The 1609 Project: The Republican-Approved History of America
Although news outlets, legislators, school boards, television stations, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene’s contacts inside the QAnon industrial complex can’t seem to find a single K-12 teacher who studied Critical Race Theory and decided to teach it to social studies students, the anti-CRT movement is growing.
You may think the recent Caucasian hysteria is part of the culture wars, but what if it isn’t? What if Trump’s 1776 project, Texas’ 1836 Project and the always-present 1968 Project (When white people started knowing what Martin Luther King would have wanted) are the beginnings of a new, lucrative whitewashing industry that Black people will once again miss out on?
Not me.
After missing out on cannabis, cryptocurrency and stealing dance moves from Black creatives on Tik-Tok, I refuse to miss out on the next white economic explosion. I’m getting in on the ground floor of this revisionist white history movement before they leave us behind.
I know I’m not a historian but, so what? Did Jesus go to divinity school? Tucker Carlson didn’t go to clown college! Steve Jobs dropped out of school and invented the telephone in his basement; now look at him!
So, I present to you my Republican-approved pre-whitewashed version of American history. The full version comes with lesson plans, teacher’s notes and multiple-choice tests where every answer is “B” but feel free to download this complimentary summary. School districts can purchase The 1609 Projecttextbooks in bulk at www.LikeBlackHistoryButWithWhitePeople.org for the low price of $16.09 per student.
The 1609 Project.
It’s based on a true story.
In 1609, with the help of Jesus, manifest destiny’s child and a few ships, a diverse group of 104 white men and boys arrived in Jamestown, Virginia as part of a real estate development company called the Virginia Company of London. The entrepreneurs were greeted by Indians who were elated to share their land with the settlers.
After a tense negotiation, the Indians decided that they didn’t want to live on the land anyway. Instead, they complied with the First Virginia Charter’s stated goal of “propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government.”
Ten years later, a ship called the White Lion showed up with “20 & odd negroes” looking for work. Luckily, the colonists had a few job openings, so they gave the Africans entry-level, minimum-wage positions ($0 per hour) with the opportunity to double and triple their salaries. Because the British transplants believed in the value of hard work, they graciously allowed the Africans to do most of the work in the English colonies, even traveling to Africa to recruit more workers, offering paid relocation expenses, free housing and lifetime job security.
The program was so successful that subsequent colonies adopted the policies. Although this kind of work program had been tried around the world, this race-based, constitutionally enshrined, intergenerational, perpetual, chattel-based version that offered no means of escape was an American invention. Thus began this country’s long history of innovative exceptionalism.
In 1662, the first-of-its-kind “Negro Womens Children” act expanded employee benefits to include the children of these employees while including America’s first law on sexual harassment in the workplace:
WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And that if any christian shall committ ffornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the ffines imposed by the former act.
This law was not racist because it was applied equally to all races. The same thing applies to the October 1669 law, “An Act About the Casual Killing of Slaves,” which legally allowed slavemasters employers to murder their workers. It was just a remarkable coincidence that all of the slaves happened to be Black. It turns out, knowing they could be murdered without punishment made the enslaved Africans very productive. In fact, these provisions kept the African American unemployment rate very low for the next 150 years.
In 1770, British officers killed an unarmed Black man named Crispus Attucks. But the officers who caused the Boston Massacre said they feared for their lives because Attucks’ “very look was enough to terrify any person.” This was not about race. Then, in 1773, a group of protesters rioted, looted and destroyed the property of business owners. But since it happened in Boston, they called it a “Tea Party” because Super Bowl afterparties were not invented yet.
Then came Founding Fathers like George Washington, who inspired men to tear down statues of oppressors. When he was 11 years old, Washington inherited 1o slaves but decided he loved cutting down cherry trees all by himself. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin all used violence or the threat of violence to extract free labor from captive Africans, unlike Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was a brilliant man who hated the institution of slavery so much that he enslaved 600 Black people in his lifetime. At the age of 10, 11 or 12, the young Black boys on his plantation were whipped to prepare them to work at his nail factory. His love for Black people was so deep that he fathered six children with Sally Hemings, a woman he held prisoner on his Monticello forced labor camp. Although “rape” is the legal definition for this act of having sex with 15-year-olds who are not able to consent, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, so it doesn’t count.
After the Declaration of Independence, we went to war with England to free ourselves. Eighty percent of the brave Black men who fought in the Revolution fought on the British side because they apparently had no idea that America was not a racist country. The Founders really wanted to outlaw slavery but the 30 signers of the Constitution who didn’t own slaves had to agree with the other 25 enslavers that white lives mattered 40 percent more than Black lives.
Sure, the definition of white supremacy is “a social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races.” And, yes, the word “founded” means “to establish (something) often with provision for future maintenance.”
