrees as long as they still expect skill premia coming in once they start degree-requiring jobs. The only problem is that the supply of degree-holding job applicants is far greater than the number of openings of these well-paying jobs. Employers can hire workers with degrees even in jobs where the degrees arent required and pay is low. At the same time, the cost of post-secondary education is increasing. As a result, the rate of return on human capital investments decreases. Even students who dont care about anything other than the cost and benefits of their education investments have reasons to be disturbed.

There are also other students, of course, who value learning as an end in itself as much, or even more, than the formal degree they will eventually obtain. They might be puzzled by the contradiction between education as investment in skill premia and as contribution to some greater good. Wouldnt that include, they might wonder, economic equality, a goal at odds with wanting more money than others who also work as hard, if not harder, than post-secondary graduates? Unequal access to post-secondary education and unequal conditions of study can only add to such puzzlement. Yet, finding courses that provide the space to turn puzzlement into more specified questions and possibly find some, if only tentative, answers are hard to find. Most course offerings focus on subjects allegedly boosting students future employability, regardless of diminishing returns on human capital investments.

Whether it is concerns about these diminishing returns, puzzlement about the contradictions between education as investment and as contribution to something beyond personal career development, or some twisted mix between these two, unease about going to college or university seems to be unavoidable. Cognitive dissonance permeates campuses. Not just amongst students. Compared to the janitors, kitchen and administrative staff who provide essential services on campus, educators have for a long time earned the skill premia that post-secondary executives are still promising students today. However, over the last decades, numbers of well-paying jobs in teaching and research have gone down, numbers of low-paid, mostly temporary jobs have gone up. The increasing polarization of jobs that marks the outside world prevails on campuses, too. Increasing gaps in terms of incomes and job security are complemented with increased top-down control, standardization, and automation of work. Fears of teaching bots and massive open online courses replacing face-to-face teaching entirely may be exaggerated but still shape todays work experiences in post-secondary as much as fears about job prospects shape students learning experiences. Cognitive dissonance prevails on both sides.

When it comes to post-secondary executives putting administrative and fiscal pressures on students and teachers, the latter two groups are on the same side. At the same time, teaching staff have to deal with students grade expectations that only get higher as the marketing of higher education as a good investment in ones own future departs further and further from actual returns on these investments. Straddling the grade-expectations-performance-gap easily strains the relations between students and teachers. More precisely, it reveals that, when it comes to student evaluation, teachers are in a position of power over their students. This power is more limited than that which employers have over their employees, but still, the teacher-student relationship bears some resemblance with employment-relationships. The contradictory relations between students and teachers, facing similar pressures from post-secondary executives while at the same time teachers exert some power over students, is another source of cognitive dissonance, as it belies the idea of the university, not so much the more down-to-earth colleges, as a community of scholars committed to critical inquiry and truth. Any such commitments have to reckon with contradictions, hierarchies, and power-relations within the institutions of post-secondary education and between those institutions and their outside world that produces various forms of alienation and cognitive dissonance. This is structural; denial only makes it worse.

This being the case, teaching should aim at helping students to cope with cognitive dissonance. Being able to do so can only help them to find out how to make their way in the off-campus world that also is full of contradictions, and marked by power-relations and alienation. One of the first teaching goals should be the deconstruction of the idyllic images that post-secondary marketing and HR departments paint about the value of higher education and well-paying, fulfilling jobs. Awareness of not so nice realities is actually a good starting point for students charting their own paths to learning and life more generally. On the first parts of students learning journeys, teachers can offer a bit of guidance, not by showing students the way, or telling them whats wrong and whats right, but by encouraging them to figure out for themselves where they want to go and whats wrong and right.

A first signpost on that path would point out that there is more to the picture than meets the eye. This should be obvious from the discrepancy between the images that marketers paint of post-secondary education and the jobs it helps to get, and the realities of austerity on campuses and beyond. However, cutting through such images is difficult in societies where the culture industry has co-opted the idea of enlightenment and turned it into a vehicle of mass deception. The reach of this industry is so wide that anyone challenging its messages, if only by confronting them with empirical data, easily comes across as a crank. Not the most inviting prospect for aspiring students. Moreover, an age of diminished expectations creates its own incentives to avoid inconvenient realities. Why confront oneself with reality if there is little hope for improvement? Cognitive dissonance is prevalent. But so are attempts to escape it. Making clear to students that learning happens outside of ones comfort zone, that cognitive dissonance is a starting point to explore reality, and that such explorations are actually exciting because they dont deliver comforting truths, is a real teaching challenge.

