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The 1619 Project
The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
98 pages
First published August 18, 2019
About the author
Nikole Hannah-Jones
19 books893 followersNikole Hannah-Jones is an American investigative journalist known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. In April 2015, she became a staff writer for The New York Times.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
August 17, 2020
My issue with this collection is that it is too simplistic in its analysis in a way that verges on counterproductive at times. Yes, slavery is crucial to understanding America. But 1) Not everything is reducible to slavery (as a minor example, the claim that contemporary black hair styles come out of slavery is such a simplification of history as to be essentially false and erases the impact of the "Black is Beautiful" movement of the 1960s) and 2) tracing everything back to slavery ignores the question of why slavery started in the first place, namely capitalism. In fact, the opening essay actually tries to claim that capitalism can be "liberating" if only practiced correctly (whatever correctly means). The reality is if you could only pick one mode of analysis, then you could do much more to solve the problems raised here by examining capitalism than by examining slavery (of course you can and should use both modes of analysis, but I'm highlighting the point), so to not examine capitalism at all is a significant failure in the project.
You will never be able to publish something actually radical (especially Black and radical) in the NYT, but Jones knows that and the NYT knows Jones isn't radical anyway.
I'm glad this exists and if read by the right people it could do some good, but I left disappointed.
You will never be able to publish something actually radical (especially Black and radical) in the NYT, but Jones knows that and the NYT knows Jones isn't radical anyway.
I'm glad this exists and if read by the right people it could do some good, but I left disappointed.
March 8, 2020
Worth every moment of your time; ought to be required reading. A couple of pieces relating to health care are particularly relevant right now.
May 30, 2020
Read all the stories | Listen to the PodcastFrom traffic to healthcare to incarceration, every facet of our society can be traced to the history of slavery and continued racism in our country. The 1619 Project is a collection of essays that examines the legacy of slavery and is a good first step for people looking to educate themselves and confront their privilege.
I read all of the essays and then listened to the podcast episodes, and highly recommend both formats. I especially enjoyed the inclusion of archival records in the podcast and that they supplement one another.
“Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending,” they note in “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”; “it is a heartfelt cry about where they fear ‘their country’ may be headed.” And Tea Party adherents’ “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people,” they write, “signal a larger fear about generational social change in America.”If you only read one of these essays, please read What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery.
It is worth mentioning that not all historians agree with interpretation of history in this collection, as discussed in this Atlantic article "Historians Clash with The 1619 Project", but the facts presented are historically accurate. History is about the analysis of events, and it is rare for a consensus to be reached in the field - especially when it's reframing the history of an entire country.
Confronting the systems of power in place to disenfranchise people is difficult but important work. The first step is realizing how insidious these systems are and how we unknowingly play into and benefit from them.
November 29, 2020
This was well researched and presented.
I'd go further than this author and say the modern western world exists as a result of West African chattel slavery.
Colonialism can't be removed from it.
It starts before 1492, about 50 yrs before and also can't ever be removed from capitalism.
Ethical capitalism is like ethical slavery, a myth. So any semi positive references to capitalism are a reflection that this project doesn't go back far enough🤷🏾♀️
I'd go further than this author and say the modern western world exists as a result of West African chattel slavery.
Colonialism can't be removed from it.
It starts before 1492, about 50 yrs before and also can't ever be removed from capitalism.
Ethical capitalism is like ethical slavery, a myth. So any semi positive references to capitalism are a reflection that this project doesn't go back far enough🤷🏾♀️
September 8, 2019
I took my time reading every word of this New York Times supplement about recasting the history of the US through the crucible of slavery and it was well worth every moment.
June 11, 2020
Highly informative, full of well researched details that illustrate systemic injustices. Eye-opening !
June 24, 2020
Absolutely required reading. I thought several of the essays could have dived into more extensive detail, but they provide an impeccable overview.
December 31, 2020
There is nothing new that I could add that has not been said about the vital importance of this document. Essential reading.
July 7, 2021
I couldn’t find a copy of the articles for this series. Instead I listen to the podcast. At first I thought I was getting all kinds of new information. Later I found out this information was false & had no historical truth. I really hate it when their is false information put out, especially when it is done so to support a cause. At least I discovered the truth about this publication.
November 28, 2019
All Americans should read this.
April 8, 2021
I used to listen to the New York Times’ Podcast: The Daily pretty religiously. One might even say daily. Occasionally they would have a spin-off or mini-series take over for an episode to encourage you to follow another feed. The zealot that I was, I always subscribed and listened to the new episodes offered to me, 1619 was one of their best. I remember being floored by the series, especially the episode on appropriation of Black music titled The Birth of American Music. 1619 is much easier to consume than The 1619 Project, but that doesn’t mean one is better than the other, it’s just the truth of reading and brevity. There are reasons I think 1619 exceeds its print self, but those are so inherently political, I don’t know if there’s any truth past my bias. Let that be a warning should we ideologically not agree.
I stopped putting so much stock in the NYT when they consistently talked about how sorry they felt about the 2016 election, while giving Biden the Hillary treatment; “we shouldn’t have given Trump so much air time” followed by an episode about his supporters was eerily similar to their earlier missteps, not to mention sandbagging the Left to celebrate the Center. Smarter Leftists than me could tell you plenty of other reasons to have jumped ship earlier, meanwhile I’m repeating my habits with NPR and praying critical thinking keeps me from drinking any more Kool-aid than I already have. I’m still subscribed to the NYT morning newsletter, I feel fine in my cynic-colored glasses. I stand by my endorsement of the 1619 podcast, though I haven’t re-listened since the first time it came into my feed.
The New York Times is a great publication for centrist Democrats who love Aaron Sorkin, the magazine is right in line with that demographic. I get the sense that any other issue I would have put down or thrown away before getting more than a few pages in; having cared so deeply for the podcast I wanted to power through to the end. I’m glad I did. Speaking of Sorkin, the magazine begins with a centerfold ad for his To Kill a Mockingbird, I guess to remind the reader that white men are still profiting off of Black trauma? One hell of a tone-deaf way to start the issue on the exploitation of Black people. The American history of this magazine filled in gaps that my American education left blank, the poetry took up more space in my heart than the single pages they were printed on in the magazine, but the article I’m going to return to whenever I think about this magazine was the one on capitalism. Undoing everything The 1619 Project intended, the message I left with was, “capitalism is good, it’s too bad America’s is so tied up in slavery because it would actually work so well if only Black people held the means of production”. It’s like in elementary school when you read about Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams of multiracial hand-holding, but none of his socialist ideals that had the CIA sending letters telling him to kill himself. It’s so hard for me to take the rest of the magazine seriously when this article spent six pages missing its own point. Capitalism is not a tool of racism, it’s the other way around and there’s no version of capitalism without oppression.
