How Not to Understand Slavery

"He begins the series by examining the practice of chattel slavery, he said to Kelly, "because this is, we're told, the original sin" of the United States. In Walsh's account, the left believes that "America was built on slavery, and it has no right to exist, and every white American carries, somehow, that legacy, that guilt in their blood"; therefore progressives feel they have the "moral justification to just do whatever they want" to white people."

"In 2019, Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of The New York Times, reportedly described "The 1619 Project" to his staff as "the most ambitious examination of the legacy of slavery ever undertaken" by a newspaper. Despite its grand ambition, however, the project arrives at a narrow conclusion: "One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.""

A conservative media project claims widespread historical falsehoods and opens by reassessing chattel slavery, portraying it as overemphasized by progressive narratives. The project asserts that many on the left present slavery as the nation's original sin and attribute collective racial guilt to white Americans, justifying punitive policies. Reactionary forces have embraced sanitizing slavery as a political objective under Donald Trump, framing it as a corrective to alleged left-wing oversimplifications. A truer understanding of slavery recognizes both the horrors of racial oppression and the necessity of seeing beyond them. The 1619 Project is presented as a contrasting example that argues slavery was central to the decision for American independence.

Read at The Atlantic