The attraction of comforting truths constitutes another challenge that leads to signpost two: Beware the pretense of knowledge. Knowledge can draw on observations and critical reflection that allows learners, students, and teachers alike, to position themselves in the world in such a way that they can pursue their interests and happiness. However, if one doesnt expect this to be possible, knowledge can also be used, or, from the perspective of enlightenment philosophy, misused, to escape the real world and seek refuge in reassuring certainties, in the most extreme eternal truths protected against critical inquiries by alternative facts. By making their own history, humans change already existing circumstances. Whether they, or only some of them, are aware of their history-making and circumstance-changing doesnt matter. Looking back, it is rather obvious that an interplay of actions and reactions changed the world, and there is no reason to assume that this will stop. If it doesnt, ongoing changes challenge received wisdoms over and over again. What might have been persuasive under one set of circumstances could be less than persuasive under different circumstances.

Changing circumstances are one reason to be wary of anyone pretending to know eternal truths. Differences of perspective are another. People looking at the same thing from different angles see it differently. Therefore, signpost three on the learning path suggests putting oneself in somebody elses boots. Look at a bunch of soccer players, for example. Even if everybody plays by the same rules, playing on an unequal field distributes the chances of winning unevenly. Therefore, players with high chances of winning want to keep the field unequal and, if necessary, change the rules in such a way that this goal can be achieved. Most likely, they are the rule-makers who can actually do this. Players with lower chances of winning, on the other hand, are more likely rule-takers who may not like to run around the most difficult parts of the field but see little chance of imposing rules that would either level the playing field or at least give some of them the chance to make it to greener pastures some of the time. That rule-makers and rule-takers see the same field differently shouldnt be a surprise. The point is not that one side is right and the other wrong. In their own ways, both may be right but only partially. As realities are multi-faceted, the truth is in the whole. Which does not mean that it is eternal. After all, as signpost two said, realities change and so does the truth about them.

Learners also change. Reason enough to amend the idea of putting oneself into somebody elses boots to signpost four: Take a look at yourself. After a few steps on your learning path, you may see things differently. Equipped with some new ideas, you may also look at experiences outside the classroom and beyond campus. A fresh look at experiences slumbering somewhere in your memory can bring them to life so that they can contribute to whats learned in the classroom. Reflection about your learning and life experiences is part of the journey. A few basic principles will help you to chart your own course beyond the signposted path set up by a teacher: Analyse, synthesize, and contextualize. These very general principles are adjustable to all junctures and cross-roads that you will encounter during your journey. While you chart your own course, you should not forget that there are always paths not taken, insights not found. At least not yet. There is always something new to discover. That is why a learning journey is unending, may sometimes wear you out but is always interesting.

Excerpt from:
The Not So Negative Dialectics of Post-Secondary Education - The Bullet - Socialist Project

By Sandra L. Strauss

There is a widely held view that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that our laws and policies should be shaped by Christian values. Not all Christians agree that our nation was founded as a Christian nation and will defend that viewpoint by citing the Founding Fathers, Enlightenment theory, and theological arguments.

However, lets go with the view that we were founded as a Christian nation, and therefore should be shaped by Christian values.

But what are Christian values? Its obvious that there is significant disagreement among Christians over just what that means. It strikes me that as Christians, we should go to the source Jesus. What did Jesus say? Or what would Jesus do? What were the rules that guided the early Christian community that rose in the wake of Jesus life, death, and resurrection?

First, it should be noted that Jesus was born, lived his life, and died as a Jewish person living in a Jewish society under the oppressive rule of the Roman Empire, so what he said and did is not exclusive to Christians but it did shape those who became our early Christian forebears.

Wearing a mask is an act of love. This is why | Opinion

And where do we find what we need to know about the man we choose to follow as Christians living 2000 plus years later? While there are lesser known writings by historians of that timelike Josephusour primary source as Christians is the Bible, and in particular, the New Testament, which documents the life of Jesus and the early church.

What did Jesus say? Heres just a few things: (1) Love your neighbor as yourself; (2) Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; (3) Whatever you didfor one of theleast of thesebrothers and sisters of mine, you did for me; (4) The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve; (5) In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; (6) From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded. Theres more, but what did Jesus do? Did his actions back up his words?

Jesus healed those who suffered from lifelong ailments. He fed hungry throngs when they didnt have access to food in the wilderness. He broke bread with the least desirable elements of his society when no one else would do so.

