The main focus of CriticalRace.org is Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its applications in higher education, as this is where the ideology was first developed and where many individuals are trained. While CRT has been around for a few decades, it really has gained prominence since the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, serving as an intellectual underpinning to grant the movement a perception of legitimacy as a civil rights movement. The 1619 Project attempts to bring all these forces together to reimagine and revise the historical narrative of America. The central premise is that America was not founded in 1776, or in the early colonies, or when the Constitution was ratified. According to this new interpretation, the functional founding of America occurred when the first enslaved Africans arrived on the North American continent. Further, the authors claim, the colonists fought the Revolutionary War primarily to protect the slave trade. First published in August 2019 by New York Times Magazine, the 1619 Project "aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States' national narrative." Activists have proposed the 1619 Project as history curriculum in elementary, secondary, and higher education.
In response, a growing number of historians, scholars, and critics have written about some of the logical fallacies, false equivalencies, and historical errors in the 1619 Project.
Here we include some reading material, criticisms, and other resources to understand the impact of The 1619 Project in American society and in particular, education: