A Tale of Two Declarations
Bradley Rebeiro* | 25.4 | Citation: Bradley Rebeiro, A Tale of Two Declarations, 25 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 915 (2023).
It is hard to not feel the heavy weight of the US’s current identity crisis. As the nation comes to grip with its past in a way perhaps not seen for over a hundred years, we struggle to understand that past, let alone carve out a way forward for the future. A microcosm of this struggle might be seen in the tension between the 1619 Project and the 1776 Unites project. On the one hand, the 1619 Project was launched in 2019 as an initiative to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Its proponents argue that the real foundations of the nation lay not in 1776, or in 1787–88 for that matter, but in 1619, when slavery was first introduced to the continent. The nation’s founding, as such, does not deserve our loyalty or respect given its dark, reprehensible nature. The 1619 Project’s reframing of the nation’s history in terms of slavery and its legacy has influenced the public mind and helped reorient scholarship. The project 1776 Unites, on the other hand, attempts to respond to the 1619 Project by explaining the foundational themes of the American experience as a story of self-determination, equality, and resilience. It was upon these values, 1776 Unites argues, that the US was founded. Among this war of alternative histories, one may find it difficult to come to terms with America’s legacy and what that legacy would mean for political action today.
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* Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University.