These people are just as bad in their completely unrealistic portrayal of history as someone like Francis Parkman was during the 19th century. Back then, Parkman and other writers created a narrative that legitimized the English, Protestant, and white nation and culture as supreme and above all other races or ethnicities. The conquest of America and the native savages was something like that in action. Nowadays, it is denouncing whites and blaming them for the origins of slavery and other evils.
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Interesting ...."something like that".
Almost all of these claims and counterclaims can be put down as variations of “Us vs. Them” hyperbola.
That is, “Us” comes along and makes some exaggerated claims about “Them” and gets them accepted by the largely uncritical public.
After a long period of acceptance, scholarship determines that elements, perhaps large elements, of the “Us “ claim were false or, at best, misleading. “Them” (and its “Woke” allies among the “Us”) now claim that, because some elements of the previous “Us” claim (which better educated members of “Us” have long since stopped defending) were false, every element of the “Us” claim is now false. They insist that a new narrative, told exclusively from the perspective of “Them,” must now replace it.
Anyone daring to point out that the new “Them” narrative has elements just as exaggerated as the previous “Us” narrative is to be labeled as an “-ist.” And any more nuanced narrative of events, no matter how carefully framed, is to be regarded as “-ism.”
Unfortunately, the either/or dualism above ignores the complexity of human behavior and the prevalence of gaps and self-serving documents in the historical record.
Actual history is messy and human behavior inconsistent. That’s what gives you a black man as the first recorded slave owner in what would become the United States. Or that there were a number of slave owning white southern gentlemen of quality who signed a declaration in 1776 stating “all men are created equal.” Or that black kings on the west coast of Africa really did collect and sell fellow blacks into slavery knowing full well they would never return. (Or that their modern day descendants would claim that African slavery was “different” and that they had been duped into participation.) Or that there were a lot of southern white men who could not afford/did not want to own a slave and/or did not believe in slavery who still joined the Confederate States Army and fought and died defending “the Southern way of life” because their community felt under threat and had called them to arms. Or that President Lincoln (along with a good part of the Union Army) held what would today be regarded as racist views concerning the intellectual inferiority of the blacks they were fighting to liberate from slavery in the South. Or that there were prominent men in the North who publically opposed slavery but who were personally profiting off of slavery in the South. Or a thousand other discrepancies to the black or white, either/or narratives being pushed by one side or the other.
No! Admitting to such ... such “grayness” in human behavior undermines the narrative, subverts the righteousness needed to judge the opposition as “immoral,” and introduces confusing complexity into the thinking of the easily distracted masses. Grayness is hated by both sides even if it is closest to the truth. Or rather, it is hated precisely because it is closest to the truth in most cases. You cannot maintain/restore the status quo or forment the revolution based on moral ambiguity.
Regard and reject the “1619 Project” for what it is: a leftist educational agenda masquerading as history.