In the wake of recent Black Lives Matter protests—in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer and the important dialog that has resulted—I am inclined to revisit The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project.

This project propagates a popular narrative, which has taken hold among many in the media, politics, and education, to link the foundational origins of the American experiment not to the context of the American Revolution of 1776 but to 1619, the year that enslaved Angolans arrived on the shores of colonial Jamestown, Virginia.

In this view, all of America’s current institutions, public attitudes, economics, and social structures—or, perhaps more pointedly, the alleged horrors and woes therein—are a result of slavery.

Among other claims, it credits slavery for the dismal state of America’s prison system, for suburban traffic congestion, for the prevalence of obesity and diabetes, even for capitalism itself. All this, even though many of this narrative’s adherents belong to the most respected, most lucrative institutions in the country—which is a testament to the unique constitutional freedoms that Americans enjoy.

Many who hear or read such views are incredulous, including the founders of the 1776 Project, who are attempting to dispel the belief that black America’s destiny has been shaped in the crucible of slavery and racism.

Bob Woodson, the 1776 Project’s founder, objects to the argument that the “shadow of slavery and Jim Crow” hangs over the destiny of black Americans.

“Nothing is more lethal,” he says, “than to convey to people that they have an exemption from personal responsibility.”

The 1776 Project’s organizers, for example, criticize the characterization of America as a place in which all whites are villains and all blacks are victims. It is easy, they argue, “to point to slavery and Jim Crow and then be done with your account of black American history. But that is lazy thinking.”

In fact, despite what the liberal media would have you believe, many African Americans have bitterly fought the narrative that blacks are eternally constrained by the attitudes and structures of racism.