1619 Rightly Understood

One of the most important things to be said about the New York Times’ loud but intellectually threadbare effort to recast the year 1619 as the date of the American nation’s “true founding” is that it was a missed opportunity. The year 2019, which was the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of enslaved Africans at Jamestown, could have been a signal moment for the entire nation to reflect on the long trajectory of Africans’ rich and multifarious influence on American life. The occasion deserved something better than a journalistic stunt, which mangled key elements in the history of North American slavery in order to serve a political agenda—reparations—that descends into absurdity, as is now happening in California, the moment it begins to be contemplated as a practical measure.