Was Karl Marx black?
How about Lenin?
Or Antonio Gramsci?
Marcuse? 
These are the figures behind the kind of black history being promoted by 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones and her allies. 
The 1619 Project is more accurately a Marxist history than a black history. 
It promotes history through the lens of neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory and the neo-Marxist school of New History of Capitalism, whose practitioners overwhelmingly are <a href="https://www.aier.org/article/the-new-history-of-capitalism-has-a-whiteness-problem/">white</a> male professors at Ivy League universities. 
Ironically, Nikole Hannah-Jones, in a recent <a href="https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1490906972484694016/photo/1">tweet</a> slamming an anti-1619 Project issue of National Review complained that it did not include any black women and only one black person in an issue intended to “write about a slavery project created by a Black woman.” Economic historian Phil Magness, her frequent target who calls the New History of Capitalism “<a href="https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1490905093020930051">an error-ridden</a> ideological echo chamber,” posted a group of photos of these New Historians, including Project contributor Matthew Desmond,  that looked like it could have come from a reunion of an Ole Miss fraternity in the 1950s. Ironically, Hannah-Jones continues to <a href="https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1493588639435079684/photo/1">advance</a> Desmond’s claims, while reserving “most of her <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nikole-hannah-jones-responds-to-our-1619-and-slavery-issue/">ire</a>” for political science professor Wilfred Reilly, a contributor to the National Review issue, who happens to be black. 
Yet, Hannah-Jones has become a sought-out television pundit who frequently appears on <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-reidout-2-8-22-n1288893">MSNBC</a> to commiserate with Joy-Ann Reid about what they call censorship laws against the use of The 1619 Project in schools. Recently, she expressed agreement with Reid, as Reid inveighed against Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act. Citing the Act’s language, Reid said that the attempt to prevent feelings of “anguish” or discomfort applies to “white children” only. Hannah-Jones agreed, “We should feel uncomfortable about racial apartheid.” 
Reid played the statement of Rick Stevens of Florida Citizens Alliance, “We want teachers to take sides that slavery was wrong. But they don’t need to take sides that one race purposely did it, and so now that race is forever condemned and another race is forever exalted.” Twisting around his words, Reid claimed that “You cannot teach this history without race.” Hannah-Jones took the cue, stating, “Slavery was a racist, racialized system. You could only be enslaved if you were of African descent. And the enslavers were of European descent.”
True, laws forbade the enslavement of white people. But not all “enslavers were of European descent.” 
In fact, as I point out in <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511778/debunking-the-1619-project/">Debunking The 1619 Project</a>, a significant percentage of free blacks — proportionally a third as many as whites — in the antebellum south were enslavers. Hannah-Jones revealed that she knows this too, when in a <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/newsletter/2021-11-06/book-club-newsletter-nikole-hannah-jones-the-1619-project-book-club">Los Angeles Times</a> interview, she named The Known World, about a black slaveowner in antebellum Virginia, her favorite novel.
Hannah-Jones also pretends that slavery had been invented in Jamestown in 1619. She ignores slavery’s global and transhistorical existence. In response to my challenges on Twitter, she blocked me and then tweeted, “Like, imagine using 1,000-year-old history to justify downplaying 150-year-old history” — thus revealing that she was lying by omission.
Yet, on MSBC she replied to Reid’s prompt about whether black history would even be legal in Florida with, “When you ask, will we see Black History Month being outlawed, we’re already seeing black history programming being challenged in some states . . . because some white parents think that that’s Critical Race Theory. . . .” 
Well. . . . 
Similarly, Keisha N. Blain, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, who co-edited, with Ibram X. Kendi a collection titled Four Hundred Souls which included essays by Hannah-Jones and other 1619 Project contributors, in a recent article in the communist-sympathizing Nation, equated black history with CRT. She claimed that the “obsession over critical race theory is a new manifestation” of “long-standing efforts to keep Black history—and the perspectives of Black Writers—out of the classroom.” Yet, she cast  conservatives’ opposition to “’critical race theory’ as being “rooted in a desire to shield their children from the uncomfortable aspects of history and evade ‘sensitive’ topics such as racism, white supremacy, and inequality.” 
The “history” pushed by those like Blain and Hannah-Jones does present an anti-white/anti-capitalist perspective, per CRT. It distorts history. It presents white people as uniquely marked with the “original sin” of slavery.   
It follows the diktats of Vladimir Lenin, not the principles of the “father” of black history month, Carter G. Woodson. After Lenin gave orders that “The Negroes in America” were to be used as “a strategically important element in Communist activity,” the Communist Party USA released a statement in 1921 saying that the “sufferings” of “Negroes” were to be fixed on the “bourgeoisie and the Capitalist-Imperialist System!” Slavery represented the quintessence of capitalist exploitation.
Woodson, in contrast, acknowledged the “1,000-year-old history.” In his 1922 book, The Negro in Our History, Woodson stated, “That the Negro should be enslaved was in the halcyon days of the institution no exception to the rule. Slavery was once the normal condition of the majority of the inhabitants of the world.”
Sadly, in the 1920s, a number of black Americans were lured to the Soviet Union. One of these tragic figures was Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a writer and actor, who became an enthusiastic propagandist, only to meet his death in the gulag in 1939 by starvation, overwork, and beatings. But even such horrific deaths cannot dissuade communist-sympathizing historians like Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. In Defying Dixie: The Radical [i.e, Communist] Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, Gilmore defies the observations of black writers of the time, such as <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/who-was-george-schuyler">George Schuyler</a>, and asserts that the Communists were the only white people concerned about black people in the South. She describes the excruciating death of this “<a href="https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/11/lovett-fort-whiteman-the-first-african-american-communist/">first black communist</a>” in poetic terms, as evincing “the perfect equality of the gulag.” 
Not surprisingly, Gilmore has become a promoter of The 1619 Project on Twitter. 
The attitude of Gilmore is that individual black lives, like Fort-Whiteman’s, don’t matter.
And that is how Nikole Hannah-Jones felt about the loss of life — black and white — and property during the 1619 Project riots in 2020. 
That is how Communists think.
There is plenty of black history and more can be written, especially about conservatives like George Schuyler. But we should not allow Hannah-Jones and revisionist historians to confuse us about what it is. 
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., a resident fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, is author most recently of <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511778/debunking-the-1619-project/">Debunking The 1619 Project</a>: Exposing the Plan to Divide America and is completing a biography of George Schuyler.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Black History

