Il y a quelques jours le New York Times lançait un projet audacieux porté par la journaliste Nikole Hannah-Jones. On propose ici une version différente de l'histoire américaine en modifiant même la date de la fondation du pays. On situe donc le commencement non pas en 1776 avec la déclaration du 4 juillet, mais bien avec l'arrivée des premiers Africains à entrer en Virginie. De multiples aspects de l'histoire du pays sont analysés sous l'angle de la contribution forcée ou volontaire des premiers esclaves et de leurs descendants. Si cette perspective est intéressante, et à mon avis nécessaire, mais elle ne plaît pas à bien des observateurs, principalement aux politiciens ou aux citoyens de droite ou d'extrême-droite. Le Washington Post s'intéresse ici à ces réactions.
"The project was deeply researched and fact-checked with the assistance of a panel of historians. Elements of it were conducted in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, a venerable pillar of American learning. It’s a serious work of popular history that starts America’s clock four centuries ago. (The Washington Post published its own reckoning with 1619.)
What followed was 250 years of brutal slavery the United States, then a century of de facto apartheid rule. Hannah-Jones, 43, stresses that she is part of only the first generation of black Americans born in a country where it was not legal to discriminate against them.
But this reframing proved all too much for an assorted cast of American conservatives. Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House, blasted the Times for printing “propaganda.” President Trump echoed the talking points of right-wing media, decrying the “zero credibility” paper’s “Racism Witch Hunt.” And conservative pundit Erick Erickson lamented the “racial lenses” that the project deployed to look at a history of black subjugation.
For right-wing nationalists, there’s little room for the recognition of fundamental evil, of an original sin, in the founding myth of the nation. A commentator for the far-right Federalist website complained that the project’s goal was to “delegitimize America and further divide and demoralize its citizenry."
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