Background on 1619 Project: In 2019, the New York Times continued its ongoing efforts to junk objective journalism in favor of advocacy journalism by founding something called the 1619 Project. The project’s raison d’être is to trash America by hijacking Americans’ understanding of their history to comport with a narrative pushed by contemporary leftist political radicals: to wit, that all American history may be reduced to, and explained by, black slavery.

As serious historians have explained, this is a flawed reading of history. James H. Sweet, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and past president of the American Historical Association, had this to say (archived version here):

When I first read the newspaper series that preceded the book, I thought of it as a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history… The present has been creeping up on our discipline for a long time. Doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.

(Sweet later appended an apology for having “alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends” to the article, which remains on AHA’s website.)

The project was celebrated by the intelligentsia and its flawed curriculum has been used by several K-12 schools. Its founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary (not for history) and a tenured professorship at Howard University.

Specific Project: On April 19, 2021, the U.S. Department of Education published a notice of proposed priorities for American history and civics education programs. The notice implicitly proposed to fund grant programs to “improve” the teaching of American history and civics by incorporating the 1619 Project’s highly politicized narrative and the “antiracist” teachings of Ibram X. Kendi (author of How to Be an Antiracist). The notice included a host of critical theory buzzwords, like requiring grant applicants to:

• Take into account systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history;
• Incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives and perspectives on the experience of individuals with disabilities;

The proposal would  have encouraged and subsidized the migration of critical theory, “antiracism”, and 1619 Project anti-Americanism into K-12 education. Legal Insurrection Foundation opposed it.