He lifted up and protected women, challenging those who were about to stone a woman accused of adultery, and interacting with the woman at the well. He touched and hugged lepersconsidered unclean in the Jewish society in which he lived.

A 9/11s worth of Americans died in a single day from COVID-19, and Trump abandoned the field | John L. Micek

His followers obviously took his words and actions to heart, and they lived accordingly, as we learn from these words in Acts 2: All who believed were together and had all things in common;they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceedsto all, as any had need. They lived in a mindset of abundance, rather than scarcity, based on all the promises that God has made to us, and that Jesus modeled.

We live in strange times, and its hard to know what lies ahead. Fear can provoke a scarcity mindset, leading us to circle the wagons and act to protect ourselves.

However, trusting in God, and following the Christ who showed us how to live, we can overcome the fear and understand that there is more than enough for everyoneand that when all have what they need, we are all healthier, happier, and safer.

Whether or not you believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, this might be a good time to consider and work toward a system that reflects the Christian values illustrated above many of which are shared across a range of traditions and among people of good will. Too many people have been left behind, and we have it within our power to end preventable suffering.

There is more than enough to provide food, housing, healthcare, education, and so many other essentials for everyone to live with dignity if we are willing to share and willing to work to create the political will to make it happen. We can do this, even in a time of pandemic and in fact, maybe this is the perfect time to begin.

The Rev. Sandra L. Strauss is the director of Advocacy & Ecumenical Outreach for the Pennsylvania Council of Churches. For more information regarding the Council, pleaseCLICK HERE. Her work appears occasionally on the Capital-Stars Commentary Page.

More here:
We say America is a 'Christian nation.' Here's what that would look like if we really meant it | Opinion - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

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GEORGE BALL | Amarillo Globe-News

Home gardening occupies a serene corner of the clamorous, go-go American business landscape. Youre unlikely to find the gardening sector grabbing headlines and leading off news broadcasts. Usually, the loudest buzz in gardening comes from bees gathering pollen.

The year 2020 is a whole other story. Within six months, the home garden industry saw a quantum leap in sales and new customers, with revenues magically levitating 60%, a seismic event in a tranquil nonindustrial industry.

Magic has been in short supply this year. For nine months, the COVID-19 virus has upturned our lives. Our viral foeinvisible, intangible, indifferenthas caused dire levels of illness and lives disrupted and lost. Looming winter lockdowns darken our world. Its all bad.

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Gaze meditatively and you will soon see a kaleidoscope of vivid colors, natural beauty and ripe produce. Freshly perfumed air wafts through the cold. How can you bring this dreamscape to life? Ask one of our countrys 50 million devoted and dedicated gardenerswho will lead you to the Beulah Land in your own backyard.

Indeed, just when everything seems to be contracting, the garden is expanding. The 2020 gardening boom will reshape not just the horticulture crowd but American society at largea natural counterforce to the light speed technological web that ensnares us, as we surrender two-thirds of our time to staring at glowing screens where nothing grows.

In contrast, towns, civic life, technology, and cultureall the features of our lives we hold deararose from the cultivation of plants. The way we garden today is scarcely different from how the first gardeners went about their work about 12,000 years ago. Nothing is new under the sun.

Consider the so-called Coming Singularity." Technocrats envision a near-future in which human brains, merging with cybertechnology, develop superintelligences. Machines, however, will concurrently possess super-super intelligences that will get more super by the second.

Some believe this mega paradigm shift will result in the extinction of humanity. I see it as a rebirth, a renaissance when we obsolete homo sapiens will have new free time and space to super-evolve our creative aptitudes and capacities for a Second Enlightenment. Gardens will flourish and nourish lives. Home at last.

Moreover, living in a deep green world brought us here. We co-evolved with the garden, and the garden with usa singular super-hybrid. Plants are the essence of life on earth: the prime resource for animal life, food, shelter and clothingand the key to survival for all eight billion of us. For all our cybernetic and digital intelligence, the coming Singularity has been here a long time. How so?

This proto-Singularity is powered by the super-genius of plants. Scientists in various disciplines are continually studying plants myriad technologies to understand their intricate genes, self-propagation and uncanny communications.

Using only air, sunlight, water, and soil, plants have been relentlessly creating, recreating and varying themselves ad infinitum. Unlike even the most powerful cyborg army, cultivated plants and gardens are altogether both simple and complex, as well as ancient and modern. Happily, you cant turn them off.

