A recently released school curriculum by the 1619 Project education network will teach thousands of high school students that they are victims of slavery that ended in 1865 under the 13th Amendment -- more than 150 years ago. The new radical “Reparations Math and Reparations History” curriculum teaches how slavery “led to a wealth gap for African Americans.”

Using Culturally Responsive Teaching, race-based Marxist propaganda is fused into lessons linked to Common Core Math and Social Studies Standards. Through progressive groupthink Project Based Learning (PBL) over three-four weeks, students will gather information about “the way that the sugar industry, and other industries that grew as a result of slave labor, have led to a wealth gap for African Americans in the U.S.” Employing math skills, they will “evaluate whether they think reparations should be paid to descendants of enslaved people in the U.S.” And they will determine how trillions of dollars of this free money should be doled out by White taxpayers.

For their reparations project, student research should include the seminal work by Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, in which he concludes that the vast majority of Whites and Blacks believe there are more Blacks living in poverty than there actually are. According to the 2019 U.S. Census, the poverty rate for Blacks is not 75 percent or three out of four, but rather 18.8 percent or less than one out of five.

Negating the fake history that students are taught, Sowell provides evidence that America was never a major world leader in the African slave trade. Of the 12.7 million Africans sold into slavery by their own people from 1501-1875, only 2.4 percent went to the United States. The vast majority went to Portugal (46%) and England (26%). Sowell notes that, today, there are 40 million slaves worldwide -- three times more than the total number in the 400-year history of the transatlantic African slave trade. Nearly 94 of the nearly 200 nations in the world have not criminalized slavery or the slave trade.

As they ponder the effect of slavery on the presumed wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in America, students should also read Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, in which Keith Richburg concludes that descendants of slaves brought to America from Africa are far better off than the descendants of those who were left in Africa. American Blacks are richer than 90 percent of the people in the world, live longer than African and Caribbean Blacks, and even Whites, in much of Eastern Europe and Latin America, have higher rates of literacy, and have achieved more postsecondary degrees than African Blacks.

How will students determine who should pay? Black descendants of Black slave owners? Descendants of White Southerners even though fewer than 10 percent of Southerners owned slaves? Descendants of post-Civil immigrants who now comprise the majority of Whites in America?

Will students consider, as part of the debt they believe is owed, the decades of welfare payments and affirmative action that has allowed Blacks to enter universities and obtain employment based on preferential treatment?

In their zeal to prove that slavery is the cause for the wealth gap of Blacks in the U.S., students should include the role of government in creating dependency. Although the poverty rate had dropped from 32.1 percent to 14.7 percent prior to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, its entitlement programs have actually increased dependency. Government programs have fostered a Black culture with single-parent families mostly locked in a life of inner-city gang violence.

The fact is that the reparations course predetermines that students will be indoctrinated into the Marxist ideology of victimization rather than conducting unbiased discovery. The course outcome will be further radicalized students who are being taught that the U.S. -- and specifically all Whites – is inherently racist.

“Reparations Math and Reparations History” is simply Critical Race Theory embedded into math and history lessons. Since a number of states have bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory, will this course be allowed in the schools? Most likely, yes.

The 1619 Project was created by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2019 in collaboration with the New York Times. Rather than a history of the United States, it is a journalistic work that claims slavery, not liberty, was our founding principal and our War of Independence from Britain was fought to preserve slavery. The project is the vehicle for those who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery. An entire curriculum with reading guides, activities, and other resources was created.

Pulitzer Center, the curriculum partner of the 1619 Project, has already rolled out English lesson plans, “Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap,” through its website as supplemental teaching materials for educators rather than official adoption by school districts. This is how the initial lessons were implemented in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states within five months. The new reparations math course will be sneaked into schools the same way.

School boards have been doing an end run around state bans on Common Core and Critical Race Theory by denying that the curriculum has been adopted. They fail to tell parents that supplemental materials are being downloaded by teachers from the internet, with names changed to delude the parents when necessary. Parents need to understand the rules of the game and ask the right question: “Are any 1619 Project materials, including supplemental, being used in any way, whether adopted or not, and under any other name?