The magazine reads like a history book sandwiching remarkable poetry and flash fiction relevant to the material. The flow of the piece stumbles on itself, I found myself skipping around to more bite-sized material between the dense textual history of Black oppression. I can’t critique it for being in chronological order because the importance of its words felt bigger than my reading pleasure. I’m not one to read my news in one go, I like to consume it as it comes to me, article by article, newsletter by newsletter. This wasn’t for me and I read every last drop. Don’t subscribe to this magazine, there are others more worth your time, but if you happen to find this issue on your apartment’s free-shelf as I did, pick it it up and educate yourself. Or don’t, there are other books written about the Black history of America whose intent can be more clearly traced than a news organization that tends to root for Wall Street.
I stopped putting so much stock in the NYT when they consistently talked about how sorry they felt about the 2016 election, while giving Biden the Hillary treatment; “we shouldn’t have given Trump so much air time” followed by an episode about his supporters was eerily similar to their earlier missteps, not to mention sandbagging the Left to celebrate the Center. Smarter Leftists than me could tell you plenty of other reasons to have jumped ship earlier, meanwhile I’m repeating my habits with NPR and praying critical thinking keeps me from drinking any more Kool-aid than I already have. I’m still subscribed to the NYT morning newsletter, I feel fine in my cynic-colored glasses. I stand by my endorsement of the 1619 podcast, though I haven’t re-listened since the first time it came into my feed.
The New York Times is a great publication for centrist Democrats who love Aaron Sorkin, the magazine is right in line with that demographic. I get the sense that any other issue I would have put down or thrown away before getting more than a few pages in; having cared so deeply for the podcast I wanted to power through to the end. I’m glad I did. Speaking of Sorkin, the magazine begins with a centerfold ad for his To Kill a Mockingbird, I guess to remind the reader that white men are still profiting off of Black trauma? One hell of a tone-deaf way to start the issue on the exploitation of Black people. The American history of this magazine filled in gaps that my American education left blank, the poetry took up more space in my heart than the single pages they were printed on in the magazine, but the article I’m going to return to whenever I think about this magazine was the one on capitalism. Undoing everything The 1619 Project intended, the message I left with was, “capitalism is good, it’s too bad America’s is so tied up in slavery because it would actually work so well if only Black people held the means of production”. It’s like in elementary school when you read about Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams of multiracial hand-holding, but none of his socialist ideals that had the CIA sending letters telling him to kill himself. It’s so hard for me to take the rest of the magazine seriously when this article spent six pages missing its own point. Capitalism is not a tool of racism, it’s the other way around and there’s no version of capitalism without oppression.
The magazine reads like a history book sandwiching remarkable poetry and flash fiction relevant to the material. The flow of the piece stumbles on itself, I found myself skipping around to more bite-sized material between the dense textual history of Black oppression. I can’t critique it for being in chronological order because the importance of its words felt bigger than my reading pleasure. I’m not one to read my news in one go, I like to consume it as it comes to me, article by article, newsletter by newsletter. This wasn’t for me and I read every last drop. Don’t subscribe to this magazine, there are others more worth your time, but if you happen to find this issue on your apartment’s free-shelf as I did, pick it it up and educate yourself. Or don’t, there are other books written about the Black history of America whose intent can be more clearly traced than a news organization that tends to root for Wall Street.
August 20, 2021
The New York Times Magazine published this 100 page series of essays, poems, reflections, and think-pieces in commemoration of the first slave ship hitting the shores of Virginia in 1619. A devastatingly fascinating and horrifying read that addresses everything from the economy of slavery, the criminal justice system, red-lining, musical influences, healthcare, traffic/highway issue roots, and so, so much more. My head was spinning but more pieces to this complex puzzle clarified each time I read an article. Case studies that truly give me a better understanding and increased empathy for how slavery and deep rooted prejudice have stunted an entire race in the US.
The magazine will be published later this year in book format and therefore will be more widely available.
“Sept. 15, 1963: A group of Ku Klux Klansmen bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., a center of the civil rights movement. Four young girls are killed, and at least 14 people are injured. Years later, three of the four conspirators are brought to trial and convicted; the fourth dies before he is tried.
My daughter’s three months old. A nightmare rocks me awake, and then fourteen words: Brevity.
As in four girls; Sunday dresses: bone, ash, bone, ash, bone. The end. 1963, but still burning. My darkening girl
lies beside me, her tiny chest barely registering breath.
Had they lived beyond that morning, all the other explosions
shattering Birmingham — even some who called it home called it Bombingham — three of the girls would be 70,
the other 67. Somebody’s babies. The sentences I rescue from that nightmare, I make a poem. Four names,
grayscaled at the bottom of the page:
Addie Mae Collins. Cynthia Wesley. Carole Robertson. Denise McNair.
Revision is a struggle toward truth. In my book I won’t keep, The end.
For such terrible brevity — dear black girls! sweet babies — there’s been no end.
Poem by Camille T. Dungy
The 1619 Project
The magazine will be published later this year in book format and therefore will be more widely available.
“Sept. 15, 1963: A group of Ku Klux Klansmen bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., a center of the civil rights movement. Four young girls are killed, and at least 14 people are injured. Years later, three of the four conspirators are brought to trial and convicted; the fourth dies before he is tried.
My daughter’s three months old. A nightmare rocks me awake, and then fourteen words: Brevity.
As in four girls; Sunday dresses: bone, ash, bone, ash, bone. The end. 1963, but still burning. My darkening girl
lies beside me, her tiny chest barely registering breath.
Had they lived beyond that morning, all the other explosions
shattering Birmingham — even some who called it home called it Bombingham — three of the girls would be 70,
the other 67. Somebody’s babies. The sentences I rescue from that nightmare, I make a poem. Four names,
grayscaled at the bottom of the page:
Addie Mae Collins. Cynthia Wesley. Carole Robertson. Denise McNair.
Revision is a struggle toward truth. In my book I won’t keep, The end.
For such terrible brevity — dear black girls! sweet babies — there’s been no end.
