The award-winning documentary filmmaker Gloria Greenfield, President of Doc Emet Productions, established the series “Deep Dives” in 2020. Her purpose was to invite significant scholars to probe issues critical to contemporary politics and culture. In the May issue of the monthly series, Mary Grabar, Resident Fellow of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) discusses “The 1619 Project: Stripping Away Manhood.”
In August 2019, the New York Times introduced the 1619 Project, the brainchild of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, in a special 100-page issue of the Sunday magazine. A left-wing activist, Hannah-Jones attempted nothing less than the transformation of the public’s understandings of Americas history through the application of Critical Race Theory. Well-heeled organizations have rallied to her cause with capital and other resources to help insinuate the project’s falsifications and misrepresentations into school curricula across the country. In effect, ideology replaces scholarship.
Dr. Grabar, in her article, describes Hannah-Jones’ project as “a marketing phenomenon in the guise of history.” She points out that many of Hannah-Jones’s claims of originality are either misleading or false. The 1619 Project pushes myths in the guise of suddenly discovered truths.
Grabar focuses on the remarkable life of Frederick Douglass to expose some of the 1619 Project’s sleights of hand. Hannah-Jones selectively edits the writings of Douglass to make him “appear to be a ranting victim.” The net result, Grabar concludes, is that Hannah-Jones and her ilk “strip” Douglass, “the former slave of the manhood he struggled to attain.”
Dr. Grabar is the second member of the AHI family to be chosen by Ms. Greenfield to write for the series. In the March issue, AHI President Robert Paquette explored the issue of whether the United States Constitution, in its framing, was proslavery or antislavery.
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