Disney Hulu’s The 1619 Project — a streaming adaptation of the widely discredited New York Times series — received three Emmy Award nominations on Wednesday, including a nod for best docuseries.
The streaming series, hosted by the Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones, is pushing for at least $16 trillion in slavery reparations while also attempting to resurrect Hannah-Jones’ debunked claim that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery.
The 1619 Project received Emmy nominations in the categories of docuseries, cinematography, and editing. The series was co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, Lionsgate, and the New York Times.
ABC, which is also owned by Disney, aired a truncated version of the Hulu series during primetime in May.
The Hulu series argues that the final reparations bill for U.S. taxpayers will come to about $14 trillion — and that, one “expert” says, is letting America off easy.
The alarming figure comes in the series’ sixth and final episode during a conversation between Hannah-Jones and William Darity Jr., a Duke University professor and proponent of social “equity.”
Darity estimates that each individual should receive about $350,000 in reparations. Since there are 40 million black-American descendants of slavery out of a total of 45 million black people in the United States, the total bill would be approximately $14 trillion dollars.
“It is a big debt. But you know, I’ve seen estimates of the bill that have run as high as $6.2 quadrillion dollars. So yeah, I do think it’s helpful –– $14 trillion might be letting, you know, America off a little bit easier,” Darity says. “I mean, pretty much any number you put on. It would be letting America off easy.”
The original Times series won a Pulitzer Prize despite multiple noted academics debunking one of its central claims — that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery. The newspaper eventually corrected references to the contested claim.
The Times also deleted its central claim that 1619, not 1776, is the “true founding of America.”
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