“Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed. — Thomas Sowell: “Poisoning present by distorting slavery’s past.” Opinion, Dallas News Administrator, May 1, 2010.
Slavery was, and remains today, a horrific contradiction of God’s word. While we cannot repair the past or undo past harms, we can and must acknowledge the truth our history teaches us and commit to learn from it.
The 1619 Project is an attempt to redefine the history of America as rooted in slavery: “No aspect of [America] has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed,”[i] writes the project’s leader.
The contributors to the project hope to eclipse the thought of a self-governing nation founded for liberty for all Americans and replace it with one thoroughly and systemically racist, leading to the conclusion that America can only be “healed” through reparations to those descended from slaves. The original writing of a collection of ten essays, poems, and fiction by a variety of authors, assembled and published in August of 2019 in the New York Times by a journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has been developed into a school curriculum and children’s books to instill deceit and hatred for their country in the rising generation. The false ideas behind the 1619 project contradict the indisputable record of history acknowledged and affirmed by America’s preeminent scholars.
Teach the Children (Proverbs 22:6):
- All men are created equal by God; none should be viewed as someones property.
- Slavery is an invention of fallen mankind.
- God used America providentially to provide an example of good government “from reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force,”[ii] but also to show the evil of chattel slavery which had plagued mankind in every human culture to that time.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6
[i] Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project, August 18, 2019
[ii] Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1, October 27, 1787