Thus, 2020s expansion of new gardeners20 million strongwill fundamentally transform Americas landscape and society. This grassroots movement will be a harmonious and relaxed affair, with participants of every race, ethnicity, income, age, gender, and political slant. Call it the Plural Singularity.

As we wrap up this hapless past year, our gardens are a beacon of new hope. No other place is so many places. Even the simplest garden plot extends home and family life. A garden is a refuge, an outdoor schoolroom, a Shangri-La of bliss, joy and revelation. Its all good.

In your garden, you partner with plants to create a private Eden of color, flavor, scent, nutrition, ineffable beauty, and deep satisfaction. True magic is available at any time, right at homeand you are the magician.

George Ball is chairman of W. Atlee Burpee Company and past president of The American Horticultural Society. herrlueffle@gmail.com

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Ball: The garden at the end of the tunnel - Amarillo.com

2020 was the year the statues came down. Throughout the summer, as demonstrations erupted over the senseless murder of George Floyd and the racist structures that define our social and justice systems, protestors across the world tore down the racist monuments that line our streets, from Confederate soldiers in the Southern United States to imperialist leaders across Europe. As each statue came down, the history behind it made loud and visible, the pervasive ways in which our cityscapes are constructed by and around racism was thrown into sharp relief.

For Lisa Williams, founder of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association and creator of its Black History Walking Tours, recognising the often unspoken histories contained within these monuments is a crucial step towards acknowledging and reckoning with the legacies of colonialism and racial capitalism that continue to this day. There was a man who had been on one of my tours who said, I cannot look at Edinburgh in the same way now. Because when Im walking around The Royal Mile Im now thinking about those young people who were held as enslaved people, Williams considers. People are really shocked by how many Edinburgh men were involved in heading up massacres and genocide: not just Scottish men who were head of the military but actually from Edinburgh itself. Scotlands over-represented on the compensation and list of former enslavers not massively but significantly. Edinburghs over-represented on that list, and the New Town is over-represented on that list.

For Williams, the Black History Walking Tours are a way of unpicking the deliberate erasure not only Scotlands participation in the slave trade and colonialism but also the lives and legacies of the Black and Asian people who were caught in its wake. I dont like it when people turn around and call my tours the slavery tour, Williams says firmly. Theyre not slavery tours.

Instead, the tours and talks that Williams gives work just as much to highlight the construction of historical biases as they do the racist construction of the city-scape. I did a talk about race and the Scottish Enlightenment for the National Library, because when I went into their Enlightenment exhibition earlier on the year, there was barely any mention of the intellectual construction of these pseudo-scientific ideas of race, Williams explains. So I gave a talk, and it shocked the people in the National Library. Because they dont know necessarily about Black intellectual critique, or Black Enlightenment scholars, [or]the significance of, lets say, Islamic scholars coming from somewhere like Timbuktu, extremely well-read and well-respected being enslaved.

In this way, Williams offers a reconfiguration of historical race relations that challenges the very ways in which our understanding of race has been received. If were talking the last 250 or 300 years, people [] just made up these mad ideas, because they decided that they wanted to classify people into brown, yellow, red and white, Williams says. And then that became the standard book that was been built on by another scholar. But people [need to] understand that these ideas were interrogated at the time. Were not putting the present lens on the past. All of these things were highly controversial at the time depending on who and where and what your interests were.

Confronting Scotlands specific history is also crucial in order to complicate the easy, preconceived narratives we have been handed down. Scotland has a very peculiar, unusual context, in that it has been I dont say colonised because I dont agree that it has been colonised, Williams considers. But Scotland has suffered: people knowing that their grandmother was beaten at school for speaking Gaelic, or the loss and banning of certain important cultural symbols like tartan and bagpipes. I encourage people to develop empathy for those who have been through similar experiences at a much more extreme version.

It is this empathy, this rejection of individualistic perspectives, that is central to seeing and coming to terms with the past for what it really was. I think that were lacking in skills of nonviolent communication and dialogue, Williams sighs. I think we are trained by our education system to have debates that we feel we have got to win, and it means were not listening to the other side. All that has got to shift, we need to have empathetic dialogue, and we [need to] move away from even using words like pride and shame.

This is where its difficult in Scotland because people are holding onto their identity, and it is tied up with independence and having to have pride in a nation, Williams continues. I think we need to unpick all that and maybe even do away with it. Its not helpful, and it stops people from investigating and having mature conversations.