Black History Is Not Marxist History

Black History Month

Marxism

Readers Pass

In 1932, when journalist George Schuyler traveled with Roy Wilkins to report on abuses of black levee workers in Mississippi and Louisiana for the NAACP, he stopped to consult with “Dr. Dumas” in Vidalia, Louisiana. Dumas was later described in Schuyler’s 1966 autobiography, Black and Conservative, as “a former president of the National Medical Association, . . . a distinguished, courtly, and wealthy mulatto who owned a large white mansion atop a double terrace, six blocks of downtown real estate and a big plantation. He was one of a considerable number of Negroes in the vicinity who were planters and slaveholders before the Civil War. . . .” 
During the Great Depression, Dr. Dumas was doing quite well, thanks to inherited wealth from slave ownership. 
Those like Dumas and his descendants, however, do not figure in calls for reparations, which, according to Robin Rue Simmons, are needed to make up for “the massive intergenerational economic devastation inflicted by slavery.” Simmons, a former alderman in Evanston, Illinois, helped usher through legislation that allocated cannabis tax revenue as reparations to residents or descendants of a redlined district. She wrote in the Washington Post that such payments were still “inadequate,” a mere “down payment on what is rightfully owed to millions of African Americans.” 
Is Simmons thinking of the over 10,000 slaves owned by free blacks in 1830, in Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia? As David Lightner and Alexander Ragan show, with black slaveowners constituting about two percent of the free black population of the South, and white slaveowners constituting six percent of whites, “a southern white was just three times more likely to own slaves than was a southern free black.” On a national level, “a white American was not even twice as likely as a free black American to be a slaveholder in 1830.” 
Today, however, histories that ignore black slave ownership and the role of African slave merchants, and wildly exaggerate the economic contributions of slavery, are used to argue for reparations. 
Listed among the “resources” at Simmons’s new nonprofit FirstRepair that advocates for “Local Reparations, Nationally” is The 1619 Project, the special issue of the New York Times Magazine published for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans at Jamestown. 
A collaborator of The 1619 Project’s creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, testified for reparations before Congress in June 2019, claiming that by 1836, “more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves.” This comes from The Half That Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist, a member of the neo-Marxist New History of Capitalism school. 
A couple months later, in The 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones similarly wrote, “[Slaves] grew and picked cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply.” One of the Project’s longer essays, by sociologist Matthew Desmond, advanced Baptist’s claims. 
Baptist’s wildly inflated numbers had been exposed widely. Trevor Bernard, writing in Slavery &amp; Abolition in 2015, called Baptist’s claims largely “made up.” Economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode in 2016 cast them “hocus pocus.” Economic historians Peter Coclanis, Philip Magness, and Gavin Wright have charged Baptist with innumeracy. 
But Hannah-Jones, in her June 30, 2020, New York Times Magazine article, “What Is Owed,” asserted that “white Americans’ centuries-long economic head start” and “their generational wealth and higher incomes” nullified antidiscrimination laws. They maintained “caste.” “[T]he racism we are fighting today,” she repeated, “was originally conjured to justify working unfree black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for European colonial powers, the white planter class and all the ancillary white people from Midwestern farmers to bankers to sailors to textile workers, who earned their living and built their wealth from free black labor and the products that labor produced.” Therefore, cash reparations should “go to any person who has documentation that he or she identified as a black person for at least 10 years before the beginning of any reparations process and can trace at least one ancestor back to American slavery.” 
But a black American could have ancestors from both the enslaving and enslaved camps, or have ancestors that were both at different times. Even those from disadvantaged backgrounds overcame racism to accrue fortunes on their own. Hannah-Jones, like Howard Zinn, promotes the Marxist narrative that black Americans are exploited proletariat. 
She ignores Frederick Douglass’s charges against “savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage,” and promotes the fiction that Europeans “kidnapped” Africans. 
She and other reparations agitators ignore the Wall Street Journal article, “When the Slave Traders Were African,” by Nigerian writer, and descendant of slave traders, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, who reminded in 2019 that “local collaborators,” “middlemen and merchants,” sold slaves to the Europeans. Contrary to Hannah-Jones’s claims, slaves were captured by Africans. 
Nwaubani posed “questions of historic guilt and responsibility” to fellow Africans. But because agitators know that reparations are not forthcoming from Africa, they use fake histories like The 1619 Project. 
Mary Grabar is author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-1619-Project-Exposing-America/dp/1684511771/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&amp;keywords=debunking+1619+project&amp;qid=1631049117&amp;sr=8-3">Debunking The 1619 Project</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Menu

Mary Grabar

Black History Is Not Marxist History

OPINION: Reparations: A Bad Idea Based On Fake History From The 1619 Project