Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not Much
Mains level: World History: American decolonization
The White House has released the 1776 Commission report, just days before president-elect Joe Biden would take his oath in office.
Read about anti-apartheid movement from your World History sources.
What is the news?
- Earlier, Trump has signed an executive order to set up a “national commission to promote patriotic education” in the country.
- The initiative dubbed the ‘1776 Commission’, is an apparent counter to The 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of essays on African American history of the past four centuries.
- It explores the Black community’s contribution to nation-building since the era of slavery to modern times.
- The name marks the independence of 13 US colonies from the British Empire in 1776.
What is Trump’s 1776 Commission?
- With this move, Trump sought to activate his right-wing supporters by doubling down on what he described as “cancel culture”, “critical race theory” and “revisionist history”.
- Looking at the racial attacks, trump had said that Americans are inundated with critical race theory.
- This was a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression.
- Trump wanted to reform this idea and wanted to portray himself as a defender of traditional American heritage against “radical” liberals.”
What was the 1619 Project?
- The Project is a special initiative of The New York Times Magazine, launched in 2019 to mark the completion of 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in colonial Virginia’s Jamestown in August 1619.
- The project aimed to reframe US history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as America’s birth year.
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