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(1) You haven't read most of the thing.
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Correct.
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(2) You rely on other people trashing it for your views, including a bunch of socialists who don't write very well but said some stuff on the internet.
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Incorrect. That was the most comprehensive analysis I'd seen. I based my views on a combination of different things I read within
1619 itself and about
1619.
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(3) You actually don't have much to quibble about when the substance is laid out, except that you think there was too much hyperbole that needed to be dialed back.
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Yes. One can frame it as hyperbole, which is natural way of looking at it given my own framing of it as an argument of absolutes where an argument of degree ought to have been used.
One could also see it as an attempt to state a position that's flatly inaccurate -- that slavery and racism are the most important defining characteristics of the country. I'm happy to avoid that by moving to an argument of degree and not getting caught up in the semantics. But the criticism that such a statement is simply untrue, and not undone by a charitable allowance that the author actually meant to suggest racism and slavery are one of many important characteristics of the country, is also a valid position.
A cynic would assert that the author may have been trying to get away with a false absolute and when caught was compelled to drop back to a less severe position.
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(4) Let's repeat that last one, you, Sebby, the Sultan of Overstatement, the Pooba of Puffery, object to a journalist using hyperbole.
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First, see my last sentence just above this one. Second, yeah, I like lobbing missiles where hand grenades might be fine. I regularly violate Buckley's rule that if one writes too aggressively, one undoes his own point, even if his is a winner. BUT... There's naked overstatement, rhetorical fireworks which convey that the author is availing himself of considerable license, and then there's overstatement which offers itself as sincere. If Jones had written her essay in a firebrand style, she'd deserve the benefit of the doubt. But she didn't. She ran with an extreme argument dressed up as a mainstream position.
