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It is true that the project was initiated by journalists and the media apparatus, rather than by historians directly. It's worth mentioning in passing that Journalism is also an academic field, and one that Hannah-Jones is reasonably likely to be inducted into in the future, given the evident status resulting from her project.
Here is the 1619 project's bibliography. Pretty clearly, Jones drew heavily from "legitimate" academic and pseudo-academic sources (Kendi, Coates and similar, people it's not a good idea for an academic to disagree with) from a variety of fields, including history, in the production of her project. I am confident she was assisted in her project by many professional academics, including professional historians. She presented her project as history, and she was able to do so because actual historians provided her legitimized raw material and legitimized her output in turn.
Within the field of history specifically, people spoke out. James H Sweet, President of the American Historical Association, penned an article titled Is History History?. An answer to the title's question might be inferred by the abject apology that now precedes the article, in which he defends precisely zero of his previous points.
At least five other prominent historians were willing to speak out against it under their actual names, with the result that general descriptions note that it's controversial due to disputed accuracy of some elements of its narrative, making it indistinguishable from every other historical account ever written. In no way does this extremely limited pushback from within the discipline appear to have counteracted the 1619 project's effect on broader culture. The author has attacked those objecting to her project's lies as motivated by racism, and claimed that objectivity in History is impossible in any case and so her story is as good as any. Historians as a academic class appear to be smiling and nodding, or, at most, argue that this is a valuable contribution to the national conversation and the real problem is pushback from legislators.
Her project appears to have been accepted as history by large portions (supermajorities?) of the broader Academy itself, together with most of the rest of the knowledge-production apparatus outside academia proper, and through these channels has also been accepted by large portions of the public. It was subsequently converted into educational materials specifically for teaching history at all levels of education from grade school to University, and for this purpose was in fact adopted as formal curricula many teachers across many schools, and has doubtless heavily influenced the curricula and teaching of many, many more. It continues, to this day, to be generally considered a valid resource for teaching history, even at the university level.
...Given the above, how is the 1619 product not an output of History as an academic discipline, by which that discipline should be judged?
More generally, what is the purpose of History as a formal, credentialed, taxpayer-funded, status-laden academic discipline and sociocultural organ, in your view? What is the point of it, why is it valuable? There are always going to be autists digging for information about the past, synthesizing it down into coherence, and then encapsulating it for transmission in a narrative. I'm one of them, in my own modest way. Why is it necessary that this system in particular continue on?
My understanding once was that Historians generated a consensus understanding of the world we live in and how that world came to be, while simultaneously keeping that consensus as honest as possible by puncturing its self-delusions. I am quite convinced that the current system is incapable of performing such a function, as I believe examples like the 1619 project demonstrate.
Another argument might be that the system generates significant amounts of true knowledge, and that even if that true knowledge is shouted down and buried in the present, it is still possible to dig it up later and use it for the betterment of all. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the harm the system enables in the present and has enabled in the observable past, significantly outweighs any plausible potential benefit in the future. True knowledge can and will be generated outside the present system, and the scale of the harms appear to me to demand immediate redress.
Or perhaps the present system is about the process, not the observed ends. The important thing is to generate and maintain this lively, interesting, collegial intellectual ferment, where smart people get together and bounce zany ideas off each other, and we fund this in the hope that they'll hit on some bizarre, out-of-the-box idea that's super useful, something we'd never find by looking for it in a rational, systematic, spreadsheets-and-time-cards approach. And if this is the argument... You concede bias, but I do not think the term "bias" adequately encapsulates the scope of the problem.
And so on, and on. It is routine for Academics of all disciplines to call for ideological purging of people like me from the academy. It is routine for academics to express support for discrimination and exclusion of people like me from the academy, whether in polls or in their own public advocacy. I do not believe it is possible for my views or my values to receive a fair hearing in any part of the existing academic system. I do not believe it is practical for members of my tribe to attempt to join that system in hopes of reforming it from within. I do not believe that the system can be meaningfully reformed in any eventuality; Academics, collectively, have built the environment they wish to have and fully intend to maintain it, at any cost, while burning vast resources and generating considerable harms. The solution is not to ask them kindly to please not, nor to generate ineffectual mandates in the face of limitless resistance and bottomless malicious compliance.
The job we gave Academia was one of great import. They willingly accepted a sacred duty, and in my view they have willingly betrayed that duty about as thoroughly as it could possibly be betrayed. One of the patterns I've noticed in Moderate thinking is the ability to recognize that if bad choices are made, negative consequences are likely to result, but then when the bad choice is in fact made, to argue that the negative consequences they themselves predicted should nonetheless be restrained. My unwillingness to engage in such behavior is, I think, one of the things that marks me as an extremist. There have been no shortage of warnings to the Academy that if they continued to convert their system into a partisan war-engine for their tribe, the system itself would be in peril. They continued. I think it is time to actualize the peril. If you disagree, I'd be particularly interested in whether you disagree over where to draw the line beyond which the system must be dismantled, or if you disagree that there is such a line at all.
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