Poem by Camille T. Dungy
The 1619 Project
July 1, 2020
*Note: I listened to the podcast.*
This podcast was fascinating, eye-opening, and heartbreaking. It’s like I read a book of United States’ history when I was in school, but a bunch of pages were ripped out; 1619 is those pages. Through six episodes, Nikole Hannah-Jones offers listeners a condensed history lesson that spans from 1619 to today. From the origins of slavery to the current litigation surrounding First Guaranty Bank’s acts of discrimination, listeners are immersed in facts and personal stories that broaden one’s perspective of our country’s history and the systemic racism that plagues our economic, entertainment, and healthcare systems, among others. Though the podcast never mentions reparations, it gives all the reasons they are deserved. 1619 should be required listening for everyone.
This podcast was fascinating, eye-opening, and heartbreaking. It’s like I read a book of United States’ history when I was in school, but a bunch of pages were ripped out; 1619 is those pages. Through six episodes, Nikole Hannah-Jones offers listeners a condensed history lesson that spans from 1619 to today. From the origins of slavery to the current litigation surrounding First Guaranty Bank’s acts of discrimination, listeners are immersed in facts and personal stories that broaden one’s perspective of our country’s history and the systemic racism that plagues our economic, entertainment, and healthcare systems, among others. Though the podcast never mentions reparations, it gives all the reasons they are deserved. 1619 should be required listening for everyone.
October 15, 2021
I listened to this one a second time to prepare for a staff discussion session. It was every bit as powerful the second time around.
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I know a podcast (or magazine feature, for that matter) isn't a book and probably shouldn't be counted, but I'm breaking the rules. The 1619 Project has been on my radar for a while, but I never made time to listen to it. I love audiobooks, but I'm not a big podcast listener so I never moved it up on my priority list. I'm kicking myself for sure now, though. This was compelling and educational. It was also absolutely maddening and heartbreaking at times, particularly the last two episodes. But, I think it's an important read/listen. We can't change where we're going until we fully understand how we got here.
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I know a podcast (or magazine feature, for that matter) isn't a book and probably shouldn't be counted, but I'm breaking the rules. The 1619 Project has been on my radar for a while, but I never made time to listen to it. I love audiobooks, but I'm not a big podcast listener so I never moved it up on my priority list. I'm kicking myself for sure now, though. This was compelling and educational. It was also absolutely maddening and heartbreaking at times, particularly the last two episodes. But, I think it's an important read/listen. We can't change where we're going until we fully understand how we got here.
July 2, 2020
The 1619 Project is basically promoting the same bourgeois narrative of American history with a slight twist to the historiography. This country is great and special. Chattel slavery was bad and uniquely American. America’s defining sin was denying civil and political rights to black people. It’s a very glib analysis that lacks any real serious critique of the role class and capitalism played in the rise of slavery/white supremacy. It’s pretty much what I expected from a Times piece sponsored by Shell.
August 21, 2021
Very interesting and difficult for me to read. It is a great first step for we of white privilege to begin our learning (since these topics were certainly never taught in school nor discussed much in our bubble).
Read
November 13, 2020Class requirement
March 18, 2022
I was lucky enough to be able to attend a lecture given by Nikole Hannah Jones in Waterloo, Iowa.
Her message at that meeting was clear. You can't ignore the generational pain caused by slavery and systemic racism You must seek to acknowledge it. You must embrace and understand it.
I tried to read this book with an open mind and open heart. In fact, I studied it. I dove into the footnotes while seeking to understand why I was taught differently.
I learned a lot. I learned we cannot and should not forget the wonderful and numerous contributions that people of color have made and are making to our culture. Those beautiful contributions make us who we are.
I learned that our country and Constitution were founded on lofty goals; A beautiful dream. I learned the dream was tainted from the beginning by fear, greed, malice and ignorance. But, the Constitution allows for change to occur.
We have changed for the better but, we still have a lot of work to do.
We still have hope. We still aspire to that dream. This dream can't be achieved by one race or religion alone. Either we all will succeed together or fail separately.
Buy this book. Read it with an open mind and heart. You will become better for it.
Her message at that meeting was clear. You can't ignore the generational pain caused by slavery and systemic racism You must seek to acknowledge it. You must embrace and understand it.
I tried to read this book with an open mind and open heart. In fact, I studied it. I dove into the footnotes while seeking to understand why I was taught differently.
I learned a lot. I learned we cannot and should not forget the wonderful and numerous contributions that people of color have made and are making to our culture. Those beautiful contributions make us who we are.
I learned that our country and Constitution were founded on lofty goals; A beautiful dream. I learned the dream was tainted from the beginning by fear, greed, malice and ignorance. But, the Constitution allows for change to occur.
We have changed for the better but, we still have a lot of work to do.
We still have hope. We still aspire to that dream. This dream can't be achieved by one race or religion alone. Either we all will succeed together or fail separately.
Buy this book. Read it with an open mind and heart. You will become better for it.
July 19, 2022
mixed bag. upsetting and depressing to see what we were and still are as a nation. the interspersed poetry is kind of annoying. the historical event that is described prior to the poem, much more compelling. The statistics of the continued disparity are especially upsetting. I can see why conservatives are upset with this. We'd like to pretend that racism is all behind us. It's not.
May 23, 2024
PROVOCATIVE? CONTROVERSIAL? PROFOUNDLY STIMULATING? DEFINITELY ‘YES’
This publication will be “must reading” for anyone studying American and African-American history, current events, and many other important subjects. But on the other hand, some of the excesses contained herein [e.g., “the colonists decided to declare their independence … to protect the institution of slavery”; “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country”] give even we VERY sympathetic readers some ‘cause for pause.’ The 20-30 Africans brought here in 1619 were probably ALREADY enslaved (and remember that even Malcolm X acknowledged in his ‘On Afro-American History’ lecture that “Africans sold slaves; we sold each other”), so it was an established institution that America originally inherited. While Jefferson’s ‘All men are created equal’ didn’t apply to slaves or women, it still WAS a very ‘revolutionary’ thought in 1776 (rejecting inherited ‘nobility,’ etc.). Also, 400,000 enslaved Africans---representing 3.6% of the 11 million enslaved---were less than one-fifth the new country’s population; should that proportion convince us to “reframe American history” and “regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year” for the other 80%? (And remember also that not ALL Blacks in America were enslaved; there were growing numbers of ‘free Blacks’ before the Civil War.)
