The 1619 Project is a bit of a rabbit hole since it is, in a lot of ways, ground zero for the current controversy over CRT. To make a long story short, it was a massive piece ran in the New York Times that posited 1619 was the real founding year for America rather than 1776 as it was the first year slaves were traded in the New World. From there, everything about the US has been about keeping black people slaves, and when we couldn't keep them literal slaves and had the Civil War, it means we kept them pretty much slaves in all but name only. This includes claims that the Revolution wasn't fought over any real ideals but rather because Britain looked like it might abolish slavery sometime in the near future and the founders couldn't bear to give up their slaves. Even left wing historians were calling out how poorly researched the whole thing was and clearly contradictory to anything we know about American history.
Fast forward some time later and the whole country was engulfed in controversy over it. The most prestigious paper in the country (and maybe the entire world) had published a huge thing positing, against all historical consensus of any kind, that our country's entire reason to exist is to be racist against black people. A lot of normies for the first time found out about CRT and its claims about systemic racism and "whiteness." The author has since made herself into a martyr because people had the gall to criticize her and tried to play language games about "oh, you know, it's just a theory about America's history" and other deflections from having to rigorously defend her project from basic historical criticism. Somebody who followed it closer could probably give a more detailed account of the whole thing, but that's the gist of it.
Also, no, you can't ask who owned the boats because that's not the point. The purpose is to ignore any fact of history and instead cast everything as a metaphysical struggle against the racism emanating from the souls of white people, who have engineered all the world to be racist. If whites don't own the boats, the people who do are only trading slaves because of the whiteness in their hearts.