However, just because the men and the document that established the United States of America created a system that made sure white people were legally, constitutionally, politically and economically superior, it does not mean that America was founded on white supremacy. It was the land of the free.
In the 1830s, America decided it had an “Indian problem” and decided to backtrack on signed treaties between Native Americans and real Americans. They went to court and the Supreme Court decided that the Cherokee were a separate nation with sovereign powers. But the Supreme Court did not have an army and Andrew Jackson did. So the federal government graciously helped the members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations relocate to an area west of the Mississippi. Even though they were removed at gunpoint, they were so happy to receive this free land, they cried a Trail of Tears. This land was not stolen; it was traded.
Soon, the Southern states and the Northern states began to argue over the states’ rights. The only right they disagreed on was the right to own slaves but the phrase “states’ right” sounds weird. So 11 states decided to form another country that was just like America but, according to the new nation’s vice president Alexander Stephens, these Confederate States would be founded on “the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery–subordination to the superior race–is his natural and normal condition.”
This was not about race.
So on August 12, 1861, Confederate Troops in Charleston, SC launched bombs at Fort Sumter, which was occupied by sleeping soldiers from the North, thereby starting the War of Northern Aggression. But the South lost the war, partly because so many brave Confederates warriors deserted their army. Even though the Southern gentlemen were known to treat their slaves kindly, for some reason, more than 500,000 slaves left their work sites during the war. In the end, the South promised that they would never bring up the Confederacy again.
After the Civil War, fraternities like the Circle of Brothers emerged in the South. To be more authentic, they adopted Greek names like Kuklos for circle and Klanfor “brothers.” The Ku Klux Klan was known for their surprise parties on Black people’s lawns and their fight for justice in the South. This era was known for its political activism, prompting a rash of violence against newly-freed slaves who just happened to be not white. This period ended with the Compromise of 1877when a diverse group of 15 men who just happened to all share the same ethnicity (American) agreed to make Rutherford B. Hayes the president in exchange for the South’s ability to enact Jim Crow laws that helped African Americans know their place.
Because so many people in the South learned how to tie nooses, many Black people left the South to find non-noose-related jobs. This was called the Great Migration. Following World War I, when Americans defeated the Nazis, the pro-noose trend invaded Northern cities, resulting in the Red Summer of 1919, when “race riots” broke out between noose-reluctant African Americans and pro-lynching patriots who objected to microaggressions like Black people wearing military uniforms, looking real Americans in the eye or existing in the world. They also killed Asian people for working jobs that no one else wanted.
During World War II, Black people fought in the war and were promised the G.I. Bill but many African Americans didn’t fill out their paperwork correctly. After the Great Depression, the U.S. government gave work, land, money and entire towns away with the provision that the neighborhoods remain segregated. Since contacting individual landlords would be a tedious task, the government instead instructed banks not to offer mortgages in places where Black people lived. The New Deal created a middle class for all Americans except Black people. For some reason, there was a big wealth gap after this.
Around 1960, Black people noticed that a lot of laws weren’t fair. So Martin Luther King Jr. organized a bunch of marches to convince America that the key to ending racism was little kids holding hands. Malcolm X and other radicals advocated for armed attacks on whites, while Angela Davis paid the Black Panthers to shoot two police officers in cold blood. Soon, MLK’s plan worked and African Americans received their civil rights. A year later, African Americans were granted the right to vote with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On April 4, 1968, King was shot and killed on a balcony by James Earl Ray, a lone wolf. Although records show that the FBI surveilled King for years and tried to get him to kill himself, they did not kill him because that would be wrong.
In 2001, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush, Haliburton and a woman named Sharia Law attacked the World Trade Center with airplanes and a planned demolition. To stop terrorism, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries where Bin Laden was not hiding. To prevent this from ever happening, intelligence officials devised a plan that involves placing shoes, wallets and laptops on a lunch trays in the airports. But just sometimes. And not in every airport. Also, people hide stuff in shampoo bottles.
In 2008, American finally ended racism by electing a Black president, Barack Obama. He was decent. Eight years later, Russians elected Donald J. Trump because he was going to build a wall. He did not build a wall. Then the Black Lives Matter Movement started alongside the All Lives Matter movement. BLM wanted to defund the police and replace them with socialized medicine. All Lives Matter wanted an end to Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter wanted Smurfette to stop being such a tease.
In 2020, a virus that no one could’ve seen coming hit America, sickening and killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Scientists proposed that masks would alleviate the pandemic while people on Facebook disagreed. a police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck, killing him. The country erupted into protest which was solved with a combination of tweets from major corporations and police officers firing bean bags into protesters’ eye sockets. A few months later, Joseph R. Biden was elected president.
Maybe.
We’ll let you know how it turns out.