The 1619 Project describes itself as “an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative… [I]n late August of 1619… a ship arrived … in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years… Out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional… long before our official birth date, in 1776… The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones [a staff writer for the NYT Magazine; she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her contributions here] states in the opening essay, “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all… Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire... Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.
“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves—black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different—it might not be a democracy at all.” (Pg. 16)
She continues, “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy… when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it.” (Pg. 18)
She adds, “For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our founding fathers did not. But it would not last. Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices.” (Pg. 21)
Tiya Miles [a professor in the history department at Harvard] wrote, “To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding. This ideology—that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race—did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.” (Pg. 24)
Mehrsa Baradaran [a professor at U.C. Irvine School of Law] wrote, “day laborers during slavery’s reign often lived under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty, and jobs meant to be worked for a few months were worked for lifetimes. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners. This not only created a starkly uneven playing field, dividing workers from themselves; it also made ‘all nonslavery appear as freedom,’ as the economic historian Stanley Engerman has written. Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse. So they generally accepted their lot, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage.” (Pg. 36)
Jamelle Bouie [a columnist, and analyst for CBS News] wrote, “The plantations that dotted the landscape of the antebellum South produced the commodities that fueled the nation’s early growth… But plantations didn’t just produce goods; they produced ideas too. Enslaved laborers developed an understanding of the society in which they lived. The people who enslaved them, likewise, constructed elaborate sets of beliefs, customs and ideologies meant to justify their positions in this economic and social hierarchy. Those ideas permeated the entire South, taking deepest root in places where slavery was most entrenched.” (Pg. 52)
Wesley Morris [a staff writer for the magazine] wrote, “American popular culture was doomed to cycles not only of questioned ownership, challenged authenticity, dubious propriety and legitimate cultural self-preservation but also to the prison of black respectability, which, with brutal irony, could itself entail a kind of appropriation. It meant comportment in a manner that seemed less black and more white. It meant the appearance of refinement and polish.” (Pg. 66)
Khalil Gibran Muhammad [a professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard] wrote, “It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything… Over the four centuries that followed Columbus’s arrival… countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage.” (Pg. 72) He continues, “Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of black people in the name of economic efficiency... Most of these stories of brutality, torture and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. They have been refined and whitewashed in the mills and factories of Southern folklore: the romantic South, the Lost Cause, the popular ‘moonlight and magnolias’ plantation tours so important to Louisiana’s agritourism today.” (Pg. 73)
Bryan Stevenson [executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative] wrote, “The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes. After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human ‘slaves,’ were seen as less than fully human ‘criminals.’ … Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people—making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control. These strategies intensified whenever black people asserted their independence or achieved any measure of success. During Reconstruction, the emergence of black elected officials and entrepreneurs was countered by convict leasing, a scheme in which white policymakers invented offenses used to target black people: vagrancy, loitering, being a group of black people out after dark, seeking employment without a note from a former enslaver. The imprisoned were then ‘leased’ to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions.” (Pg. 81)
Trymaine Lee [a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist] wrote, “Today’s racial wealth gap is perhaps the most glaring legacy of American slavery and the violent economic dispossession that followed… When legal slavery ended in 1865, there was great hope for formerly enslaved people. Between 1865 and 1870, the Reconstruction Amendments established birthright citizenship—making all black people citizens and granting them equal protection under the law—and gave black men the right to vote. There was also the promise of compensation. In January 1865, Gen. William Sherman issued an order reallocating hundreds of thousands of acres of white-owned land along the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina for settlement by black families in 40-acre plots. Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom, and the Freedman’s Savings Bank was formed to help four million formerly enslaved people gain financial freedom… [But then] After a decade of black gains under Reconstruction, a much longer period of racial violence would wipe nearly all of it away. To assuage Southern white people, the federal government pulled out the Union troops who were stationed in the South to keep order.” (Pg. 83)
Definitely, read this publication; but check out some of the published commentaries on it, as well.
This publication will be “must reading” for anyone studying American and African-American history, current events, and many other important subjects. But on the other hand, some of the excesses contained herein [e.g., “the colonists decided to declare their independence … to protect the institution of slavery”; “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country”] give even we VERY sympathetic readers some ‘cause for pause.’ The 20-30 Africans brought here in 1619 were probably ALREADY enslaved (and remember that even Malcolm X acknowledged in his ‘On Afro-American History’ lecture that “Africans sold slaves; we sold each other”), so it was an established institution that America originally inherited. While Jefferson’s ‘All men are created equal’ didn’t apply to slaves or women, it still WAS a very ‘revolutionary’ thought in 1776 (rejecting inherited ‘nobility,’ etc.). Also, 400,000 enslaved Africans---representing 3.6% of the 11 million enslaved---were less than one-fifth the new country’s population; should that proportion convince us to “reframe American history” and “regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year” for the other 80%? (And remember also that not ALL Blacks in America were enslaved; there were growing numbers of ‘free Blacks’ before the Civil War.)
The 1619 Project describes itself as “an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative… [I]n late August of 1619… a ship arrived … in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years… Out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional… long before our official birth date, in 1776… The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones [a staff writer for the NYT Magazine; she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her contributions here] states in the opening essay, “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all… Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire... Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.
