The New York Times has announced the 1619 Project, and its leftist friends are already lapping it up.  MSNBC hails it thusly: "How slavery has defined America today."

That's right.  Slavery can no longer be just a stain on our nation's past.  Leftists are rewriting history to make it our Origin Story.  Without slavery, they would have us believe, America today would be just another third-world hellhole.  Everything good and decent and remarkable and exceptional about America today is a direct result of slavery.  To make this case, they push the founding of America back from 1776 — you know, the Declaration of Independence and all that other "white patriarchy" stuff — to 1619, when the first African slaves arrived on our shores.

I think it could fairly and accurately be said that progressive policy since the 1960s has created a permanent black underclass in America today.  We see this dynamic manifest most clearly in the large metropolitan areas that have been governed primarily, if not exclusively, by Democrats for the last half-century or better: Detroit; Chicago; St. Louis; Washington, D.C.; Oakland; and, of course, Baltimore.

Progressive policy condemns poor minority schoolchildren to failure factories every day and has for generations.  As progressive politicians tell us "education is the civil rights issue of our age" (and I couldn't agree with them more!), they're also fighting tooth and nail to do everything in their power to defeat initiatives that have proven successful everywhere they've been tried that could provide at least some of these kids an escape valve from the apocalyptic hellscapes they've created, charter schools and voucher programs being the best examples. 

The unholy alliance between teacher unions and Democratic politicians should be the greatest scandal of our age.  Why doesn't the vaunted New York Times do a "project" on that topic?  That's an endeavor that could actually facilitate meaningful change today and would be far more productive than rewriting history from 400 years ago.  Unfortunately, those at the New York Times no longer have the intellectual honesty to subject themselves to that level of introspection but are absolutely giddy at the prospect of further fanning the flames of racial resentment and division in America today.

Did anyone notice that President, Barack Obama did not send his girls to D.C. public schools?  He sent them to the ultra-exclusive Sidwell Friends private school while letting the voucher program that allowed a few fortunate minority students to attend school with his daughters expire.  I guess these now unfortunate students were returned to the failure factories they thought they had been rescued from.  How traumatic that must have been for them.  None of the Democratic politicians in the cities cited above would ever send their children to these schools.  It is more than hypocritical for these politicians to tell those unfortunate enough to reside in the ghettos they've created that the public schools there are fine for your children but not for ours.  It's immoral. 

Social policy that discourages or penalizes two-parent nuclear families has been devastating to black communities.  Progressives bemoan the "income gap" between blacks and whites while simultaneously ignoring the academic "achievement gap" that is largely responsible for it, or worse, inventing "white privilege" narratives to justify and excuse it.  If progressive politicians were more committed to closing this achievement gap than to raking in campaign contributions from teacher unions, they would be all for charters and vouchers.  That Republicans can't exploit these dichotomies is a subject for another day, perhaps scandalous enough in itself.

Progressives can never admit that the policies and social engineering they've foisted on black communities over the last 60 years are why we have the permanent underclass we see today, so they must divert attention from this reality by creating narratives like "white privilege."  Democratic politicians of all colors have no misgivings whatsoever about condemning generations of poor black Americans to an existence of poverty, hopelessness, despair, and inter-generational government dependence.  Progressives have no choice but to create excuses that cast the blame for large swaths of black America's lived experience on anything and anyone but themselves.  The 1619 Project is just the latest of these diversions.