Whatever Tom Cotton meant to say, he agrees w/ Pompeo, Gingrich, Guelzo, et al that the 1619 Project is a threat to their vision of America. But most Black folks never bought that story. The 1619 Project matters to these guys b/c it threatens their control of white ppl.
To believe in their leadership, you have to believe that, whatever our faults & foibles, America has been the shining light of God’s truth to the world since we rejected tyranny in favor of the “bold vision” that propertied white men agreed to in Constitutional Hall.
If you go all the way back to 1619, then you have to deal not only w/ the inscription of racial caste into Virginia law, but also w/ Bacon’s Rebellion & the fact that white men like Jefferson would have had no property in 1776 if British tyranny hadn’t come to his ancestors aid.
The very idea of a “free white man” in the 18th century depended on a plantation system that had convinced poor white people not to join w/ Black & Native people to overthrow their local tyrants.
For the 400th anniversary of 1619, I made a pilgrimage to Ft Monroe w/ 3 generations of my Southern white family. We reflected together on what the injustices done to white people had done to our ancestors, our faith & us. On the ride home, we read @nhannahjones aloud. 
Standing beneath the Freedom Tree at Hampton University, we talked about how our white ancestors—women & men my parents knew as children—would have never gotten a public education in the late 19th cen were it not for the determination of Black people to pass universal public ed.
W/out the Black political power that was real for a time during Reconstruction, our family couldn’t imagine our life in the 20th cen. This is what Tom Cotton & Co are really afraid of.
Once white folks catch on to the fact that most of us do better when genuine democracy is practiced, the minority rule that many white Americans go along w/ is impossible to maintain. Appeals to “traditional values” & nationalism fall flat.
Once you remember how we got here, it becomes clear that the Tom Cottons of the world aren’t serving the interests of most of us. The 1619 Project scares them to death b/c it challenges the myth that their power rests upon.