“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves—black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different—it might not be a democracy at all.” (Pg. 16)
She continues, “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy… when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it.” (Pg. 18)
She adds, “For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our founding fathers did not. But it would not last. Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices.” (Pg. 21)
Tiya Miles [a professor in the history department at Harvard] wrote, “To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding. This ideology—that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race—did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.” (Pg. 24)
Mehrsa Baradaran [a professor at U.C. Irvine School of Law] wrote, “day laborers during slavery’s reign often lived under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty, and jobs meant to be worked for a few months were worked for lifetimes. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners. This not only created a starkly uneven playing field, dividing workers from themselves; it also made ‘all nonslavery appear as freedom,’ as the economic historian Stanley Engerman has written. Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse. So they generally accepted their lot, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage.” (Pg. 36)
Jamelle Bouie [a columnist, and analyst for CBS News] wrote, “The plantations that dotted the landscape of the antebellum South produced the commodities that fueled the nation’s early growth… But plantations didn’t just produce goods; they produced ideas too. Enslaved laborers developed an understanding of the society in which they lived. The people who enslaved them, likewise, constructed elaborate sets of beliefs, customs and ideologies meant to justify their positions in this economic and social hierarchy. Those ideas permeated the entire South, taking deepest root in places where slavery was most entrenched.” (Pg. 52)
Wesley Morris [a staff writer for the magazine] wrote, “American popular culture was doomed to cycles not only of questioned ownership, challenged authenticity, dubious propriety and legitimate cultural self-preservation but also to the prison of black respectability, which, with brutal irony, could itself entail a kind of appropriation. It meant comportment in a manner that seemed less black and more white. It meant the appearance of refinement and polish.” (Pg. 66)
Khalil Gibran Muhammad [a professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard] wrote, “It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything… Over the four centuries that followed Columbus’s arrival… countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage.” (Pg. 72) He continues, “Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of black people in the name of economic efficiency... Most of these stories of brutality, torture and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. They have been refined and whitewashed in the mills and factories of Southern folklore: the romantic South, the Lost Cause, the popular ‘moonlight and magnolias’ plantation tours so important to Louisiana’s agritourism today.” (Pg. 73)
Bryan Stevenson [executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative] wrote, “The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes. After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human ‘slaves,’ were seen as less than fully human ‘criminals.’ … Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people—making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control. These strategies intensified whenever black people asserted their independence or achieved any measure of success. During Reconstruction, the emergence of black elected officials and entrepreneurs was countered by convict leasing, a scheme in which white policymakers invented offenses used to target black people: vagrancy, loitering, being a group of black people out after dark, seeking employment without a note from a former enslaver. The imprisoned were then ‘leased’ to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions.” (Pg. 81)
Trymaine Lee [a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist] wrote, “Today’s racial wealth gap is perhaps the most glaring legacy of American slavery and the violent economic dispossession that followed… When legal slavery ended in 1865, there was great hope for formerly enslaved people. Between 1865 and 1870, the Reconstruction Amendments established birthright citizenship—making all black people citizens and granting them equal protection under the law—and gave black men the right to vote. There was also the promise of compensation. In January 1865, Gen. William Sherman issued an order reallocating hundreds of thousands of acres of white-owned land along the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina for settlement by black families in 40-acre plots. Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom, and the Freedman’s Savings Bank was formed to help four million formerly enslaved people gain financial freedom… [But then] After a decade of black gains under Reconstruction, a much longer period of racial violence would wipe nearly all of it away. To assuage Southern white people, the federal government pulled out the Union troops who were stationed in the South to keep order.” (Pg. 83)
Definitely, read this publication; but check out some of the published commentaries on it, as well.
August 23, 2023
Great read, heavy on history I learned so much that somehow got missed in 12 years of schooling.
October 12, 2021
I chose to read this novella-length journalistic endeavor (edited and introduced by the journalist and professor Nikole Hannah-Jones) for Banned Books Week. I didn't get it all done in one week, because it is IN DEPTH, but it rewards taking your time. This nonfiction work includes an ad recommending that teachers visit a website where they can (free of charge) find curricula, activities, and assignments related to this subject matter to use in classrooms. This has proved majorly controversial across the country this year, lighting a fire amongst reactionaries pointing to it as a tool of the much-maligned Critical Race Theory. Do I think any of the people protesting this school of thought have read this? Certainly they haven't, and wouldn't, but anyone who has a more neutral or unsure view of the topic should give it a try. The whole work is available on the web at the Pulitzer Center website, or, an expanded edition will be published as a book later this year.
The 1619 Project begins with Nikole Hannah-Jones's piece on what is America, historically, mythologically, culturally. (This essay won Hannah-Jones the 2020 Pulitizer Prize for Journalistic Commentary.) It includes personal reflections about her father (a military veteran) as well as a history of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and the institutional inequalities we still see today. She presents the thesis of the whole project, which is that everything America has and has become was built on the broken backs of Black people, brought here against their will. It's an upsetting mission statement, one that we all owe a good-faith effort to consider.
There are two essays on economics - one about the cotton industry and one about the sugar industry. Both describe the building of America's industry and wealth on the backs of slave labor. Both mention (something I certainly never thought about) how the monetary value of enslaved persons directly contributed to America's wealth. Per Khalil Gibran Muhammad's essay (the one on sugar), "the value of enslaved people alone represented tens of millions of dollars in capital that financed investments, loans and businesses." There are also two essays about medicine and health care, one about politics, one about music, even one about traffic patterns.
The work is also interspersed with contemporary literary works which address historical events and points of view. Of these, my favorites were Eve L. Ewing's poem about Phillis Wheatley, the 18th century Black poet; a piece of microfiction by Yaa Gyasi about the Tuskegee Study and the Black community's ingrained distrust of the medical industrial complex; two poems about the four little girls of the church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, by Rita Dove and by Camille T. Dungy; and especially a striking found poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Betts's work is a nice companion to a short essay by the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson (whose book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption is a must-read if you care at all about criminal justice) about our wildly inequitable prison system.
Drawbacks? Some of the arguments are more convincing than others. What the critics fail to acknowledge is that arguments they all are, each one of these works. Good arguments, meticulously-researched. No one but practicing historians should probably attempt to unravel them. But I think we should all read more, not less, and if anyone knows of any rebuttals to 1619 which are NOT written by white supremacists, I'm interested.
Another: the first federally-recognized Indigenous People's Day just came and went, and that caused me to notice that there is not much mention of America's first people within these essays otherwise crawling with historical detail about early America. Indigenous people are there - usually part of a brief acknowledgement that they were oppressed and suppressed, too - but that community could certainly create a volume equivalent to this if they got the opportunity. I will read it.
The 1619 Project begins with Nikole Hannah-Jones's piece on what is America, historically, mythologically, culturally. (This essay won Hannah-Jones the 2020 Pulitizer Prize for Journalistic Commentary.) It includes personal reflections about her father (a military veteran) as well as a history of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and the institutional inequalities we still see today. She presents the thesis of the whole project, which is that everything America has and has become was built on the broken backs of Black people, brought here against their will. It's an upsetting mission statement, one that we all owe a good-faith effort to consider.
There are two essays on economics - one about the cotton industry and one about the sugar industry. Both describe the building of America's industry and wealth on the backs of slave labor. Both mention (something I certainly never thought about) how the monetary value of enslaved persons directly contributed to America's wealth. Per Khalil Gibran Muhammad's essay (the one on sugar), "the value of enslaved people alone represented tens of millions of dollars in capital that financed investments, loans and businesses." There are also two essays about medicine and health care, one about politics, one about music, even one about traffic patterns.
