The Patriot Post® · Oprah Parties Like It's 1619

The “reframing” of U.S. history by Nikole Hannah-Jones has been turned into a miniseries. Hulu’s “The 1619 Project,” with Oprah Winfrey as one of the executive directors, uses six episodes discussing “Democracy”, “Race,” “Capitalism,” “Music,” “Fear,” and “Justice” to inform the ignorant masses about how racist our country has been from its inception (which Hannah-Jones claims was effectively the year 1619) and just how much black Americans are better than whites.

In a Q&A session, Hannah-Jones’s worldview is summed up in this thesis statement: “I just want us to be liberated by the knowledge of what we were built upon because if you understand that all the inequality we see — that the divisiveness, the fact that one political party doesn’t seem to believe in democracy anymore — that this whole society was created, that it’s not innate. It’s not inevitable. … Then you know that it can be deconstructed, that we don’t have to have this society — we can choose something else.”

In other words, it’s the Republicans’ fault, and deconstructing society is the goal.

Even at the time of the original 1619 Project iteration in The New York Times, our Mark Alexander noted: “The 1619 Project is a political agenda, not a history curriculum. The accurate history of slavery should be taught in our schools, including the fact that in the 19th century, it was countries under White leadership, Britain, France and the United States, which abolished slavery within their nations. What young people really need to know is that today, there are more than 700,000 people enslaved in the sub-Saharan Africa — by Black slavers — more than twice the number of slaves brought to North America in the 1800s.” Even in the trailer for the show, Hannah-Jones admits: “The 1619 project is not a history. It really is talking about America today.”

The basis for her demands for reparations, the advancement of critical race theory, and other radical claims are solely grievance-based and groundless. The irony is that Hannah-Jones has leveraged this work to gain status and wealth while hurting the American people and society as a whole.

According to Variety, the most emotional moment for Oprah Winfrey was when Hannah-Jones was pouring over a slave ledger that tracked the movement of slaves around a plantation. Even Variety noted that “Winfrey shared that she too has been affected by seeing those records and keeps a ledger in her home, which she basically has as an altar.” Winfrey herself said, “I visit the names and speak the names out loud and look at that moment where shoes and cattle and wagons were costing more than human beings.”

Winfrey and Hannah-Jones want to make the current white generation that never owned slaves pay the current generation of black Americans that weren’t slaves for America’s “original sin.” They have literally made an altar of this.

As has been pointed out before, reparations don’t produce good for either party; rather, they reinforce the dehumanizing and anti-white language of CRT, all while trying to bring about a Marxist utopia. It’s failed over and over, has made the population miserable, and has given inordinate power to a select group of corrupt elite.

Armond White, contributor for National Review, is scathing in his indictment of Winfrey and Hannah-Jones’s collaboration. He writes: “Oprah’s involvement in this scam reveals her menace. The 1619 Project is part of how she permits women to be termites — stealth warriors in the undoing of American media, society, and now history. She and the Times have set the agenda and defined the zeitgeist. But only those who make money from it will be satisfied.”

It is truly shameful that Oprah has given her megaphone to this biased, Marxist, and activist “journalist.” It is especially concerning considering how many people will watch this series and just take it at its word instead of as a leftist narrative that loosely ties snippets of history together to justify a Marxist, racist worldview.