Talk:Leslie M. Harris

Stance on 1619

Regarding these diffs, @InformationCheck:: you're right that the article subject says that the project ignored some of her cautions and repeated information that she said was not true. The sentence as I wrote it was "she has written both about mistakes that were made in that project and about the illegitimacy of some critiques of it". The fact that she has written about mistakes that were made in that project was absolutely acknowledged in the article. When you say she "is speaking to the LEGITIMACY of the critics", yes, she is speaking to the legitimacy of some of the critiques of the project, that's exactly why I wrote that first half of the sentence. But when you are deleting the second half of that sentence, you are eliding an extremely important half of the story which is in one of the sources cited in that sentence: in the Politico article, she writes "Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that’s exactly what has happened." That's what the second half of the sentence is aiming to capture: that she believes that some of the critiques are correct, because there were factual errors, but overall those errors have been used to illegitimately criticize the project. I'd much rather have a consensus than an edit war so I will now try to restructure the sentence in a way that makes it clearer what her position is. - Astrophobe (talk) 18:39, 13 July 2020 (UTC)