The work is also interspersed with contemporary literary works which address historical events and points of view. Of these, my favorites were Eve L. Ewing's poem about Phillis Wheatley, the 18th century Black poet; a piece of microfiction by Yaa Gyasi about the Tuskegee Study and the Black community's ingrained distrust of the medical industrial complex; two poems about the four little girls of the church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, by Rita Dove and by Camille T. Dungy; and especially a striking found poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Betts's work is a nice companion to a short essay by the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson (whose book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption is a must-read if you care at all about criminal justice) about our wildly inequitable prison system.
Drawbacks? Some of the arguments are more convincing than others. What the critics fail to acknowledge is that arguments they all are, each one of these works. Good arguments, meticulously-researched. No one but practicing historians should probably attempt to unravel them. But I think we should all read more, not less, and if anyone knows of any rebuttals to 1619 which are NOT written by white supremacists, I'm interested.
Another: the first federally-recognized Indigenous People's Day just came and went, and that caused me to notice that there is not much mention of America's first people within these essays otherwise crawling with historical detail about early America. Indigenous people are there - usually part of a brief acknowledgement that they were oppressed and suppressed, too - but that community could certainly create a volume equivalent to this if they got the opportunity. I will read it.
Read
May 30, 2023Wasn't in the right frame of mind for all of the detailed history
July 16, 2021
My freshman proseminar, "Global Pathways" at Georgetown University first introduced me to The 1619 Project, published that the preceding month. Combined with selected readings of Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparation" and Between the World and Me, I consider Hannah-Jones collected of essays, poems, prose, and curriculum to be a rude-awakening for how I examine race in America. Although I had long been skeptical of the inherent goodness of the United States' origin in 1776 (especially given that the Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act were key causes for patriot resentment against Britain), The 1619 Project gave a firmer and more concrete understanding of the inherent paradoxes in American's foundation and apparent ideals of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even more importantly, I credit The 1619 Project and my professor in that class for directing me into the field of history, the more well-known essays within the project, such as Hannah-Jone's introduction and Mathew Desmond's NHC indictment of American economic prosperity. Since my freshman year, I have reexamined my perspective of the histories of Buffalo, the United States, and the world, through popular and academic texts as varied as High Hopes, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, A People's History of the United States, Orientalism, The Making of the English Working Class, and What is History? By recasting America's origin point at the landing of the first permanent African slaves at Jamestown in 1619 instead of the Declaration of Independence's signing in 1776, The New York Times explored an essential facet of our country's past and present identity. The Monticello plantation, segregated Birmingham, and redlined Detriot have replaced the illusionary city on a hilltop.
In regards to content, The 1619 Project is very multifaceted, featuring essays on topics varied as the sugar industry, history textbooks, the racial wealth gap, public transportation, cultural appropriation of Black music, and medical racial falsehoods, each contextualized by nearly two-hundred-and-fifty years of slavery. Regrettably, a few essays were slightly lackluster in connecting some content to their slavery-based roots, such as Desmond's denouncement of invasive bureaucracy and management. Nonetheless, I particularly found the articles that inspected the origins of minstrel shows and the Atalanta white suburbs' opposition to public transportation such as MARTA to and from the city. "What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot" felt especially relevant given my frustrations with white-majority suburbs around Buffalo and near Georgetown protesting the expansion of sufficient public transportation. When The 1619 Project first released, several established historians of US history denounced what they considered historical revisionism. Although some of their criticisms were appropriately acknowledged, including the redaction of the statement that the preservation of slavery was a central motivation for the patriots and the reliance on the scholarship of the New History of Capitalism, The 1619 Project still projects a critical public endeavor on how American should view itself through both its history and its ideals.
In regards to content, The 1619 Project is very multifaceted, featuring essays on topics varied as the sugar industry, history textbooks, the racial wealth gap, public transportation, cultural appropriation of Black music, and medical racial falsehoods, each contextualized by nearly two-hundred-and-fifty years of slavery. Regrettably, a few essays were slightly lackluster in connecting some content to their slavery-based roots, such as Desmond's denouncement of invasive bureaucracy and management. Nonetheless, I particularly found the articles that inspected the origins of minstrel shows and the Atalanta white suburbs' opposition to public transportation such as MARTA to and from the city. "What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot" felt especially relevant given my frustrations with white-majority suburbs around Buffalo and near Georgetown protesting the expansion of sufficient public transportation. When The 1619 Project first released, several established historians of US history denounced what they considered historical revisionism. Although some of their criticisms were appropriately acknowledged, including the redaction of the statement that the preservation of slavery was a central motivation for the patriots and the reliance on the scholarship of the New History of Capitalism, The 1619 Project still projects a critical public endeavor on how American should view itself through both its history and its ideals.
January 12, 2022
This magnificent blend of journalism, analysis, and history has changed how I look at the world around me forever. Now, I will always be asking, "How did slavery cause or shape this institution, this relationship, this set of statistics, this physical landscape even?"
It's not that I was naive before. Some parts of this special issue of the NY Times magazine were familiar to me, especially the parts dealing with the ability to build wealth by owning a home (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America) and the way the legal system makes being Black in the U.S. a probable cause for arrest, imprisonment, enforced labor, and death (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
These essays made me connect the dots in a different way.
I grew up singing "Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal," but I didn't know that one of the main reasons for that canal was to bring cotton from the enslaved South to the textile mills of the North. The cotton gin made enslaved African people more valuable as means of production; slavery made the textile industry more profitable.
I knew that plantations were slave labor camps with mansions. I didn't realize just how wealthy Mississippi used to be because rich white people borrowed incredible amounts of money using the bodies of the Black people they enslaved as collateral, or how wealthy Louisiana used to be when the free labor beaten and tortured out of enslaved workers made sugar a profitable crop to grow.
I knew that self-serving stereotypes let white doctors and scientists believe that Black men and women didn't feel pain the same way that white people do. I realized that some doctors let Black men develop syphilis instead of treating it, so they could study its progression. But I didn't add up the way that entire job categories predominantly filled by Black and Latinx people were excluded from federal health coverage after WWII and in the Great Society programs of the 1960's--and how you can draw a straight line from those racist institutions to the refusal of certain states to expand Medicare even when the Affordable Care Act (sneeringly called "Obamacare") made it so, so easy for them to do so.
Depending what you already know, you will learn different things than I did. But do read the book, learn them, and start seeing the way the U.S. has become less free, less equal, and less safe because of the stubborn persistence of slavery in the way we live today.
