(Photo: Marcus Ingram/Getty Images)
Historians note that applying the 1619 Project’s standards for evaluating historical racism could prove especially awkward for Democrats. Mark Hemingway writes:
Democrats who advanced a bill in June to remove statues of white supremacists from the U.S. Capitol ignored a central fact about those figures: All of them had been icons of their party, from Andrew Jackson’s adamantly pro-slavery vice president, John C. Calhoun, to North Carolina Gov. Charles B. Aycock, an architect of the white supremacist campaign of 1898 that ushered in the era of Jim Crow.
At a time when governments, sports teams, schools, and other bastions of American society are rushing to expunge legacies of slavery or racism, this was another instance of the Democratic Party’s failure to acknowledge that it did more than any other institution in American life to preserve the “peculiar institution”—and later enforce Jim Crow-style apartheid in the Old South.
“I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize the history of the Democrat Party when we’re literally changing the names of birds because they’re named after racists,” said Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” referring to a new racism-cleansing push in, yes, ornithology. (Stepman is also a columnist for The Daily Signal.)
[Mark Hemingway, "Bias by Omission: 1619 Project Ignores Democratic Party’s History of Racism," The Daily Signal, August 5]
