The 1619 Project (in the New York Times Magazine)

[David Lockmiller]

Proposed Federal legislation against the teaching of the “1619 Project”:

Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton introduced legislation last Thursday that aims to prohibit use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that reframes US history around August 1619 and the arrival of slave ships on American shores for the first time. He called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built” in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published on Sunday.

Also on Sunday, Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted: “If chattel slavery – heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit – were a ‘necessary evil’ as Tom Cotton says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.