It's not that I was naive before. Some parts of this special issue of the NY Times magazine were familiar to me, especially the parts dealing with the ability to build wealth by owning a home (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America) and the way the legal system makes being Black in the U.S. a probable cause for arrest, imprisonment, enforced labor, and death (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
These essays made me connect the dots in a different way.
I grew up singing "Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal," but I didn't know that one of the main reasons for that canal was to bring cotton from the enslaved South to the textile mills of the North. The cotton gin made enslaved African people more valuable as means of production; slavery made the textile industry more profitable.
I knew that plantations were slave labor camps with mansions. I didn't realize just how wealthy Mississippi used to be because rich white people borrowed incredible amounts of money using the bodies of the Black people they enslaved as collateral, or how wealthy Louisiana used to be when the free labor beaten and tortured out of enslaved workers made sugar a profitable crop to grow.
I knew that self-serving stereotypes let white doctors and scientists believe that Black men and women didn't feel pain the same way that white people do. I realized that some doctors let Black men develop syphilis instead of treating it, so they could study its progression. But I didn't add up the way that entire job categories predominantly filled by Black and Latinx people were excluded from federal health coverage after WWII and in the Great Society programs of the 1960's--and how you can draw a straight line from those racist institutions to the refusal of certain states to expand Medicare even when the Affordable Care Act (sneeringly called "Obamacare") made it so, so easy for them to do so.
Depending what you already know, you will learn different things than I did. But do read the book, learn them, and start seeing the way the U.S. has become less free, less equal, and less safe because of the stubborn persistence of slavery in the way we live today.
June 15, 2020
Download the Magazine here:
The 18th August 2019 edition of NYT Magazine which published the entire 1619 Project, comprising of 10 essays plus a collection of poems, can be downloaded on the Pulitzer Prize's website - Nikole Hannah-Jones's lead essay in the project won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary: https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/defa...
Complementary Podcast also available:
A complementary podcast, also entitled 1619, can also be downloaded for free from the usual podcast sources. It is not a narration of the essays but the podcast content does cover the key essays in the project, from Hannah-Jones' lead essay on the fight for a true democracy (Episode 1), to the story of cotton plantations in the South and the economy that slavery built from the cotton trade in the early to mid 1800s (Episode 2), to the origin of the "Blackface" entertainers (Episode 3) and how policies enacted after the Civil War explains why universal health care doesn't exist in the US (Episode 4).
Review:
Hannah-Jones' essay was one of the most moving works I've ever read. She weaved her own family's story and her confusion growing up as a black girl being taught at school that "our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation" alongside key moments in history since, starting with August 1619 when a group of colonists in Jamestown, Virginia bought 20-30 enslaved Africans from English pirates.
She argued that "The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie", that the Declaration of Independence, despite proclaiming that "all men are created equal", denied these ideals to one-fifth of the nation at that time. And if the African-Americans did not fight to make these ideals true since 1776, then America would not have a democracy at all.
As a non-American who hasn't studied / read much about American history, Hannah-Jones' examples were a stark reminder that this "equality", if it does exist today, is in fact quite a recent phenomenon. Postcards of lynchings of African-Americans, popular souvenirs for visitors to the South, still existed in early 20th century. Segregation continued into the 1960s.
The other essays argued why universal health care doesn't exist in the United States because of policies enacted after the Civil War and why segregation continues to cause severe traffic jams in Atlanta today.
After publication, the 1619 Project has been heavily criticised by many historians, in particular citing that the stories told were immensely one-sided. Wasn't this the point? That history is most often written by "winners" or those with more power and thus that in the United States' early history, it is recorded from the whites' perspective? Another criticism was that the project failed to take into account that slavery was not exclusively an American institution but existed throughout history. Just because others do it too doesn't make it right or excusable...
The 18th August 2019 edition of NYT Magazine which published the entire 1619 Project, comprising of 10 essays plus a collection of poems, can be downloaded on the Pulitzer Prize's website - Nikole Hannah-Jones's lead essay in the project won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary: https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/defa...
Complementary Podcast also available:
A complementary podcast, also entitled 1619, can also be downloaded for free from the usual podcast sources. It is not a narration of the essays but the podcast content does cover the key essays in the project, from Hannah-Jones' lead essay on the fight for a true democracy (Episode 1), to the story of cotton plantations in the South and the economy that slavery built from the cotton trade in the early to mid 1800s (Episode 2), to the origin of the "Blackface" entertainers (Episode 3) and how policies enacted after the Civil War explains why universal health care doesn't exist in the US (Episode 4).
Review:
Hannah-Jones' essay was one of the most moving works I've ever read. She weaved her own family's story and her confusion growing up as a black girl being taught at school that "our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation" alongside key moments in history since, starting with August 1619 when a group of colonists in Jamestown, Virginia bought 20-30 enslaved Africans from English pirates.
She argued that "The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie", that the Declaration of Independence, despite proclaiming that "all men are created equal", denied these ideals to one-fifth of the nation at that time. And if the African-Americans did not fight to make these ideals true since 1776, then America would not have a democracy at all.
As a non-American who hasn't studied / read much about American history, Hannah-Jones' examples were a stark reminder that this "equality", if it does exist today, is in fact quite a recent phenomenon. Postcards of lynchings of African-Americans, popular souvenirs for visitors to the South, still existed in early 20th century. Segregation continued into the 1960s.
The other essays argued why universal health care doesn't exist in the United States because of policies enacted after the Civil War and why segregation continues to cause severe traffic jams in Atlanta today.
After publication, the 1619 Project has been heavily criticised by many historians, in particular citing that the stories told were immensely one-sided. Wasn't this the point? That history is most often written by "winners" or those with more power and thus that in the United States' early history, it is recorded from the whites' perspective? Another criticism was that the project failed to take into account that slavery was not exclusively an American institution but existed throughout history. Just because others do it too doesn't make it right or excusable...
January 11, 2021
I am going to skip over all of the controversy that Nikole Hannah-Jones embroiled herself by daring to deviate from the established narrative of America’s Mythic Founding. I will also skip over the numerous—and occasionally valid—critiques of the historicity of her project, and by extension the journalistic integrity of the New York Times. Critiques that eventually led to such a backlash that a Who’s Who of everyone’s least favorite people developed their own answer to the 1619 Project called the 1776 commission, designed to reinforce a happy Völkisch identity that did not overemphasize all the killing, raping, and enslaving parts.