Yet for all that is left to do, Williams remains deeply hopeful about the future. Having talked to certain curators and certain institutions over the years, there have been people inside who have been wanting to make change but as an institution, they havent been able to do it. I think the bolder these organizations are, other people will follow, because it gives them permission. This fear about potentially alienating their core audiences is starting to shift quite a bit. And Ive been really pleased by the response, she adds enthusiastically. At the beginning when I set it up, I said, this is about healing. We can only really have healing if we can tell the truth.

Details of the Black History Walks can be found here.

The rest is here:
Interview with Lisa Williams, founder of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association and creator of its Black History Walking Tours - bellacaledonia.org.uk

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Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has signed a nearly $1.9 billion bonding bill passed by the Minnesota Legislature in October. Included in the bill are funds set aside exclusively for investment in Communities of Color.

The state constitution was amended in 1962 to allow the state to take on debt and issue bonds to help pay for construction, upkeep of public buildings and other infrastructure, and review and assemble a package of other projects they want to fund. There have been bonding bills ever since.

The bonding bill always felt like a secret handshake behind closed doors, explained Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan in an MSR phone interview.

It typically leads to hours of debate among lawmakers because of competing interests and pet projects. All bonding bills must have at least a three-fifths majority vote in each chamber81 votes in the House and 41 votes in the Senatein order to pass

The Minneapolis-based Cultural Wellness Center, Jutaposition Arts, and the proposed Baldwin Square theatre, caf and art gallery development project in North Minneapolis are among nine groups that will receive Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) equity funding.

Flanagan conducted a four-stop Local Jobs and Projects Tour on October 29 to highlight the equity funding. We need to reimage what bonding could look like for all Minnesotans, she said. It was important for us that right at the beginning of this process we asked to set aside $30 million specifically for projects led by and for Communities of Color.

Juxtaposition Arts (JXTA) was founded in 1995 as an urban youth creative education organization on Minneapolis North Side. They will receive $1.1 million in state funds, Managing Director Gabrielle Grier told the MSR.

Investing in predominately Black communities is important to the Walz-Flanagan administration, Flanagan said, stressing that it is still unsure what will happen coming out of the pandemic, especially to communities of color.

My hope is that $30 million will turn into $60 million, and so on, said the lieutenant governor. Our job now is to ensure that our communities are centered in policymaking and protecting the investments that have been in communities of color and Indigenous communities.

The state funds will go toward JXTAs current four-year $14 million capital and legacy campaign. Grier said they hope to break ground on a new building next summer.

We are in a moment that we can measure what equity looks like, concluded Flanagan. It took longer to pass [the bonding bill] than it should have. I think the bonding bill is one place where we can start to measure it.

More:
State bonding bill prioritizes investment in Communities of Color - MSR News Online

There may be more juice left in the fourth quarter.

Ally Invest's Lindsey Bell said she believes the backdrop supports December gains.

"We're positive that it will be a good end to 2020," the firm's chief investment strategist told CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Wednesday.

Bell sees optimism surrounding another coronavirus aid package providing a near-term upside catalyst to stocks. She also cites resilient consumer spending as a driver.

But Bell, a CNBC contributor, acknowledges the gains may be lower than the historical average.

"December is usually the third-best month of the stock market. You usually see the S&P 500 up about 1.5%," she said. "That might be a little more muted this year."

While constructive coronavirus aid developments should help stocks, Bell warns it will also contribute to uncertainty regarding the size and timing.

"It could make investors a little bit nervous," added Bell. "There will be some choppiness."

Near-term, she sees mega-cap technology and high-flying stay-at-home names as most vulnerable.

"Some of those names really did get ahead of themselves," she said. "I don't necessarily believe they're going to fall off a cliff. ... A lot of the product and services that some of these companies offer have become part of our everyday lives."

In this environment, Bell favors dividend aristocrats defined as stocks that have paid and increased dividends for at least 25 years.

"They were up 12% in the month of November," she said. "Not only do they outperform the S&P 500 on a long-term basis, but they do so in a less volatile manner. So, you're building a nice diverse base by having some exposure."

She said she believes divided aristocrats, which include a big portion of economically sensitive industrial and materials stocks, will continue to grab profits as growth recovers. According to Bell, the market is underestimating the bullish impact of the Covid-19 vaccines on the economy and earnings.

"There is a lot to look forward to in 2021," Bell said.

