The CRT menace comes to TV.
Oprah Winfrey is one of the troublemakers behind The 1619 Project, Hulu’s TV show. It’s a spin-off from the controversial 2019 New York Times Magazine opus led by writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who sought to “reframe” American history. Hannah-Jones proposed the arrival of slaves on these shores four centuries ago, in 1619, as the true, corrupt beginning of the United States of America. Oprah congratulates Hannah-Jones’s endeavor by rubber-stamping it in her own preferred medium.
A six-part TV program, advertised as a “docuseries,” The 1619 Project represents a convergence of Oprah’s media empire with the Disney corporation that owns Hulu. The show is co-produced with Oprah through the Onyx Collective, a racially segregated content brand for “creators of color and other underrepresented groups,” as Disney heralded in 2021.
Seen through Oprah’s eyes, The 1619 Project makes clearer sense of Hannah-Jones’s fabrication than historians and think-tankers such as Robert Woodson (head of the 1776 Commission, aka The 1776 Project) have been able to. By countering Hannah-Jones strictly on the basis of her poor scholarship, they underestimate the bad faith of the project, which is evident in Oprah’s TV adaptation.
This show is for the semi-literate, content-hungry masses who can’t read through to the Times’ true agenda but can be swayed, maybe, by Oprah’s visual divertissements such as the drama Queen Sugar (a collaboration with Ava DuVernay) and interviews such as Oprah with Meghan and Harry. Here, Oprah attempts to make a star of Hannah-Jones, the fuchsia-haired activist-journalist who narrates the series and does face-to-face interviews with family members and friends. (Nikole competes with Joy Reid, Symone Sanders, and Karine Jean-Pierre.) Focus on authorial personality is something readers overlook; it was obscured by the Times’ powerful hegemony, which some people take objectively but believe as truth.
On screen, The 1619 Project is sometimes risibly subjective. Hannah-Jones’s voice carries the tone of her Iowa roots, in contrast to her Notre Dame–New York–MacArthur Prize résumé — recalling the Arkansas twang that Hillary Clinton dropped once she reached the national stage. Hannah-Jones’s smile suggests conviviality, unlike her defensiveness when challenged about the legitimacy of The 1619 Project. Now we see and hear her Ursula-mermaid aspect and understand how it could intimidate the ranks of white-collar liberals at the Times.
Hannah-Jones’s spoken words work differently than her writer’s voice; her tone as heard in The 1619 Project seems almost reasonable, not so crackpot. Still, it’s that PBS-interlocutor style we no longer trust. The 1619 ads are nearly doggerel:
They say our people were born on the water
like nothing else had existed before.
We were told by virtue of our bondage that we could never be American.
But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.
Hannah-Jones isn’t a reporter but uses homegirl wiles in her interviews, asking, “You are calling for reparations — what is the total that would be owed?” Economist William Darity answers, “Thirteen Trillion Dollars.” Hannah-Jones responds, “That’s a big number. Big debt though.” Skinheads, Confederates, and casino-owning Indigenous People all feel owed and unappreciated, but Hannah-Jones offers no common ground or credible solution. Or is socialism, with its apparatchiks’ dachas on Martha’s Vineyard and in Mendocino, her answer?
Instead of an academic investigation, The 1619 Project uses PBS doc clichés to which academics (often cast as PBS commentators) are also susceptible. Promoted as being “based on journalism by the New York Times,” the show is divided into individual segments: “Democracy,” “Race,” “Capitalism,” “Music,” “Fear,” “Justice,” a structure that predetermines Hannah-Jones’s black-Marxist argument. It conforms to the pop sentimentality of Afro-Am-studies curricula. That’s where executive producer Roger Ross Williams contributes, directing the opening and closing episodes.
The series uses the faux lyricism that now afflicts the doc genre. In this case, it’s Beyoncé’s Lemonade-style imagery that fudges the distance between reportage and poetry. The fantasy shot of a nappy-headed black child wearing an American flag as a cape comes decades after David Gordon Green’s George Washington, yet not so late that Hulu is ashamed to promote this dangerous revisionism as “an origin story.”
Sure enough, the propaganda press like Rolling Stone falls for it hook, line, and stinker, calling it “a hub of information” without ever mentioning its disputatious controversy. The Hollywood Reporter praises it as “a reminder of how effectively legacy media can still move the needle in terms of discourse . . . [on] policing, the justice system, and our particularly brutal version of capitalism.” That’s a corker, attacking “brutal capitalism” in a trade publication!
Sometimes the doc format forces Hannah-Jones to come clean: “The 1619 project is not a history. It really is talking about America today,” she says. That’s also a sales pitch, more honest than the infamous Times portfolio that has become a critical-race-theory textbook.
Hannah-Jones’s complaint, stated as piety (“Black Americans have always been foundational to the idea of American freedom”), was always biased and grievance-based. Now it looks like the frustration of biracial confusion — the horror behind the post-racialism that Obama never achieved and that grew into the aggravation evidenced by wealthy strivers such as Oprah and Hannah-Jones.
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.
