Jacobin Show: The Left Case Against the 1619 Project w/ James Oakes
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2021
⏱️ 91 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Historian James Oakes explains how the 1619 Project misconstrues the relationship between slavery and capitalism and what the left can learn from the mass politics of the antislavery movement.
The Jacobin Show offers socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the podcast version of the show from September 28, 2021 with Jen Pan and Cale Brooks hosting. The historian Matt Karp joins the program as well.
Verso book club:https://www.versobooks.com/bookclub
Subscribe to Jacobin for just $10:https://jacobinmag.com/subscribe/?code=JACOBINYT
Music provided by Zonkey:https://linktr.ee/zonkey
Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/jacobinmag
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, welcome back to the Jack of In Show. |
| 0:20.6 | I'm Jen Pan, here today with a special guest host, that's right, it's your and my favorite |
| 0:27.8 | video editor, Kale Brooks. Kale with Shaken. Hey, yeah, I'm, I'm not typically on screen |
| 0:34.6 | and probably for good reason, but happy to, happy to co-host today. And happy to, to take |
| 0:41.5 | down, you know, the, the scourge that's, you know, coming across America, waved by wave, |
| 0:47.1 | year by year, and set it, set the record straight finally. |
| 0:52.2 | We will set the record straight. We are interviewing James Oaks. We actually pre-recorded the interview. |
| 0:59.4 | So we spoke to him yesterday. I thought it was a really, really fantastic and in-depth interview. |
| 1:05.3 | He talks, of course, about the 1619 project. As I think a lot of you probably know, he has |
| 1:11.2 | some pretty fierce, but I think well informed and very rigorous criticisms of the project. |
| 1:20.4 | Of course, he's also a renowned scholar of slavery, anti-slavery, emancipation, Lincoln |
| 1:27.3 | and the Civil War. So he talks about all of that as well. And Kale, you actually got a chance |
| 1:33.0 | to obviously hear that interview beforehand. So you can, you can vouch that it's a good one. |
| 1:37.6 | Yeah, no, we, we went to him not because he's like, you know, a polemic person. It's because he's |
| 1:42.8 | like one of America's most serious historians of this period. And he finds this project |
| 1:49.0 | coming out of the New York Times wrong. And that's significant. And so I think he does a pretty |
| 1:55.9 | fair and an accurate job of explaining what his issues are. And then, you know, you can hopefully |
| 2:00.9 | make your mind up if, you know, if your mind isn't already made up. And speaking of serious |
| 2:06.4 | historians, because we were sort of thinking through the themes of this show and, you know, |
| 2:12.3 | we had this great interview with James Oaks yesterday, we realized that we would be remiss if |
| 2:19.0 | we did not invite a very special surprise guest for this episode. That's right. It is our friend |
| 2:25.9 | Matt Carp. You know him as a historian of the Civil War. He teaches over at Princeton. And I was |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jacobin, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Jacobin and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.