Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

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Welcome to the Quillett podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

Most of us learned in school that the United States took its first definitive form in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed.

But last year, the New York Times developed something called the 1619 project, an interactive collection of articles, poems, stories, and photos that traces

the real beginning of the United States to the year 1619, when the first black slaves arrived

in what is now mainland North America. The creator of the project

Nicole Hannah Jones has promoted an ambitious and controversial historical theory

namely that the protection of slavery was one of the main factors motivating the American

revolutionary movement, and a number of respected historians have criticized its content.

To discuss the 1619 project, I spoke this week to Colette contributor Coleman Hughes, who together with other well-known black writers and scholars has created a counterpoint to the 1619 project known as the 1776 project. We discussed American history, Black Lives Matter, and Hugh's own frustrations with the modern obsession with racial identity.

Here are excerpts from our conversation.

The 1619 project, can you tell me what its goal was?

The goal of the 1619 project was to reframe American history to place slavery and white supremacy

at the center of the story that we tell ourselves about who we are. The tactic that was chosen to do this was to say that metaphorically, the beginning of the country was not 1776, the Declaration of Independence. Rather it was 1619 when the first

Africans were brought to colonial Virginia. And the goal was to produce not just journalism,

...