REVIEW: What I Learned Watching ‘The 1619 Project’ on Hulu (Episode 1)

Author’s note/ Disclaimer/Trigger warning: I haven’t yet read The 1619 Project. Not the award-winning essay collection from Nikole Hann-Jones. New York Times. Or the best-selling Random House anthology. Or the award-winning and best-selling book for children. I haven’t listened and won’t again. There are better ways to do it. Spend your precious time.

This is true for the vast majority, not just the majority of Americans of color. That’s obvious, right? This is true for the majority of internet users who have strong opinions about whether they should use the internet. The 1619 Project It should be taught in public school, with the majority of politicians and pundits defending or denouncing it on television. This is often what passes as public discourse today in the digital age.—a shouting match among the passionately uninformed, while the People who are smarter than others (or who value their sanity, or just don’t care). Tune out and do nothing

What I do know is that America’s élite universities are among the most radical purveyors of anti-anti-segregationist racial sensitivity nonsense, and among the quickest to quash even the slightest dissent in the ranks. This is why it’s important to note that Several Histories Professors Yale, Princeton and Brown as well as Northwestern were able to strongly criticize The 1619 Project’s historical accuracy. “errors and distortions” is profoundly damning. I’ll believe their words. 

I also know that anyone—Nikole Hannah-Jones, for example—who Prices a public library $900 per minute to tell an audience of bourgeois liberals The United States is “one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world” Historical accuracy might not be as important as other things. Ditto a cultural establishment that promotes her work on numerous platforms and showers her with awards. We might be meant to take her seriously, but maybe not literally. 

Serious people wouldn’t claim to have said something so absurd in public. “a fact.” (Or Accept To believe in “the zodiac.”) But that’s just how most Democratic politicians, journalists, and other professional left-wing activists who demand to be taken seriously communicate these days. The world is changing. Democracy is in peril. “Jim Crow on steroids.” No wonder so many of their kids have turned to Domestic terrorism. 

This is the stuff they teach in universities. They also applaud it at corporate diversity summits. It’s now available for streaming on Hulu. Hulu is a joint-owned subsidiary of NBC Universal, The Walt Disney Company. Because that’s what I’m being paid for to do.