I’m skipping over all of that because I genuinely believe that what Hannah-Jones is trying to accomplish with 1619 is not the ultimate destruction of the White Cishetero-Patriarchal Metanarrative (as intellectual luminaries like Charles Kirk and Jerry Falwell Jr. would suggest) but rather provide a helpful frame for it. If the narrative of the American Founding, with its soaring meditations on human liberty and invocations of the universal dignity of man, is a glimmering stone on the forest floor, the 1619 Project is the dark underside of it, covered in dirt and grubs, bedecked with moss, providing cover for burrowing things. It’s the part that is not readily visible, but no less important for understanding the story of this stone.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is trying to demonstrate not that the American Promise is a farce, but that it is a promise that is incomplete, and has only approached completion when black and indigenous people took that promise and insisted it applied to them as well. Her aim is to demonstrate that the work of the Founders is not over, and that it has been black people—from Crispus Attucks to Robert Smalls, Martin Luther King Jr. to Stacey Abrams—who have endeavored to complete it.
I’m skipping over all of that because I genuinely believe that what Hannah-Jones is trying to accomplish with 1619 is not the ultimate destruction of the White Cishetero-Patriarchal Metanarrative (as intellectual luminaries like Charles Kirk and Jerry Falwell Jr. would suggest) but rather provide a helpful frame for it. If the narrative of the American Founding, with its soaring meditations on human liberty and invocations of the universal dignity of man, is a glimmering stone on the forest floor, the 1619 Project is the dark underside of it, covered in dirt and grubs, bedecked with moss, providing cover for burrowing things. It’s the part that is not readily visible, but no less important for understanding the story of this stone.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is trying to demonstrate not that the American Promise is a farce, but that it is a promise that is incomplete, and has only approached completion when black and indigenous people took that promise and insisted it applied to them as well. Her aim is to demonstrate that the work of the Founders is not over, and that it has been black people—from Crispus Attucks to Robert Smalls, Martin Luther King Jr. to Stacey Abrams—who have endeavored to complete it.
January 27, 2022
This is a must read for all Americans, and specifically white Americans. It forced me to unearth and unpack existing racism, bias, prejudices and, in my case, judgy stereotypes to learn there is a reason these ideas exist, no matter how much believe I am not a racist.
I particularity enjoyed Matthew Desmond's essay on business practices in slave plantations forming today's American corporate capitalism -- an often dehumanizing, top-down authoritarian regime most working Americans are subject to. Kevin Kruse's essay demonstrating how big city traffic problems have their roots in segregation, is also eye-opening and forces me to examine that slavery does indeed still have affects on all of us today.
Bringing light to sad, horrific stories is hard, but hiding them is worse, which is what we have been doing as a nation. Phrases throughout the Pulitzer-winning project such as "a re-education is necessary" and "help us understand the evil our nation was founded on" will have me chewing on and thinking about instances in my own life where I have failed to acknowledge how my own prosperity, even being born in 1971, is greatly reliant on this nation's slave history. It mandates my respect and humble acknowledgement to all people of color.
I particularity enjoyed Matthew Desmond's essay on business practices in slave plantations forming today's American corporate capitalism -- an often dehumanizing, top-down authoritarian regime most working Americans are subject to. Kevin Kruse's essay demonstrating how big city traffic problems have their roots in segregation, is also eye-opening and forces me to examine that slavery does indeed still have affects on all of us today.
Bringing light to sad, horrific stories is hard, but hiding them is worse, which is what we have been doing as a nation. Phrases throughout the Pulitzer-winning project such as "a re-education is necessary" and "help us understand the evil our nation was founded on" will have me chewing on and thinking about instances in my own life where I have failed to acknowledge how my own prosperity, even being born in 1971, is greatly reliant on this nation's slave history. It mandates my respect and humble acknowledgement to all people of color.
August 16, 2021
It really not possible to review The 1619 Project: multiple contributors, multiple forms (essays, poetry, stories, photographs). It's a teaching tool. African American history is largely overlooked in elementary and secondary schools for generations. That's not propaganda; that's my experience. I am a product of U.S. public school education, and I didn't learn about some of these people and events until I was in college. As the Project moves through history, it eventually gets to things I lived through, so didn't have to rely on school to teach me, but the events that took place before I lived through them or was old enough to remember them were mostly left out of my otherwise good education. As an example, the history and extent of sugar production in the United States ("The White Gold that Fueled Slavery") was pretty much unknown to me. The slave trade in New York? Didn't know about it until I reached adulthood and began to read and study on my own. I could go on and on with examples, but let me leave it at this: It is my feeling that if teachers are allowed to use the 1619 Project in the way it is intended to be used, the next generation of students will gain a balanced view of history, and be better citizens as a result.
December 16, 2020
*podcast only*
So I heard about this podcast through another podcast I listened to as an advertisement. It sounded interesting to me so I added it to my list. Who would've thought in the middle of listening there would have been national news about it apparently trying to get inducted into schools as a program!?
But I'm not gonna get into that. I'm just gonna judge this on entertainment value alone.
And entertaining it was. This was one of the most well produced podcasts I've listened to, and it had some unique ways of telling it's story. Especially on episode 3, the music episode. This gave me some food for thought and I have been finding I enjoy things more often recently that have some history in them.
Speaking of history, I haven't done tons of research but I have seen some things saying this isn't historically accurate in a lot of things. Now while I didn't look a bunch of things up, I will say that there was plenty of times it seemed....a convenient truth I suppose. But nevertheless, I was entertained.
Overall I enjoyed listening to this.
So I heard about this podcast through another podcast I listened to as an advertisement. It sounded interesting to me so I added it to my list. Who would've thought in the middle of listening there would have been national news about it apparently trying to get inducted into schools as a program!?
But I'm not gonna get into that. I'm just gonna judge this on entertainment value alone.
And entertaining it was. This was one of the most well produced podcasts I've listened to, and it had some unique ways of telling it's story. Especially on episode 3, the music episode. This gave me some food for thought and I have been finding I enjoy things more often recently that have some history in them.
Speaking of history, I haven't done tons of research but I have seen some things saying this isn't historically accurate in a lot of things. Now while I didn't look a bunch of things up, I will say that there was plenty of times it seemed....a convenient truth I suppose. But nevertheless, I was entertained.
Overall I enjoyed listening to this.
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