Disclaimer

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It will be a good end to 2020, Ally Invest's top investment strategist says - CNBC

The cannabis market is having a bit of a heyday.

Cannabis stocks as a whole have been on the rise since the U.S. election, with U.S. names such as Trulieve, TerrAscend and Green Thumb Industries climbing alongside Canadian heavyweights including Canopy Growth, Aphria and Village Farms.

But there's an important distinction to be made between U.S. and Canadian pot plays, Tim Seymour, founder and chief investment officer of Seymour Asset Management and the portfolio manager of the Amplify Seymour Cannabis ETF (CNBS), told CNBC's "ETF Edge" this week.

U.S. names have enjoyed healthy gains in 2020, with Trulieve, TerrAscend and Green Thumb all up triple digits. And while the group's moves around the presidential election were "solid, ... overall, cannabis stock trading was confusing at best," Seymour said in a Wednesday interview.

Though the U.S. pot plays rallied heading into the election, Canadian cannabis stocks managed to outperform afterwards. That set up a counterintuitive dynamic: If the election served to highlight the U.S. opportunity, with five states legalizing some form of cannabis use, why were the Canadian plays rallying?

In some ways, it's a function of how the market is structured, Seymour said.

When Canada federally legalized cannabis use in 2018, Canadian pot stocks became "the conduits in which a lot of institutions could access the cannabis market, even if the Canadian [limited partnership]s were not necessarily sitting in the middle of the biggest and most important market in this new high-growth sector," he said.

Now operating legally, those companies were able to list on U.S. exchanges, making the likes of Canopy Growth and Aphria easily accessible to U.S. investors. Shares of U.S.-based players dealing directly with cannabis, however, are listed on Canadian exchanges, and are only bought and sold in the U.S. via the over-the-counter markets.

Additionally, while over-the-counter stocks in many cases "have significant liquidity and are as efficient to trade" as stocks on major exchanges, some institutions and ETFs are limited from investing in that market.

"Picking the best stocks often is about understanding where capital is going," Seymour said. "Investing in cannabis is as much about understanding the fundamentals both bottom-up and top-down as it is really understanding fund flows and understanding the momentum in the market."

Much of that momentum has centered on Canadian colossus Canopy Growth, in which U.S. alcohol giant Constellation Brands has a major stake.

Though it is based in Ontario, Canopy has strong U.S. ties given its relationship with Modelo maker Constellation and its investments in stateside operators Acreage Holdings and TerrAscend, Seymour said.

It also has a "very strong" management team, hence its prominent place in CNBS's portfolio, said Seymour, who added that the key to running a cannabis ETF is active management.

"You want to be investing with someone who's certainly investing in the middle of the sector, is involved in the sector, is meeting with company management teams daily, but also understanding where we can get the best of the markets that we can invest in," Seymour said.

As of Friday, CNBS's top five holdings were GrowGeneration at more than 12.5%, Village Farms at over 12.5%, Canopy Growth at almost 11.5%, Aphria at nearly 11.5% and GW Pharmaceuticals at just under 10.5%. Innovative Industrial Properties, a medical cannabis-focused REIT, was No. 6 at just over 7%.

Not only does active management allow Seymour to look for "ancillary exposure" to the space with names such as Innovative Industrial Properties or hydroponics retailer GrowGeneration, but it allows him to capitalize on the industry's up-and-comers.

"There will be IPOs coming in the next three to six months that will give us more opportunities and we'll be there for them," he said. "Active management in cannabis is critical and I think our ability to really pick from the best of what's around the world is part of why you've seen this ... disparity between the performance of the different cannabis ETFs."

CNBS is up 38.5% year to date as of Friday's close. The ETFMG Alternative Harvest ETF (MJ), the largest cannabis ETF on the market by assets, is down nearly 8%. The AdvisorShares Pure Cannabis ETF (YOLO), the second largest, is up about 42.5%.

"Ultimately, our view is that we want to be investing in the stocks that we know have not only the best fundamentals, but the ones that have the most exposure to institutions who might be looking to invest in the sector," Seymour said.

That may mean you can only invest "in some of the Canadian names or the big listed U.S. names that are not plant-touching, but great ways to get exposure," he said. "The key is balance. The key is active management. This is an industry that will continue to evolve and an active strategy in a really exciting thematic strategy is, we think, the best way to manage your money."

Disclosures: Read all ofSeymour's disclosures here.

Disclaimer

Originally posted here:
What it means to invest in U.S. vs. Canadian cannabis stocks - CNBC